I wish I had a little oak barrel. Or a little cherry barrel. Or some little barrel.
Why? Because I am married to the delightful, talented, and immensely generous Josh Legler, whose ancestry traces back to a family of small barrel makers. The barrels were small, not his relatives. And I want a small barrel to put new vinegar into.
Last year I started making fruit vinegars. I age them in mason jars, but I kind of wonder what wonderfully surprising things would happen if I aged them in small, wooden barrels.
This year I am attempting to make balsamic vinegar, without a small barrel. Here’s what I did:
I used my friend’s grape juice steamer, and Niagara table/juice/wine grapes. I poured the juice into a pot and reduced its volume by 50% by boiling. I poured it into jars (50% full) and waited until it fermented. Some of the jars were slow to ferment, so I jump started them with a jar that was quicker to ferment. After they started to ferment, I let them bubble for a week to 10 days. Then I gave them each a vinegar mother. They will hang out with her until she starts giving them outdated advice or criticizing their life choices.
I contacted our local winemaking supply store, and asked if they sold barrels or champagne yeast. They didn’t have either, and they were abrupt and unhelpful. My interaction with them kind of left a bad taste in my mouth that had undertones of Rogaine for Men with high notes of premium gasoline and a finishing whiff of attorney’s fees and divorce papers. La di da. I understand. But it made me think that maybe wine people need more vinegar in their lives, and less wine.
So, I’m still looking for a small barrel to age this new batch of balsamic vinegar.
Radishes were never meant to be eaten raw.
We bought a 20 pound box of freestone peaches for $17. I bottled 14 quarts, then dehydrated 3 trays of sliced peaches. We have about 6 left to snack on.
Tonight I’m shelling our Good Mother Stallard beans.
Goodbye, August. Hello, September!
Even thought we haven’t even hit peak tomato harvest time, I can already see the summer garden winding down. It reminds me of Charlotte telling Wilbur that she is languishing. She still has work to do, but she can feel the end is coming soon.
Of course, gardens have no end–only seasons. The cooler weather is already coming, which allows us to welcome in a whole new set of crops like lettuces, brassicas, a second flush of strawberries (I kept a 3×6 patch) and maybe a big ol’ chunky cauliflower. Cooler weather allows us to say au revoir to the summer crops, which is hard, but important. It will make that first July tomato of 2022 even sweeter.
When I discovered the Little House on the Prairie book series last year, I was in love. Finally! People who were as obsessed with food and the procurement and preservation of it as I was. Those pioneers know my love language.
I especially loved Farmer Boy (book #2), which is essentially a book about food through the eyes of a hungry, hardworking farm boy.
So today when I made Leather Britches (green beans, strung to dry), I felt like one of the family. Me in the kitchen with needle and upholstery thread and beans, prepping my summer harvest, imagining sumptuous winter meals.
These beans will dry naturally, then be stored. To use them, I will immerse them in water for 1+ hours, then pressure cook them with bacon, salt and pepper for 40 minutes. I’ll most likely serve with cornbread with cornmeal that we put away using dent corn that we grew.
I’ve tried so hard this year to keep our garden full. When beets come out, i have another flat ready to plant in their place. If a seed doesn’t sprout, i quickly reseed. If baby ducks nip the tops off, I replant and build a little baby duck fence around the seedlings.
But yesterday as I pulled the yellowed, leathery stalks of the asparagus beans and cucumbers, there was nothing ready to go in their place. And I felt like I was a bad, bad, unproductive gardener. Saaaaad.
I’m not an unproductive gardener, and I wish my brain wouldn’t say rude things like that. The truth is that I’ve been an incredibly productive gardener. It’s peak harvest season and there’s not time in a day to plant as well as reap and preserve. I spend a lot of time preparing and preserving the harvest so that we can enjoy it throughout the year, but no time right now to also tend broccoli, Brussels sprouts, lettuce, and cabbage.
If a section of our garden goes quiet for a season, that’s probably a good sign that I don’t have the bandwidth to manage another plant. Maybe the best thing I can do is heap a pile of rabbit manure on top and wait until spring. And cut myself some slack.
I’d like to thank Mother Nature for reseeding our Mizuna plant without any help from me. I was going to save seeds, but a hungry animal got to them before I could. One seed decided to strike out on its own and make its fortune next to where its mother plant grew up. Thank you Mother Nature!
I canned A LOT of salsa last year, and it took up A LOT of space. Unfortunately, our home-jarred salsa supply ran out a few months ago. It was a verrry sad day.
As i was picking tomatoes this week I remembered back a few years ago when I went to the Outdoor Retailer show, and they were sampling backpacker’s salsa. It was dehydrated salsa, and could easily be rehydrated on the trail. I didn’t think any more of it until yesterday.
I love experimenting, so I cooked up a great tasting batch of salsa. Chopped up sweet peppers, onion, obscene amounts of garlic (because we grew garlic this year!). Then I added previously frozen/drained, pureed TOMATOES, and some salt, pepper and cumin. I cooked it for a few minutes. Then I spread it onto a nonstick dehydrating mat.
It tastes INCREDIBLE. I kept some of it in sheets and then pureed some to make a powder. It’s going to be so much better than canning salsa. It’ll take up less space, use less resources, and be super convenient to use.
This is Sorghum. I didn’t plant it, and I have no idea how it ended up in our front yard, but I’m so glad it’s there!
It’s ready to harvest when the little berries can’t be dented with your fingernail.
The Sorghum in our pasture hasn’t produced anything yet. We’re still watering that patch and hoping for a harvest. I like that the one Sorghum plant (or multiple stuck together) in the front yard never had to be watered. I’ve heard sorghum is drought tolerant, and this proves it.
This is a typical August harvest this year. A couple pounds of beans, some cucumbers (mostly bitter), a few pounds of tomatoes, and some rando pears that dropped from the tree.
This morning I canned dilly beans (along with last week’s beans) and then I dehydrated some of the Sungold and Juliet tomatoes. These two vegetables, beans and tomatoes, are my best friends in the garden. They make me so happy. I want to do a whole row of beans next year.
As soon as a few more pears ripen (I have about 10 pounds ripening in a basket) I will dehydrate those.
Today, Grant’s friend, Cole, gave us three large zucchini. It’s so hard to use large amounts of fresh zucchini. I don’t know why I didn’t think to dehydrate shredded zucchini before. It would be PERFECT for zucchini bread!! We didn’t grow any zucchini this year, because we have so many friends who grow it. If we grow it next year, I’ll preserve some by shredding and dehydrating. Brilliant.
All is well in the garden. We feel very blessed this year. Very little animal\insect damage. Large harvests. Beautiful plants. Very few failures, but enough to remind us of who the real gardener is. We’re grateful that we’ve had enough water to keep our plants alive and plenty of sunshine to help them grow.
It’s Monday, August 9th and I am just catching my breath from the flurry of July “farmer drama” (or “fahmah drama”, as we like to say). Garden harvests, fall crop plantings, food preservation, and late nights. My upper back aches by then end of every day–but it’s an ache that I live for. It means that I’ve been on my feet, lugging water, reaching in awkward positions to grab a Sungold tomato that is buried inside a jungle of tomato vines or chasing a crew of “ducks on holiday” back to the pasture. I have pushed myself this summer to be a little more pioneersy, a little less Tik-Toky. (But for reals, I learned how to drop an egg in a pan to crack it perfectly, so thank you TikTok.)
I received a very sweet, generous gift from Josh this week–and I love it so much I miiight ask for it next year, too. He took the kids on a trip and let me stay home. This is my week to garden, read, can beans, dehydrate grapes, brew vinegar, pick blackberries, catch up on going through my piles of projects, and make a massive kitchen mess without worrying about what to prepare for dinner. It’s a lovely gift and it comes at the perfect time. Yes, I do all these things (and more) while the kids are home, but usually it’s interwoven with afternoon trips to the river, a ride to a store, a meal, help with a project, clearing everyone’s stuff off the kitchen table before dinner, sitting and listening, or just watching the ducks with the kids. I am enjoying this time to be a “controlled environment” homemaker instead of a “real world” homemaker. I know this week is a luxury, and I’m loving every minute.
While I type this, I’m sitting across from a sputtering pressure canner, watching the dial gauge as if my life depends on it (’cause it kinda does–oh hello, Clostridium botulinum, we were just talking about you). I take pressure canning very seriously, and do my best to follow precautions 100%. In the 22 years that I have mommed the heck out of this family, we’ve never had any issues with food-borne illness. I like to be super safe while canning, as well as when I’m cooking meat (which we eat sparingly) or preparing any food for the family.
So, today I pressure canned beans + beets and dehydrated grapes. That doesn’t seem like much, but it also included planting a new row of beans and beets, harvesting the grapes from Merrie’s house, and preparing the harvest to be canned.
Tomorrow, I’ll try to get a load of blackberries harvested to last us until next August! My goal is to preserve 12 quarts with a few extra quarts for blackberry plum jam and blackberry vinegar.
So beautiful! 
These will be pickles soon 
My weekly 1-2 gallon harvest of basil! I get about 2 pints of pesto per week.
Today is the last day of July. This means that tomorrow is…AUGUST! In the past 24 hours we’ve seen the first few Italian Plum tomatoes start to turn red. We thought it would never happen.
You’re blushing! 
This big tomato came from a dying plant
Peek-a-boo little Tom! I love how the tomatillo forms the paper, then grows the fruit to fill it. 
My perpetually dirty, gardeny fingernails.
Life is filled with the opportunity to make decisions. And it’s not my job to judge you based on the decisions you choose to make.
Howeverrrrrr, if you move to a new home and you decide to chop down a productive fruit tree because it’s inconvenient/too much work/in the way, then you have some of the key traits of a mentally unbalanced puppy-kicker. And I suggest you revaluate your decision to remove the tree.
Fruit trees take many years to become fully productive. When mature, they produce an abundance of food–usually more than one family can eat + process alone. Trees produce oxygen, they stabilize the soil, hold moisture, and provide shade and shelter. Trees are our ticket out of global warming (if you’re into that). Fruit trees are a gift to the future from the past.
So why on God’s green earth would someone chop down a productive fruit tree?
Last night we had oven roasted vegetables for dinner. This morning I took the leftovers of those beautiful gems and cooked them with a chicken egg. It was the perfect breakfast.
In the Standard American Diet, we typically don’t include a lot of vegetables in our breakfasts. Sometimes you see a hash brown or some ketchup. Pretty sure I was the only American this morning eating roasted swedes, beans, snow peas, carrots, and garlic. To be 100% honest, I sneaked a pre-breakfast bite of a stale pastry from yesterday’s run to the Mexican bakery. Regrets, but life goes on.
Today my heart is overflowing–mostly with gratitude, but also with a little aching. I’m just feeling all the feels, and it’s a net positive. Our son just left for a two-year mission to El Salvador as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He gets to teach los gentes Salvadoreños how to find peace in this life through Jesus Christ and his atonement. What a beautiful gift!!
And while Isaac is gone, life on the farm goes on. Nixon (our boy rabbit) will miss Isaac’s daily visits. Karen (our sheep) will miss him, too. Maggie (our mommy duck) will NOT miss Isaac, because he and Grant were the ones who caught her every day and put her back in the pasture.
Regardless of the tender hearts in our family today, we’re getting things done out in the garden. That picture of the overgrown radishes is actually our rutabagas. I harvested them today, and prepped them to be roasted (along with some other garden veggies) for dinner. I fed their tops to the rabbits. Our fridge is kind of overrun right now with beet greens. (A girl can only eat so many!) I wasn’t about to add more root veg tops to the collection.
And here’s our full garden. It looks so bushy and busy. I feel great about this year’s garden, but part of me wants to start planning next year’s garden. And maybe I will! I can observe now and incorporate what I’ve learned into next year’s garden. (My recent observation: Move the squash out to the pasture or the outer edge of the garden. It’s too big for inside a garden row.)
I did a brave and maybe stupid thing today. I lopped off some tomato branches so they would “no me molestan”. I kind of did the same thing with the squash. I’m going to be more intentional about pruning the tomatoes and squash next year. And maybe widen the spacing by 12″. Tomatoes and squash are space hawgs. Or maybe I’ll move the tomatoes to the area where the basil is this year. There’s definitely room to tuck in 3 or 5 tomato plants. I did another dumb thing (maybe?). I decided not to prune off the suckers on the tomatoes back in June. Oh wait, one more dumb thing–I bought all one variety of tomato this year (plus only two cherry tomato plants). Yeah, I made some colossal gardening mistakes, but maybe the Master Gardener and Creator of the Universe will answer my prayers and give me enough tomatoes to can homemade salsa. I neeeeeed it.
I regret planting 4 ground cherry plants.
I should have planted 40.
They are like no other fruit that I’ve ever tasted. Many people compare their flavor to strawberries, pineapples or even a super-super sweet tomato. But they’re all wrong. It’s its own unique flavor.
The texture of the skin and flesh are similar to a tiny cherry tomato. However the flavor is nearly indescribable.
It’s not overly sweet, but it’s filled with intense flavor which is best described as a “burst”. It’s not sour either. It has almost an umami undertone.
Each little fruit is wrapped in a soft papery covering. The protected fruit drops from the plant when it’s ripe and remains on the ground until someone discovers it.
My biggest gardening regret of 2021 is that I only have 4 little plants (and one of them is very stressed). Next year we’ll grow more along the fenceline. They don’t do well being grown from seed, but they do self-seed really well. Or I might try to grow from the seeds I ordered from Baker Creek.
I ate 4 ground cherries this morning without sharing with anyone (or telling anyone). #gardenguilt
Welcome to the world, little ground cherries!
Something magical happens a few days after Independence Day each year. I call it the flush of high summer.
Everything doubles in size nearly every day. Not only do the heat loving plants start producing fruit worth harvesting, but suddenly you’re overrun with multiples of vegetables you used to buy one-at-a-time. The kitchen counter real estate become scarce and the dinner menu becomes hyper-focused on eliminating excess vegetables in creative ways.
The weeds vs. plants competition finally ends as tomatoes, beans and potatoes shade out everything. Daytime weather holds steady in the “hot to hotter” range, with nighttime temps dipping into the “pleasantly cool to light cardigan” range.
At this point in the summer it’s tempting to just revel in the bounty, however I’m already starting seedlings that will go into the garden next month for our fall harvest. We’ll plant broccoli, Asian greens, lettuce, and peas.
At this point in the summer I feel a little catch in my throat thinking about how bountiful and fleeting this season is. (It’s the same feeling I have when I think of my sweet children growing up.) These glorious high summer days are true treasures–each day bringing growth, beauty, blessings, sunshine, and warmth.
These perfect days of summer don’t last forever, but they are guaranteed to return again next year.
One of our goals this year is to keep our garden full. When one crop is harvested, a flat of month-old seedlings will be planted in its place. It requires me to think ahead and plan where to put the next batch of teeny plants. It also means leaving a little margin in the garden just in case things take longer to grow than I anticipated.
This new way of approaching gardening (new to us!) is very fulfilling and exciting. It means that during the most productive months, our garden is running at full capacity. We are harvesting every day. We are making good use of the space we have.
But there’s always more that we can learn or do. I know there are spots under the corn where I could plant lettuces. I could have done a better job of protecting my baby beets from the baby ducks. I could have filled in the herb garden (but no–it will do that on its own). I could have spent more time over last winter prepping the east and west ends of the garden so they’d be as fertile as the central section. I could have planned something to put where the garlic was, instead of leaving it empty (like it still is right now.)
I’m not beating myself up with all my mistakes. I actually get giddy in the garden when I recognize mistakes–because it means that next year’s garden will be more beautiful, abundant, and lush than this year’s garden. I can learn and grow through my mistakes.
I’m going to add one more thing to this post. Actually two more things. First, I love gardening with Josh. I love doing anything with Josh. We share so many interests–some that we discovered as we dated in 1998 and some we’ve developed together since we were married 22 years ago. He brings so much joy to my life as we grow together. Second, Josh is a very organized person, and his sugar snap pea plants did not reflect that at the beginning of their growing season. They were Seussian–and that is not a vibe that jives with Josh. I put up a trellis a few weeks after they sprouted so that Josh’s snow peas would more closely match his desire for order and systems–not in a 1940’s German way, but in more of a Swiss farmer way. Now, as the snow pea season draws to a close, the pea plants which were trellised continue to produce, while the peas which were left to find their own path, wrapping their tendrils around each other, have become withered and spent.
We planted more carrots tonight. I’ve been buying little packs of carrots all summer, with the idea that if I could be successful with the cheap little Danvers half long carrots, I should reward myself with some fancy pants carrots. Something colorful and exotic–not orange.
I’ve been trying all spring and summer to grow carrots in our garden. And I finally did it! The carrot seeds I planted last week have sprouted (under a piece of plywood). That’s success! Now I get the reward!
We planted two varieties of ooh-la-la carrots tonight. One is a rainbow ombre style French carrot called the Longue Rouge Sang. At $3.50 for only 100 carrots it’s kinda a bank-breaker. The other variety is the Black Nebula. It cost $3.50 for 300 carrots. That’s about a cent per carrot. Thumbs up.
We’re slowly getting better at gardening, and figuring out how to grow carrots is a huge next step!!
P.S. Josh turned our compost pile tonight. It was really dry. We’ll try to improve that, too!
Just learned today that you only get one corn cob per corn stalk! That’s a total rip-off!
Good thing fresh corn tastes 10x better than canned corn. It makes it almost worth all the space + resources it’s taking up.
Corn. Smh…