a number of things

a poster

I uploaded a lovely poster Anna made, with the calendar herbs, to my Etsy shop this morning. She has great plans for adding more of her art, so that may mean her own Etsy shop before long. :)

Have a fantastic day!

 

gardens again

(Flame lettuce)

This morning I took my camera along for a quick garden check before I cut more of the lemon balm that needs picking before a frost knocks it back. I feel like every other post these days has something to do with the gardens, but I can't help it. I love this time of year. 

This photo is from Collin's garden. the lettuce is Black Seeded Simpson, but Collin always calls it his "favorite lettuce". It does very well in our warm weather and we always plant lots of it.

(little kale plants)

  (lemon balm)

 

After the big veggie garden, I slipped into the herb garden for the lemon balm. There is a nasty nest of wasps living in one of the cinder blocks that edge the beds and I am having a frustrating time trying to get rid of them. One stung me about a week ago, but luckily the lemon balm is on the opposite side of the garden, and they left me alone today.

Hope you are having a beautiful October day!

 

luffa!

I have wanted to try growing my own luffa for more than 15 years (I kid you not), and this year I finally tried it. We have been picking and cleaning them for a while now, so I thought I would share a few pictures today of our most recent harvest.
 
We first selected the ripe ones (brown) and snipped them from the vines. The kids then snap off the blossom end and dump out the seeds into a bowl. Most of them come falling out (you can hear them rattling around in there) at this point and the rest come out when we wash them. (We only save for later planting the ones that fall out before washing.)

Then we peel them using fingers and occasionally a butter knife, but there seems to be several different ways of cleaning them out there. We may try other methods in the future, but this way is working great for us now.

Lilly had to have her own bowl of seeds to play in. They really are rather nice to run ones hand through and they sound so pretty hitting the bowl. Star, one of the kittens, is patiently supervising.

So this is our modest little haul for the day. They have not been washed and dried in the sun yet, but aren't they fun?

And there are so many more out there!

 

The Details:

We grew Luffa aegyptica pruchased from these very helpful people. It has a very dense fiber and a long growing season of 180 days. We really like it and have saved many (many) seeds for later planting, but I have ordered some Luffa cylindrica seeds to try next year. The Luffa cylindrica has a growing season of only 130 days and a slightly different fiber texture and I really want to see what it is like. :)

(Linked to Barn Hop .)

 

Farm Anatomy

 

Ok, this book is probably not for everyone, but if you are into art / illustration as well as all things farm-ish, then you will love it. (Um, I've had it preordered since July.)

It is filled to the brim with Julia Rothman's awesome illustrations detailing nearly every imaginable aspect of farm work and life.

From gardening, to animals, to handy and helpful tips, tricks, recipes and how-to's...

...I am relishing every bit of it.

(P.S. ~ You can see even more of Farm Anatomy here!)

 

a little garden notebook

I may not have the time to draw and paint 12 new calendar images right now, but I certainly found the time to make up a quick, earthy little illustration to encourage my favorite young gardeners. You see, we are in the midst of the fall planting down here in the deep south, and Collin and Rose are quite serious about their own personal garden space.

So kid sized garden notebooks (or garden journals, if you prefer) were in order for the careful recording of planting dates, varieties, garden maps, etc. I thought there might be other kids (and grown-ups!) out there with their own gardening projects, so I made up a PDF with two little notebook covers each as a little autumn gift for you.

Enjoy!

Click here to download the garden notebook covers.

** One quick tip: To get the full image, make sure to select Borderless Printing from your Print Setup box. Complete instructions are on page 2 of the PDF.

 

so summer

Oh, these hot (so very hot) days of summer. I find myself dreaming (longing) for autumn more often than not once we reach mid August or so. I also question our sanity in moving down from the relative cool of the mountains of East Tennessee (some 13 years ago) down to the very South of Louisiana. The pitiful garden is producing little more than zinnias (um, and more cantaloupe) but they seem to brighten up the whole house with their cheery persistence.

The elderberries are rockin' right along also, and we are picking as many as we can to freeze for winter syrup. When it is 102 outside, it is so hard to believe that it will one day be cold again.

Hope you are finding ways to keep cool!

 

crazy cantaloupe

I have never had much luck with cantaloupe. If I got the plants to grow and actually produce fruit, some rat or other gnawing creature would get to them first. So when a kind, elderly nurseryman gave two of my kids a small peat pot each last spring, and told them that under the soil was an Ambrosia cantaloupe seed, I just smiled and said thank you.

Well, Anna and Collin diligently watered and cared for their seeds and before long there were plants in the pots. Collin had one and Anna's pot had two little cantaloupe plants. They began asking to transplant them into the main garden and since I had a space that was going to rest under a foot of hay this season, I told them they could plant them there. You see, it didn't really matter where they planted them because they weren't going to make it anyway (Ahem, I (in a rare stroke of wisdom) never shared my negative thinking with the kids, not wanting to discourage anyone.).

So we planted them out. Without even thinning Anna's pot to just one plant because she didn't have the heart and neither did I. To my surprise they did grow. And grow! When there were 8 baby cantaloupes on the vines, I began to tell the kids that indeed something may get to them before we did, so be prepared. But nothing did, and we ended up eating each and every one of those amazingly sweet loupes.

But that is not where this little story ends. Once the fruit was picked, the vines looked thin and tired and I quit watering them thinking I would soon be pulling them up and making room for something for fall. Just about then, it started to rain. You see, the long drought we had been experiencing was ending and it rained and rained. Suddenly, those cantaloupe vines found new life and they began to grow. They grew up and over the nearby tomato cages (and tons of grass!) and out of their bed into the next one. And they were covered in new flowers!

Now we are on round two of these amazing plants. We have found several large (I mean crazy large) fruits and are beginning to harvest and eat (with no rat teeth marks!) cantaloupe again. The tomato cages that gave us tomatoes in May, now have cantaloupes hanging from them in August. Crazy, I tell you.

 

wordless Wednesday :: drying herbs

  

 

pears

The pears are coming in by the bucket-fulls and we are reveling in all their juicy, sweet glory. We have 11 trees in total with 6 different varieties, but some are fairly young and this is the first year I allowed them to keep their fruit.

One of the new ones we got to try this year is an Asian pear called Shinko (pictured above). It is by far my absolute favorite. It is ridiculously juicy, as all the Asian pears are, but it it has a touch of tart to counteract the sugary sweetness. I never though I could wax poetic about a fruit, but this pear is amazing. Needless to say we will be adding a few more of these to the orchard.

Our favorite of the European pears is probably the Vermilion Bartlett, but some in the house are saying they prefer the Leconte. Either way, we are dehydrating lots of these for dried pears to snack on later, eating them fresh and baking them into beautiful things that go particularly well with vanilla ice cream...

...Such as the above pear pandowdy made using the apple pandowdy recipe from Rustic Fruit Desserts (Love this book.). Dreamy, I tell you.

Happy Sunday!

 

June

  The Asian green bean arch with the cukes and sunflowers behind.

Wow. What a month. Round about the end of May, Chip decided that we didn't need to pay more than one more month's rent on his little office space in town, and that we could finish (the interior at least) the office we have been working on by the end of June. Now, keep in mind that at this point the building was little more than a roof and walls, with only naked studding inside. I knew it would be work, but I am always up for a ridiculous self-inflicted deadline, so I said "let's do it!".

Tomatoes in front & Rattle Snake pole beans in back.

On top of the garden / mini-farm work that we were doing (mainly watering everything to try and keep it all alive in this horrid drought), Chip's parents flew in for the first week in June which was followed by a week of swimming lessons for most of the kids. These things slowed us down a little, but Chip was all the while plugging away with insulation, wiring and then walls on the weekends. As soon as the walls were up, however, it was my turn to come in and start priming, caulking, painting and trimming.

Lilly with zinnias.

So that is where I have been for the last two weeks. Nearly non-stop. Coming in for a quick peanut butter & maple syrup sandwich and a glass of water and letting the older kids watch the younger for the most part. (Thank goodness this is not school time!) At the end of the 95 degree days, I am tired, so very tired. But grateful. Grateful for the cooperation and real help from the kids. Grateful for the past learning experiences of adding onto our little house... 3 times in 12 years! (When we bought it and plunked it down on our patch of dirt it was a old, tiny little cypress structure (with good "bones") of only 750 square feet. That first addition was before we moved in, and by adding two bedrooms we brought it up to a whopping 980 square feet. Subsequent rooms got us to 1,300 and then 1,680 square feet... where we are now.)

Scrumptious Juliet's & a few Roma's.

I am also grateful for the beautiful abundance of the gardens. There is always a bowl of tomatoes on the kitchen island not to mention the endless cucumbers, yummy beans and sweet cantaloupe. Someone we know once looked at our gardens and some project or another we had going on and pronounced, "You all work too hard. That is why you have no life."  Excuse me? Ha! Apparently you have failed to notice that we most certainly do, and we indeed love this little life of ours! We work hard, but we play equally so. Even the teenagers, when hearing Chip relate the above conversation to me later, said indignantly, "What's wrong with our life?!"

So why on earth am I sitting here typing this silly ramble and not out painting baseboards? Because it is actually raining! Blessed rain! We have been so dry for so long. It is not that great a thing for painting plans, but the plants and trees are desperate for it.

Have a fabulous day!

 

elderflower

The short window of time to make elderflower tincture is once again here.

 

I have accumulated many herbal medicine-making books over the years since I took my first herb class in 1993, but my two current favorites are Making Plant Medicine and The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook. Without getting to technical, I basically use the folk method but with a bit more measuring (My favorite source for bottles.). We are nearly out of last year's batch, but it will likely hold out for the six weeks it will take to finish this year's. This time I am making a double batch in a quart jar instead of a pint. Now to start a batch of lemon balm tincture.

Happy early summer!

 

blackberry time

Wow. Where is the time going? Blackberries already?

So very many blackberries...

...And so very many purple stained hands and mouths (and clothes!).

Multiple trips a day are made to the patch. Sometimes with a bowl to bring the juicy morsels back to the house in, but more often than not, with only hands and a ready appetite.

Oh, my. I suppose this means summer is just around the corner. :)