Tomato Egg Sandwich

Best way to enjoy our first slicer this summer?  Tomato egg sandwich with a Brandywine from the garden, an egg from our chickens and homemade bread.  Yum.

Mystery Tomato

We have a mystery tomato plant in our garden!  We planted three variates of tomatoes this year: Brandywine, Lemon Drop Cherry, and Amish Paste Roma.  However, what was suppose to be a roma come out quite different.  In the picture above you can see the romas to the left and the cherries to the very right.  In the middle is our mystery tomato.

They are small, around 2 inches, and they are completely round unlike the romas that are pointy.  They even have different leaves then the rest of our tomatoes:

Its leaves have purple spots on them and it is the only tomato plant we have the appears to be struggling even though it is producing lots of fruit.  I'm completely puzzled by our mystery tomato plant.  We ordered our seeds from Seed Savers Exchange so I called and ask them if they could be of any help - did we make some strange hybrid plant, is this just an Amish Paste that got deformed from the hail storm we had, or did a random seed find its way into our Amish Paste seed packet?  They seemed as intrigued as me and have asked me to send pictures our of mystery tomato plant so they can try and identify it.  Anyone else have a guess while I wait to see what they say?

Peaches, blackberries and relish, oh my!

Did I say lazy weekend?  I spoke too soon.  We stopped at a roadside market just south of where we live and picked up 1/2 bushel of South Carolina peaches and three pints of blackberries.  I pretty much ate blackberries all day.  They were to die for.  The peaches were excellent too.  We even got to keep the basket they sold them in which will be a nice garden basket for collecting our crop from the day along with eggs.  We then spent most of Sunday peeling peaches and canning.  I've never had much luck peeling peaches without them ending up a big mushy mess but I think this time I figured out a trick.  Instead of just boiling the peach for 30 seconds then dunking it in cold water, I made a small cross in the skin with a knife before boiling it.  Seemed to help.  Anyone else have any good tips for peeling peaches?

We ended up with eight quarts of peaches in light syrup (one of my favorite things to eat on yogurt for breakfast in the winter) and six half pints of blackberry jam.  We also had an abundance of cucumbers and hot peppers from the garden so Lewie made a batch of hot cucumber relish.  He kinda used a few recipes and went along with what we had so it ended up having shredded cucumber, hot peppers, onions, celery, mustard seed, celery seed, canning salt and apple cider vinegar.  Have yet to try it, but the smell was wonderful and looks so pretty in the jars.  I'm sure it will be good on a brat or sausage. 

Garden fresh salsa

What's better then a lazy weekend?  A lazy weekend with homemade salsa.

We made a nice salsa with ingredients from our garden: cherry tomatoes, mystery tomatoes (more on this later), roma tomatoes, a hot pepper, a green pepper and cilantro.  The only thing in our salsa not from our garden was garlic and salt.  Just threw them in the food processor and yum it was tasty.

One of the joys of summer!

Garden progress: June

It's really amazing how fast our garden grew in June.  So far we have had two large cucumbers, an eggplant, handfuls of lemondrop cherry tomatoes, three roma Amish Paste tomatoes, and one green/yellow sweet pepper.  We continue to watch everything grow daily.  We have a few watermelons that are about the size of a pea and tons of Brandywines that seem like any day will turn red.  It's so rewarding to eat a salad or meal that came mostly from our garden.  Last week we had greens with cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers and an eggplant melt with pesto made with basil from my herb garden.  It was wonderful.  Pretty soon we should have green beans and hot peppers.  We also planted more carrots and lettuce. 

Garden invaders: Mystery poo

I woke up this week to find these all over the garden bed floor.  Tiny green grenade looking things.  Weird.  So I searched for tiny green grenade insects and found this website:  The First Clue: Tiny Green Grenades.  Ta-da!  I figure out what they were.  Let's play a game like she did on her post;  Can you spot the bug that made them in this picture:

Here is a close up:

It's a tobacco hornworm!  These suckers are massive and sure enough, above the tiny green grenades on the floor of the garden bed (which turns out to be their poo by the way) I found three hornworms chewing their way through our tomato leafs and stems.  None of them had signs of the parasitic wasp eggs on their backs so we removed all of them.  Apparently, the wasps will lay eggs on the hornworm and feed of of it making it a natural predator of the hornworm therefor if you see one with eggs you shouldn't kill it.  But it's a good thing we have chickens who love protein because they gobbled them down.  I'm not brave enough to try this.  Ek!

Spinach recipe roundup

What happens when you don't pick spinach for almost two weeks?  You end up with spinach coming out of your ears!  I picked piles and piles of it this past week and decided to cook most of it down for freezing.  We use frozen spinach a lot in our house and during winter this will sure be handy.  To freeze spinach simply wash it, put it in boiling water for 2 minutes, transfer to ice water until cool and then let drain.  Place in a freezer bag and freeze.

 

I really love spinach but now that we have so much I seem to be blanking with what to make with it.  That's why I love bloggers. Of course there are always salads but here are some other fabulous ways to use spinach:

• Spinach and Swiss Quiche from A Foothill Home Companion which can be found on the blog entry, Have Another Slice
• Morel Mushroom Souffle with Spinach from ChezWhat? which can be found on the blog entry, Morel Mushrooms Three Ways
• Farmgirl Susan's Super Spinach Soup from Farmgirl Fare which can be found on the blog entry, You'll Wanna Eat Your Spinach Soup, Ba-by After You Try This Easy & Delicious Recipe! 

 Delicious.  I can't wait to try some of these out.  Anyone else have any good spinach recipes to suggest?

Strawberry picking & recipe roundup

This past week we went to a local farm, The Fruit & Berry Patch, to pick this seasons first harvest:  strawberries!  I've been craving strawberries lately so on a nice day with great weather it seemed like the perfect thing to do.  The farm was littered with little red berries all over and it was so hard not to just sit there and eat them.

We left with almost 52 lbs of strawberries!  Here is what I made with some of our bounty this year:

Old Fashioned Strawberry Jam and canned Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Filling via Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving:

Strawberry fruit roll ups via Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It: And Other Cooking Projects:

Strawberry Icebox Pie via Martha Stewart's New Pies and Tarts: 150 Recipes for Old-Fashioned and Modern Favorites:

I also have a batch of strawberry vinegar aging in the basement that should be ready in about four weeks to can.  I made this two years and it has become a household favorite.  All I do is mix some of the vinegar with sour cream and ta-da, instant strawberry salad dressing!  I dried about three cups of strawberries for future use in granola as well.  With the rest I just froze them for use in smoothies, more jam, and popsicles.  Even our chickens enjoyed some strawberries:

If you'd like to find a place in your area to pick strawberries from, check out Pick Your Own.  It's our go to for finding local pick-your-own farms.  I can't wait to go back for the next season of fruit, perhaps blueberries, raspberries or peaches.

Rebirth after the storm

What does this pretty purple flower make?

Why, handfuls of pretty yellow snap peas!

We are actually seeing signs of rebirth less then a week after our horrible storms.  The tomatoes even popped back up and we have a new leaf on the banana plant we had outside that got destroyed:

Our pineapple on the other hand has seen better days:

And I bought potted herbs this past weekend because it seems that all my seeds were washed away by the several days of rain we got and we really needed some vegetation where they are to prevent erosion.  All in all though it's not as bad as I thought it was.  We will have to replant spinach and lettuce but most of our tomatoes are doing well and we even have a few flowers on them and a few peppers.  Hopefully we won't see a storm like that again for a long time, if ever.  Picking up from it has been slow, but seeing our garden bounce back gives me hope.

First harvest of 2011

We have our first harvest of this year: radishes!  I was able to pick a few for taste testing last week and this week we are radish central.

I can just eat them as is but last night with our first real harvest we had spicy turkey tacos with pepper-jack cheese, avocado and radish from the garden.  It was wonderful.  Along with the radishes, our lettuce is getting bigger by the day and our snap peas are about 1 foot tall now. And along with the garden, weeds are growing like crazy too.  We have dandelions all over and a few bad non-native plants taking over:  Japanese Honeysuckle, Multiflora Rose and Periwinkle.   Lewie's been working hard to erratic these plants from our acreage although this will be a few years struggle and constant battle.  And while it seems like the honeysuckle is everywhere, it could be worse, we could have kudzu, thank goodness we don't.  Unfortunately, while these plants looks nice because they are some of the first to green in the spring and really make things colorful they are making it hard for our native plants to grow so by pulling up each one and planting a mix of native seeds in its place we are hoping to better our woods and Tennessee.  Besides planting native seeds, we'll soon be planting more in the garden too.  Our last frost date is April 15 and our zone is 7a so pretty soon we'll be adding our tomatoes/peppers/eggplant to the outside garden.  I also started most of our herbs inside but they aren't doing very well.  I can always start them by seed outside but I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to start them inside.  I don't mind experimenting, in fact, I enjoy it and we'll be doing a lot of experimenting this summer because it's a new house with new soil in a new zone. 

Make It Yourself: Sandwich Bag Dryer

Regardless of what I do we always seem to have plastic sandwich bags.  I'd really like to break our habit of using them and although we have cut back we still end up needing one every now and then.  One thing that helps is washing the ones we do use for dry goods or non-meat products and reusing them.  This way they are at least getting more than one use before being thrown away and we buy them less often.  I didn't have a way to dry them so the dirty ones were stacking up in the sink.  I looked into purchasing a dryer like this one but most of the reviews I read said that eventually the wood will mold or rot because of the water, most are made in China and they can be pricey - some over $20.00 with shipping.  Then I came across this video by Michelle Kaufman - eco home designer.  I had to try it for myself.  I'm happy to say that it works!  I haven't been throwing bags away and have been cleaning and reusing the ones I have.

Supplies:

Wire - I used 16 Gauge Steel Galvanized Wire but Michelles Kaufman used wire coat hangers
Pliers
A few small flower pots
Seeds or plants to go in your pots

Directions:

Start by taking about 1 foot of your wire.  You can either just fold over one end to make a small circle, being sure to tuck in your cut end, or you can get crafty and make a design on the end - I made little flowers.

Next, stick these in your flower pots.

That's it!  After washing a bag, just place it upside down over your metal wire.  The water will drip down into the flower pot and eventually dry.

The cost breakdown:

So, is it worth it to make your own sandwich bag dryer or buy one at the store?

Pliers - free (almost all households have these - if not, just use your hands)
Flower pots / flowers - If you don't have any small pots you can usually buy these at any garden or superstore for less then 2 dollars.  I was able to get individual plants at Ace Hardware for $1.00 a piece which included enough dirt so I didn't have to buy that.  So I estimate that if you got 4 pots at $1.50 each and 4 flowers at $1.00 total this would cost about $10.00
Wire - You can use wire coat hangers if you have them - that's free.  If not, buy a galvanized wire (so it won't rust).  I was able to find this online for $5.49 but you can also buy this at many home improvement stores.

Total the most you would spend on this is $15.49 and depending on how big your flower pots are you should be able to fit about 2-3 wires in each pot leaving you with about 8-12 arms for drying bags.  I used flower pots and flowers I already had so really I only had to buy the wire, but like I mentioned you could just use an old coat hanger and then you wouldn't have to purchase anything.

VS.

Gaiam Countertop Plastic Bag Dryer which is $17.71 on Amazon.


The bottom line: if you bought everything from scratch you may only save a few dollars, however I think that the flower pot idea is more appealing - I have four pots with bag dryer wire in them sitting in my kitchen window and I just love how it looks.  You could even make them more useful by growing herbs to cook with in them.  Also, we have been trying to purchase things made in the USA or avoid buying something made in another country together so being able to make it is really nice.  Again, if you have a few flower pots and a coat hanger you get away with not purchasing anything and then you'd save almost $20.00.  Just another thing you can make yourself!

Spring garden

Radish seedlings

Our spring gardens are coming up like weeds.  We've had nice warm weather and a lot of rain so I think that helps.  Here in Tennessee we were able to plant our cold spring garden in February and it's amazing to me that possibly by the end of this month we'll have radish, lettuce and spinach.  We also planted snap peas but they take a little bit longer to produce although they are sticking out of the ground already too.  We invested this year and purchased 6 Mary Washington asparagus plants and 3 Jersey Giant asparagus plants along with 2 rhubarb plants that are now in the ground also.  These are a gamble as we've learned both are hard to grow in Tennessee because of the hot temperatures and humidity levels.  Both take several years to produce anything so we'll see what happens.

Brandywines growing in the Aerogarden

The seeds we started indoors have all come up as well.  We have 6 Brandywine tomato plants, 6 Amish Paste tomato, 4 Lemon Drop Cherry tomato, 1 eggplant, 3 Golden Flame peppers, and 3 hot peppers that are all up.  We may decide to weed down the tomato plants because we don't have room for 16 tomato plants!  Too many is better then not enough though.  Pretty soon I'll transfer them from my Aerogarden to pots and then after April 15th, to the ground. 

Peppers peeping up

And last but not least I had my first bulb bloom this past weekend!  I was the last on the block to bloom but it was worth the wait.  Now I have several blooming daffodils and crocus.  I can't wait to see what the tulips will look like.

My first daffodil of 2011

First signs of spring

A few of my 100 plus bulbs that I planted around our mailbox are coming up!  They started poking up out of the ground last week and seeing that little bit of green was so invigorating!  Spring is just around the corner and we've had temperatures in the 60's this week so it feels real.  The 100 bulbs include daffodils, several varieties of tulips, crocuses,  and a few allium.  I can't wait to see what the mailbox looks like this spring with everything I planted. 

It's seed time!

It's that time of year when the mailbox is full of seed catalogs and it's time to start planning the garden!  This year will be our first real opportunity to have a garden and I was very excited to start ordering seeds.  I love looking through seed catalogs, some of them are like works of art.  I love Territorial's catalog as well as Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  This year we decided to order most of our seeds from Seed Savers Exchange.  I love that their seeds are heirloom so hopefully we can save some seeds from our crop this year and use them next year.  I also like that members can donate heirloom seeds and it's like a community of seed savers that share with one another.

We don't have a huge space for a garden so I'm worried I went overboard a little bit but here is what we bought:

Bean, Climbing French , Packet 50 seeds
Cucumber, Japanese Climbing OG, Packet 25 seeds 
Eggplant, Listada de Gandia OG, Packet 25 seeds
Lettuce, Rossa di Trento , Packet 250 seeds 
Pea, Golden Sweet OG, Packet 50 seeds
Radish, Early Scarlet Globe , Packet 250 seeds 
Pepper, Garden Sunshine , Packet 50 seeds
Pepper, Georgia Flame OG, Packet 25 seeds
Spinach, Bloomsdale OG, Packet 250 seeds
Squash, Muscade de Provence , Packet 25 seeds
Tomato, Brandywine (Sudduth's Strain), Packet 50 seeds
Tomato, Amish Paste , Packet 50 seeds
Tomato, Lemon Drop OG, Packet 25 seeds
Watermelon, Stone Mountain OG, Packet 25 seeds
Flower, Red Marietta , Packet 250 seeds 
Sunflower, Sunflower Mixture, Packet 100 seeds

I'm most excited about the Muscade de Provence which is a 'cheese' pumpkin - one of those creepy green orange pumpkins that are always so pretty but way too expensive to buy in the store.  I'm also excited about our tomatoes.  Two years ago I canned 28 quarts of pure tomato sauce and this passed year I was only able to can about 8.  I'm missing my tomato sauce!  Hopefully we'll have a nice bunch this year to can.  We still have some work to do in the garden before anything gets planted but hopefully it will start to warm up and we can add some sand and raised beds.   For now, we'll be starting the seeds inside probably using my Aerogarden although right now it has persimmons and witch hazel seeds in it, I'll just have to make room!  Hooray for backyard gardens!

As a side note, I love this garden journal as seen in Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Sewing & Fabric crafts:

If only I could justify the time to spend making that I would.  Too cute.

Maple syrup

It took almost a week and a lot of hard work but we have 100% pure maple syrup.  And it came right out of our backyard.  Amazing.  It is so delicious it's hard to describe.  It has a sweet maple flavor but also has just a hint of forest flavor, like you know it's the real thing.  Despite lugging over 6 gallons of sap up from our woods everyday this week we only ended up with about 4 cups of maple syrup but we will savor every drop of it.  It was a neat learning experience.  After tapping the trees and collecting the sap I boiled the sap continuously on the stove for four days, adding more sap as it came out of the trees.  Yesterday our weather changed and we didn't get any sap so I continued to boil it down until it changed colors and became more concentrated.  At a certain temperature it becomes syrup and not sap and after it reached that I tested it with our hydrometer to make sure it had the right density.  Then I filtered it through a wool cone to get rid of all the sugar crystals:

After it was filtered I canned it in mason jars.  The cleanup was a bit busy with maple syrup on everything!

It's another one of those things that we love: being able to make something instead of buying it. We only tapped four trees this year and it was a success so I imagine next year we will expand to more taps.