Category: garden (Page 7 of 8)

Boy, if there was any doubt carrots grow well in West Central Texas, may it be forever removed. We planted carrot seeds in one entire bed this year; and, wow, the carrots took advantage of every bit of space in that bed. This blog post reflects the second round of thinning of the carrots; and I still have one, maybe two, rounds to go!

The carrots grew very densely because there was so much depth for them to grow in the double-dug, raised bed. So each pull of the greens revealed a handful of carrots:

“Ehhhhhh……what’s up, doc?” Gary loves carrots. The greens, eh, not so much:

So I filled the bucket with greens knowing they would be appreciated somewhere else……

Shatner, on the other hand, loves carrot greens. (In a high-class maître d’ French accent…”Taybelll for one, Monsieur?”)

I stopped pulling carrots when the basket was fairly full, knowing this many would take several hours to prepare for canning:

What a blessing to sit out in the fresh air and sunshine to work at my “day job.” I had two buckets for the initial processing of the carrots: one was for a first rinse to get the major dirt off, and the other was to give them a good scrub with the vegetable brush to get them as clean as possible:

Next, I gave them a final rinse, cut off the ends, and cut up the carrots into smaller pieces. I munched along the way and loved knowing these carrots are God’s direct provision, and that any middle men and chemicals have been eliminated:

Here they are in the jars ready to go into the canner:

And, yippeeeee! Fresh garden carrots preserved to be used in many delicious dishes:

And speaking of delicious things for meals, I thought I’d provide an update on our other garden adventures.

In addition to our abundant yield of Zuchini, we were blessed with an abundance of summer squash:

We also shredded up much of the summer squash and put it in jars with salt for lactic fermentation, and placed them down in the root cellar. It tastes great – just like sauer kraut. And it makes a very flavorful and healthy salad when you add cucumber and tomato:

Our peppers are still going gangbusters. Here is a bowl of freshly cut peppers ready to be put in jars. I have found it to be very handy to grab a jar of these off the shelf and saute them with onions when I’m making fajitas. Thanks to one our readers, Ginny, we also got the idea to cut them up and dry them in our solar dryer. They are great to add into recipes, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how much taste is packed into even one of these small pieces:

Here they are ready to be canned. As I was going through the pepper plants harvesting the ripe ones, I found that a plant with smaller red and green peppers resembling chili peppers had popped up. (Imagine, if you will, what the Chili’s Restaurant pepper logo looks like.) Well, I haven’t been canning those because Dave likes to eat them raw here and there. HOWEVER, we have found that somehow these peppers were rubbing elbows with some of the other peppers; and sometimes when we bite into a sweet red or green pepper, we’ll get a HOT surprise! So some of these jars are packed with more taste than we bargained for! 🙂

We planted 17 tomato plants this year hoping that we might have a successful crop; but for some reason, none of them did well at all. We have harvested probably fewer than 40 tomatoes the entire summer. Not sure what happened. But, thankfully, the local produce market was selling fresh tomatoes at a fraction of the normal price to keep them moving. We paid a whopping $5.00 for these tomatoes and got 22 quarts! Thanks to the Lord!

Hmmmmmm, then there is okra (not to be confused with Oprah). Okra and I are still getting to know each other. Coming from the West Coast, I had never eaten okra and don’t believe it is on any menu I’ve ever seen in California. So I’m still becoming acquainted with these Southern crops. To be completely honest, okra and I have a kind of love/hate relationship. They are SO prolific, I could not keep up with them. Do you know that okra can grow to maturity in four days?! It’s almost too much of a good thing. They are fibrous by nature; so if you don’t catch them when they are young and tender, they can get pretty tough and stringy. However, in the canning process, they do soften up and are very edible. I only tried to fix fried okra once but had to put doing that on the back burner (no pun intended) after that until I have more time to experiment with the seasonings. For now though, we are very grateful to have several jars of nutritious okra put away in the root cellar. They’re actually quite tasty when I process them with lemon juice and a little salt:

We planted a half bed of turnips this year as a kind of experiment to see how they would grow. They did very well, and we had many great salads with turnip greens. The greens are a bit misleading because the actual number of turnips that were harvested were not that many. But we were very thankful to have this basket full of them:

Dave put them in freezer bags to be kept in our large freezer (which we had running because I was in the process of canning our two butchered hogs at the time) until I could get around to canning them. Here, we paid Gary a couple carrots to guard them until Dave could put them in the freezer:

Sadly, they thawed just enough in the freezer that they started going bad by the time I could get to them. So our turnips were, instead, enjoyed by our hog, Missy. Maybe next year…….

We also have gotten some great green onions and red onions from our garden, of which I don’t currently have pictures. I still haven’t gotten used to knowing I can just walk outside over to the garden and pick a bunch of fresh produce to put into our meals. What an amazing blessing for which we are so thankful to God.

Susan

We planted cabbage in our summer garden again this year. If you’ll remember from our garden last year, we didn’t have any cabbage heads to speak of; but this year the Lord has graciously blessed us with large, beautiful cabbage heads to eat fresh and preserve.

I can probably count the number of ounces of cabbage I’ve eaten in my life in single digits. I have nothing against cabbage in the least but just didn’t grow up eating much of it. So I was stumped to find a good way to preserve all of this cabbage with which God had blessed us.

I surfed online a bit under canning cabbage and found a recipe that sounded pretty tasty to me. Fast forward several weeks, and I now have over 60 quarts of borsch in my root cellar! (NOTE: For you proper spellers, “borsch” is, indeed, an approved variant spelling of “borscht.”) I had heard of borsch but had never eaten it to my recollection. I’m not certain if this recipe is an “official” borsch; but, regardless, it’s tasty! Wow! All these years I’ve been missing out! This recipe calls for five pounds of tomatoes per batch, so we were very thankful when we discovered the local produce market was having a sale on tomatoes at about $.50 per pound.

I’ve listed the recipe below in case anybody is panicking like I was, wondering how to capture and preserve their garden cabbage crop. Or if you just have a “hankerin'” for borsch 😀

Here is the official link to the recipe, but I made a few changes so I thought I would post it here also with a few personal notes in italics:

Yield: Eight pints (or four quarts) although I was generous with the ingredients and consistently got five quarts each time.

• 5 lbs. tomatoes (about 20 medium tomatoes)
• 8 cups coarsely shredded cabbage (I tried using a grater but realized coarsely chopping the cabbage works just as well and is much faster)
• 6 cups water
• 2 cups chopped onions (approx. 2 medium onions)
• 1 cup chopped apple (approx. 1 medium apple)
• 2 tablespoons instant beef bouillon (store-bought bouillon contains MSG, so on some of the batches I used pork stock from previous canning sessions of our pigs in place of the six cups of water, and added a little garlic and onion powder seasoning in place of the bouillon; and it worked fine)
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon pepper

1. Wash, peel, remove stem ends and cores, and quarter tomatoes. Use a small spoon to scrape out the excess seeds, if desired. (I didn’t take the time to peel the tomatoes or scrape out any seeds, and it was fine)
2. In a four to six quart kettle or dutch oven combine all ingredients. Bring to a boil; boil uncovered five minutes.
3. Ladle hot soup into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch head space.
4. Adjust the lids.
5. Process in canner at 10 pounds, 45 minutes for pints or 55 minutes for quarts. (Please look online for altitude instructions if you live 1,000 feet or more above sea level)6. Makes eight pints (or four quarts) (As I stated before, I was generous with the ingredients and consistently got five quarts)

Here are the tomatoes we were blessed to be able to buy very inexpensively. A 20 lb. box yielded three to three and a half batches:

I cut up each tomato in half and then into quarters and placed them in the soup pot:

I coarsely chopped up the cabbage and placed it in with the tomatoes:

I was amazed at how many cups each head of cabbage yielded:

Here are all of the ingredients introducing themselves to each other and ready to be boiled:

The ingredients have now been boiled for five minutes and are ready to be ladled into the canning jars for processing:

MMMmmmmm, delicious Borsch all cooked, processed and ready to eat!

What a blessing to have been able to capture and preserve these abundant, direct provisions from God. Dave and I have had some borsch for supper a couple of times now. Dave said it doesn’t smell that great but tastes delicious! It can stand on its own as a very tasty and nutritious soup, or meat may be added to make a wonderful stew. I added in some canned brisket meat recently along with some homemade bread, and it made a well-rounded supper for us. All thanks to God for granting us this food from our garden as a type of the spiritual food He gives us from His Word.

Susan

We had a drought last Summer and Fall which really affected the quantity and size of many of our garden vegetables. The time came to harvest our red cabbage from our 2008 Fall garden, and the heads were small and did not really look like cabbage heads but more like a bunch of leaves loosely wrapped around or falling away from each other. Dave said we had to at least try to do something with them. Our neighbor, Michael, mentioned you could make sauerkraut with cabbage, so we thought that might be the best way to go.

I looked up the simplest recipe I could find and hoped for the best.

Here is the cabbage in our garden waiting patiently to be harvested by its novice owner (pick me, pick me!!)

I washed all the cabbage leaves and cut them up with a knife because they were too loose to shred with a shredder or grater. I put the leaves in two 9×13″ pans, added the proportionate amount of pickling salt, and mixed well with my hands. There wasn’t much moisture to be drawn out of the leaves, so I had to add a lot more water when putting them into canning jars. After about 24 hours +/-, I prepared pint canning jars and filled them up with the cut-up cabbage leaves adding water, leaving 1″ head space, and screwed on the lids. I followed the instructions to put the jars into a pan (or lined box in my case) because as they started to ferment, there was some (not much) overflow leakage.

Then I stored the jars at room temperature for six weeks and turned them upside down several times over the course of those weeks to distribute the brine and keep everything moist.

At the end of the six weeks, I opened up all of the jars and emptied them into a large sauce pan, simmering them for about five minutes. Yep, it smelled and tasted like sauerkraut, although it was very dark green and more coarse than the kind you buy at the store. Although turning the cabbage into sauerkraut is a preservation method in itself, I proceeded to can the pints of sauerkraut and put them down in our root cellar in order to preserve them for as long as possible. Since we are not generally sauerkraut eating folks, I needed all the time I could get to figure out more ways to fix it!

Wow! I couldn’t believe that we were able to make sauerkraut and preserve it from what appeared to be pretty lifeless leaves. What a wonderful blessing! I’m very thankful to be learning these valuable lessons in food preservation and to be able to witness God’s direct provision from planting to our table.

Susan