Long Time No Blog

Life on the hill has been busy, and with our internet being unreliable as of late, I've been slack in updating here.

On the homeschooling front, we're preparing for the new school year by setting up a dedicated school room in the space formerly known as the living room. I'm resurfacing an old kitchen table and chairs to function as a large school desk. (Last year we used the kitchen table.) It will be nice to be able to spread out in one room without having to put everything up at meal time, etc. In addition, I can relax about art supplies and pencil scratches on our "good" kitchen table. Of course, good is a relative term here, because I'm not certain that you can have good furniture and kids simultaneously.

Things on the farming front are not going so well. The heat has been awful, and the only things thriving in my garden are weeds and squash. My cherry tomatoes are producing a little, but sadly none of my larger tomato varieties are doing much of anything. The only large ripe tomato we've had so far had a large (deer? Fred?) bite out of it. Next year I want to plant more green beans and broccoli. Both were delicious but only enough for a few meals for this family of five.

Despite our own garden producing less that we desired, we've been eating well off the farmers market all summer. Bonnie's been a trooper with eating anything I bring home, and setting a great example for her little brothers. Jack, at age five, is pretty vocal about not "liking" certain foods he doesn't see often. Just trying to remedy that by serving those offending foods more often. I've been buying bananas at Kroger, but the rest of our produce has been all local. I struggle with giving up bananas completely, but recognize that even the organic ones we buy are not part of a sustainable system.

Awesome coupons to our local butcher shop have helped me become reacquainted with the place. The meats are fresh, local, and generally less expensive than what they have at Kroger, and I've made a goal only to buy meats there now. I didn't like shopping there in the past because "one-stop shopping" was more appealing/necessary when the boys were little, and I could barely stomach the sights and smells of the butcher shop. We are eating less meat in general, but if we're going to eat it, better to know where it came from! Or I guess better to know it didn't come from factory farms like the stuff they sell at the supermarket.

Getting our meat and produce elsewhere doesn't leave much shopping left to be done at Kroger, but we're still getting our dairy there. Yogurt making has been incredibly easy and is saving us some money, as well as removing the environmental impact of all those cartons. (Though we'd switched from the individual cartons to one large tub a long time ago.) I've also been purchasing my pasta and flour at the supermarket, because sadly, I've not been really happy with the flour I found at the farmers market. I believe it's the milling though, it's not as finely ground as what I can buy at the store. We hope to purchase our own grinder at some point, and I need to continue experimenting with recipes using the freshly ground flour from the farmers market in the mean time.

I still want to get chickens, but finances keep dictating that other things around the house and property take priority over setting up a chicken coop. My tentative goal now is to have a coop set up in time to get some chickens and/or chicks in the spring.

I think I need to harvest the power of my kids more in all these endeavors.

The Joy of Compost

Last summer, a couple of my favorite cousins mistook my compost bowl for a fresh salad, and started nibbling on the contents. Obviously I teased them mercilessly at the time and have continued a slew of compost jokes since. (Obviously.) An unexpected surprise has been the creation of a compost photo journal after a year of snapping and sending random compost bowl pictures to said cousins.

This shot makes me happy. We love, love guacamole and look, we even had a pomegranate on the same night. Lucky us!

Unfortunately, this one makes me a little sad. See the moldy oranges in there? I misjudged how many my family would eat and/or bought a bag that went bad quickly. Either way, food was wasted, and that's not cool!

Ah, this next one reminds me of two of my favorite things: family and sweet potatoes. I made baked sweet potatoes and sweet potato pie last year for Thanksgiving, and the result was a lot of peelings in my compost bowl.

Finally, here's last night's compost bowl, which is incidentally the one that sparked the idea of this blog entry. For supper, we'd eaten some really yummy red cabbage that I'd purchased at the farmer's market, along with some fresh cucumbers from my garden. I thought the colors were striking.

 What story does your compost tell?

Farmers Market Loot

Collard greens, broccoli, squash, zucchini, artichokes (didn't realize they even grew in Kentucky), cabbage and beets. Not appearing in this picture are two pounds of freshly ground organic whole wheat and one pound of rye flour.

All this food for under $15. All local and almost all organic. YUM.

Boozy Fruit

Jack and Fred helped me purchase 12 pints of fresh strawberries at the farmers market this morning, and this afternoon I made my first batch of boozy fruit! I filled seven pint jars with chopped berries, and topped three with rum and four with brandy. I must say, I think they look pretty yummy. They'll be ready in about three months.

So, I was feeling pretty pleased with my first foray into food preservation, when Bonnie suddenly realized that she and her brothers would likely not eat many of these alcoholic berries, and that the whole thing was somewhat "unfair." One of the things that appealed to me about preserving food this way is that I didn't have to worry about jar sterilization and timed boiling, but Bonnie has a valid point. I still have five pints of strawberries, so I'm going to attempt to make a small batch of (non-alcoholic) strawberry preserves tomorrow, assuming I can figure it out without any specialized canning cookware. I'm keeping my eyes out for a pressure canner, but I think I can do a simple water bath for preserves in my largest stockpot.

In the meantime, I'm still planning on making boozy fruit with other combinations of fruit, spices, and liquor as various fruits come in season.

Farmers Market

This morning, Bonnie and I had our first visit of the year to the farmers market in town. Most of the vendors were selling plants, but we did score some nice looking strawberries for dessert tonight. My persuasive daughter also talked me into some homemade chocolate chip banana bread, which though tasty, is not really a good value. Ah well, we supported the local economy, right?

This afternoon, Kelly is picking up a batch of 75+ canning jars that I scored on Craigslist for $5. Yeah! I want to tiptoe into the whole canning business with jelly and jam, and have been daydreaming about boozy fruit since I saw this link a few weeks ago. Doesn't that sound awesome?