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Putting Food By

August 8, 2008   Agriculture, Daily Farm Life, Food, Garden, Greenhouse, high tunnel, hoop house, Growing Vegetables, Homestead, Poultry

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I’ve cleaned a bushel of beans, blanched and frozen them.  When I started, this bushel basket was level with the top.  It’s now about half full.  I snap off the stem ends and feed the beans with bad spots to the dogs.  The rest of empty space is thanks to Reynolds Handi-Vac.  It vacuums air out of the bags.  I’ve “put up” 30 quarts of green beans so far.

When Steve gets home he’ll bring canning jars up from the basement.  I need to make dill pickles, stewed tomatoes and pickled beets.  Later on I’ll freeze broccoli from the seedlings we planted yesterday.  I’ll count cauliflower before I decide on freezing more, there might already be enough.  Later in the fall we’ll put potatoes, winter squash, rutabaga, carrots and cabbage in the cellar.  We’ll be eating spinach, Swiss chard and other greens fresh from the greenhouse all winter. I’d like to think the other house will sell before the ground freezes so that we can buy land and build two more greenhouses – but I’m not planning on it.

We’re eating tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, eggplant, summer squash, zucchini, carrots, turnip, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli side shoots fresh now.

The Slug Patrol is out today.  I had to cover the broccoli seedlings to keep the turkeys away from them.  I thought that when it started to rain the turkeys go into the barn but they couldn’t care less.  I’ll miss them when they’re gone.  Anyway, the slug patrol is out.  It’s raining lightly.  Thanks to the ducks we lose very little produce to slugs.  They barely make it out of the woods before the ducks gobble them up. If we didn’t have the ducks I’m sure we’d have had serious slug problems because of the rain.

I watched a small bird, maybe a wren, picking potato beetle larva off the plants this morning.  Occasionally they’d eat one but most of the time they left with them.  They must be feeding babies.  There aren’t many and the birds are making them useful so I won’t spray them until Monday night.  It’s not supposed to rain Monday.  If I wait til almost dark the birds will have gone up for the night.  And speaking of birds going up for the night, if I leave the greenhouses’ doors open birds will spend the night inside.  They’ll continue this as long as I leave the doors open.

Blanching the beans and baking banana bread took a little bit of the chill out of the house today.  I’m trying to avoid turning on the furnace or building a hot, fast burning fire as long as possible.  We should be trying to stay cool, not warm, on August 8.

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