Category: food (Page 10 of 34)

I meant to post a blog post about our garden goings-on earlier in the year, but didn’t get to it, so here is a catchup blog post about the Lord’s provisions from the gardens from Spring and Summer so far this 2018!

Spring

In our last garden blog post, we mentioned we planted garlic last year:

Well, back in May it was harvest time! Thanks to the Stonger boys for the help!

Time to dry them out for a couple of days, and then I hung them in the meat dryer to cure:

And here are the final results, with those ready for next year, Lord willing, on the left, and the ones for use this year on the right!

Then, it was to time for the main spring garden. It needed some weeding first, and thanks again to the Stonger boys:

And then we planted beans, squash, and spaghetti squash:

And here they are about a month later:

And here are some of the results!

Squash chips! Yum! (see recipe here):

Here’s a freebee turnip plant from seed thrown down in previous years (more on this in the Summer part):

And then it was time to plant okra, which usually works very well around here:

Here I tried throwing a bunch in rows, just to see how it worked:

We also wanted to do sweet potatoes again this year after good success, thanks to God, from last year (see last garden update in the link above).

In fact, here’s a freebee from last year’s planting!

We tried to start our own slips, but they sadly just never grew:

And so we purchased some:

And here’s the area we cleared and where they have gone:

Summer

Sue got to processing the spaghetti squash by this time, and here are the results! Yum again!

She roasted some:

And made “pasta” from the “spaghetti”:

And here’s part of the squash haul, and them cut and preserved in apple cider vinegar:

Here’s the freebee turnip — nice!

Thanks to inspector Mimi for allowing it to pass inspection! 😉

Finally, here we are catching up to today. We’ve had a very hot spring and summer, and drought conditions, so some things are barely hanging on, although we do have rain percentages this week, during which we pray the Lord grants rain. But, here are the beans:

Separated okra plant (many which got razed by something early on):

And in rows:

And okra fruit:

Here’s the freebee sweet potato from above:

And another one that grew by itself:

And the sweet potato bed:

We are extremely grateful to the Lord for Him granting the provisions from the gardens this year so far, and we ask for those continued as He might will. We thank Him for the spots of rain He has provided to keep things going, and we always pray He grant spiritual rains of nourishment in our hearts so that we may thrive and grow spiritually for His glory in obedience to and more like Christ Jesus!

— David

We thought we would catch you up on how the garden ended up in Fall of last year, including our foray into the adventure of sweet potato growing, and where we are today!

Here are the final days of the 2017 garden before the freezes started to hit…

This is the one plant, a broccoli, that grew from the first Spring planting. I have picked off a few broccoli heads and have eaten them as I’ve walked by 🙂 :

Here is our gogi berry plant:

And these are our blackberry plants:

Here are the okra plants third week in October:

But then the freeze was coming, and so we covered them. They looked a little creepy like this actually… 🙂

And sadly, they still didn’t fare well, and so that was about the end of them for the year:

But before that, we thought we would try to save some okra seeds this year to plant next year as part of our continued effort to get sustaining here. We pray God might grant this to work!

Sweet Potatoes

I mentioned in our last real garden update that we planted sweet potato slips this year. This is our second attempt, with the first one in our raised beds only yielding a few small ones.

This year however, and I think it has a lot to do with that we’re using the forest bed mulching technique we’ve discussed before, God graciously granted some quite nice ones!

We harvested the beginning of October. The first one I pulled out was half rotted, very mushy, and I was worried they all would be like that, but most were thankfully just fine! You’re supposed to be very careful pulling them out so as to not damage the tender skin, which hardens later.

Here’s a stack of them:

And Sue with an American football-sized one:

And this is just to give a size perspective:

Here they are in the wheelbarrow being taken to the house for curing. Using the information from a website about curing sweet potatoes, we let them open-air cure just on the ground in a couple places in the house for probably about three weeks:

And then wrapped them up individually in newspaper to go into the root cellar for another six weeks. Apparently the longer you can wait to harvest, even just after the first light frost, and giving them that long to cure allows the sugars to form in them, which gives them a good taste, and without which they apparently taste very bland:

And finally, last week, we started pulling them out of the root cellar, and they appear to be still ok….yea, and thank the Lord!

Here, Sue is putting them into a meal:

And into the pan (although there is one store-bought mixed in). But, they do indeed taste great, and again we are very thankful to God for these provisions off of the land!

Garlic

Since we have larger garden areas with which to be able to plant both for Winter and Spring, we are attempting garlic again this year, planting cloves the Stongers graciously gave us. This is just this week after the big freeze we went through here:

And the wild lettuce, which I believe is the prickly lettuce I mentioned before, is coming back too!

As always and again, we are very thankful to the Lord for His providence in granting sustenance from the gardens! We pray He might continue to, as He will, and that He guide us into more and better ways to live off of the land in direct dependence on Him!

— David