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Hi Everyone,
If you believe that mankind has continued to exist by chance I would think that you have never tried to grow a garden. The chances of something eating your garden are high—worms, slugs, birds, rabbits, deer, skunk, etc. Critters are enough to wreck damage to your garden, but you may also have to deal with drought, flooding, early winters, late springs. Now a day if our gardens flop we respond by saying, “O well, I will just have to get my food from the grocery store.” Yet, we all know how many days it takes for a grocery store to be out of food if there is a state of emergency—three days. For thousands of years people have not been able to depend upon grocery stores and if their crops failed—they starved. So I can honestly tell you that it is only by the mercy of God that we are still alive. Psalms 104:27-28 says it perfectly: “These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season. That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good.”
I do not remember the last time that we had a sweet potato harvest—yet we plant them every year. We used to harvest bushel baskets of sweet potatoes and then we would can them for long term storage. A few years we got a good harvest, but some kind of beetle would hatch out of them and we would cut into the sweet potato and find little maggots inside. Then the maggots turned into beetles and crawled all over the sweet potatoes in our house. Many a year we have painstakingly dug up sweet potatoes—after going through all the trouble of planting them and then waiting five months—and found no potatoes. One year we found lots of potatoes—but they were all eaten by rats! Last year the deer ate the plants. This year we planted them in the garden tunnel—three rows. We kept them trimmed to the rows so that the plants would not have a lot of growth to hide rats. We were not sure if we would be able to keep the vines trimmed, but amazingly we managed to set aside every Monday to trim back the vines. I think that we only missed a few weeks. I dug into one of the rows back in October—and found nothing. I was a little worried. Then last Monday we decided that it was time to go digging for gold. At first we only found very small ones, but as we advanced down the first row they did get bigger. There were no giants, but there was a nice variety of small and medium potatoes. While we were working on the first row my sister Nichole showed up—she needed a little break from homeschooling. Gardening is great therapy for stress! We got the first row done and then it was time for lunch—it was almost 2:00. After lunch Nichole went home and Mom and I headed back out to the garden. We started on the second row—digging up potatoes like a couple dogs. Maybe I should have hired our dogs to dig. As we advanced down the row our energy slowly disappeared. When I reached the end I physically could not dig another hole—and yet there was still one more row of sweet potatoes. Thankfully it was 4:30, which meant that it was quitting time. I would have been glad to go straight up to the house—but we had to cleanup first and pick up all the sweet potatoes. We had three five gallon buckets of sweet potatoes. Once we got them to the house I laid out five feed sacks on the back porch and Papa spread out the potatoes on them so that they could dry and cure. We would take care of the third row the next day . . .
. . . Or so we thought. When we woke up the next day our bodies were in protest mode. Our arms, hands and wrists hurt from digging, our legs hurt from kneeling, and Mom’s poor back was really messed up and we were still exhausted (I am sure that the time change was of no help). There was no physical way that we could dig up the third row of sweet potatoes! So I made the call to wait until next month. The sweet potatoes really were not that big, and some were small enough that they really could have gone another month, so we decided to wait. We did manage to string some netting over the two rows of zinnias to help support them as they get bigger. I have had the netting for a few years—but have never used it. Once we got it strung over the flowers I was surprised at how easy it was to use and how quick it went on, and I wondered why it had taken me so long to use it. After lunch we had our weekly egg party and then Mom and I managed to harvest the two rows of green beans. It was our seventh picking this season and we have been able to can close to 80 pints of green beans to be enjoyed throughout the year. We have also had quite a few meals of fresh green beans sautéed in butter, garlic, salt, pepper, and lemon peel.
We were not able to snap and can the green beans on Wednesday as we had planned, so we ended up spending all day Thursday in the kitchen. Before we could snap the beans though we had to get the pumpkins moved out of the barn because we had three loads of hay being delivered Thursday afternoon and they were in the way of where the hay needed to go. Most of the pumpkins were looking perfect—but one was being hollowed out by something and another was starting to rot. So we brought it inside to deal with it. Last Friday I had gone upstairs to sew—but ended up rearranging the sewing room first. I left it in an unfinished mess, so when I went upstairs Thursday to get some canning jars I quickly finished up the rearranging and cleaning. In the process I found two pumpkins that we were storing up there starting to rot—so I brought them down to deal with. Then we sat down and relaxed while we snapped beans. Once they were snapped we loaded them into jars and canned them in the pressure canner. While they cooked we tackled the pumpkins. We sliced up half of one and roasted it in the oven with butter, maple sugar and cinnamon. Then we cut up the others into one inch cubes and pressure canned them in quart jars. It is really easy for we dry pack the pumpkin cubes into the jars (we do not cover them with water, for the pumpkin makes its own juice), put the lids and rings on them (nothing is hot) then we process them at ten pounds of pressure for 90 minutes. Then we have pumpkin puree ready for pies, breads, or soups. While we spent our day in the kitchen, Papa spent his on the tractor unloading hay from the delivery trucks and stacking it in the barn.
Friday we had chickens to process and my brother Charles decided to come over and spend the day with us and help process—in exchange for a good dinner and some family time. There was more family time to be had on Saturday as my sister and her husband had invited us to go with them and Charles to the Sugar Cane Festival in White Springs in the afternoon. It sounded like fun, but I had one problem that made it hard to go. The green beans needed to be picked again. I was hoping to pick them Friday afternoon after we processed the chickens—but Mom’s back was really bad and after I finished making kombucha there was no time. I didn’t want to lose the green beans, but there was no way to go off for the afternoon and pick green beans since our morning would be spent milking cows and packing the orders for the delivery to Gainesville. I will admit that I lost a little bit of sleep Friday night over those green beans. In the morning though Mom had the perfect solution—call my sister Nichole and have her and my other sister Samantha come over and pick the green beans and they could keep them and can them up for their use. Nichole was ecstatic to be able to pick some beans and can them—and I was happy to share knowing that they would not go to waste. Then I could go off for the afternoon and have some fun without any cares.
We had a wonderful time looking at all the crafts and some of the old-fashioned skills and old buildings. My sister Nichole got talked into giving axe throwing a try. The first two tries the axe hit the wood and fell off, but on the third try she actually got it to stick into the wood—right in the middle of the bull’s eye. Everyone was shocked—including her. I knew not to give it a try at all for nothing but trouble could ever come out of me throwing an axe. I tell everyone that if I throw something at you don’t worry—it will miss you, but if I throw something near you—watch out for it is liable to clobber you. My aim is terrible! There was a blacksmith there, someone was pottery spinning, someone was turning wooden bowls, and someone was carving sculptures with a chainsaw. The last thing we got to see before the rains let loose was the greasy pig contest. The pigs weighed about 40 pounds each and they used Crisco to grease two up at a time. They had a fenced in area and the children that had signed up for the chase would stand in the middle and then they would take the two pigs out of the trailer and turn them loose in the fenced in area. Then the children were given the chance to catch a pig—and whoever caught it got to keep the pig they caught. It was so funny watching those little children run after pigs trying to catch them—when they were afraid to even touch them. The older children caught their pigs pretty fast, but the younger ones took a lot longer and gave us more laughs—but we cheered a lot louder for them when they finally grabbed the back legs and caught their pigs. The funniest part though was when the people in charge pulled one of the pigs out of the trailer and turned it loose in the pen it ran the wrong way. Instead of into the center of the pen, it ran out and under the trailer and then out and loose in town. The adults were trying to catch the pig, but it was giving them a run for their money. May I say that it was a greased pig! The last we saw it was heading for the woods. We never heard if they caught it—but I am sure that no one with a nice garden or lawn wants it to show up at their place.
On our way home from the festival we stopped by Lowe’s and Home Depot to look for a stove. Last Tuesday morning as I was heating up the milk to make yogurt we heard a loud kaboom! When we went into the kitchen (we were eating breakfast in the dining room) at first we couldn’t figure out what had happened, but then I realized that the burner was no longer on and the water was no longer boiling. When we lifted the lid to the stove we saw that the wires were charred and broken to that burner. We had the electrical repair man come out Wednesday and we found out that not only was the part to that burner broken, but the wire harness was blown also. So we need a new stove. Thankfully for now the oven and three burners still work—so we are not desperate. We looked at the stoves—but only found one 30” slide-in with coil burners, but its lid does not open and as often as we boil something over I want to be able to get under the lid to clean up the mess. So that left us with a glass top or a gas stove. I have always been against a gas stove, but glass tops are out of the question since you cannot can on a glass top. It looks like we may have to find a gas stove (and thankfully our house was once wired for gas). May I say that change is never easy! I am not sure if I am looking forward to this new cooking method or not. It will be a learning curve for sure.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare