I finally scored a box of canning peaches! Living in a colder climate I peaches are one thing that I can not grow in my yard but I still enjoy buying a box of canning peaches and preserving them for the winter months! Peaches, I find, are actually on the the easier foods to preserve!

Had a slight mishap the other day when one of the jars broke in the canner. I made the mistake of forgetting to put the rack in the canner before putting in the jars (so the jars were directly on the bottom of the canner). Just a case of too much heat being applied too quickly! Luckily there were no injuries and it was just tomato sauce, if it were something like maple syrup that takes several days to produce I would have been more upset!

There are multiple reasons why a jar make break.

I managed to can 24 quarts and I have another six quarts using the refrigerator method. I processed the refrigerator pickles in a similar manner as the canned ones except without the final step of heating, instead I just put the jars into the refrigerator. Pickles produced via the canning method will last much longer than refrigerator pickles. Canned pickles will easily keep a year or more (depending how well they were processed) whereas refrigerator pickles typically will last only 2-3 months.

Not long ago I had a hog processed and had the butcher keep the lard for me. I had the lard ground as it saves the step of having to cut it up into small pieces! The process of rendering is simply melting the fat so that it separates from the rest of the "impurities" (pieces of meat, bone, or whatever else was inside the hog). Also heating and melting helps remove the water - while technically you can never remove all the water you do want to evaporate as much as possible.

Found this in my garden in the spring and it is called a single tree hook. It is where a horse's harness attaches to a single tree which allows a horse to pull a wagon, plow, or other implement. It also hardly qualifies as coming from an ancient civilization as horses were commonly used, in day to day life, in the early parts of the 20th century! Just serves as a reminder that while today we expect our online orders to be delivered, from the other side of the country, in two days that it was not that long ago that visiting your nearest large city would have taken that long!

Armenian cucumbers are a type of cucumber that is closely related to a muskmelon. It is a long slender fruit (having them a yard/meter long is quite common) although like most fruits/veggies they taste better if picked earlier. Not to mention myself and two boys can't eat something a yard long! On Thursday evening I did not notice a single plant with fruit on it, a few days later (Monday) I found several growing with one of them being a yard long! Needless to say I was quite excited! I cut up the smaller one for lunch!

Although we started eating them straight out of the gardens earlier this week I did my first major harvest this evening after work! Time to start snapping and break out the vacuum sealer!

An advantage of growing potatoes in straw/hay is that you can harvest them easily without disrupting the entire plant. Quite a bit of summer left so I can leave the rest of them in the hay until later!

There is a lot you can do with zucchini but one of my favorite ways is to eat it battered!

For this recipe you will need eggs, seasoning salt, olive oil (other cooking oils will work), and flour (I used my Gluten Free Flour Blend but back when gluten was still an option I used regular wheat flour.

I used 1/2 quart jars, made some brine with water, vinegar, salt, and sugar. Through in two cloves of garlic and some dill!

I will know in a week or so how they taste!

8 cups water
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup + 1 Tbsp pickling salt
6 cups distilled white Vinegar (5% acidity)

Put in hot water bath for 15 minutes.

If you don't love play dough you don't know how to love!

Here is my recipe for gluten free play dough. While play dough is not something that should be eaten it can still be be a concern for kids with celiacs as a single "crumb" of gluten can be a concern.

3 cups flour (see for the flour blend I use)
1/3 cup salt
1/4 cup oil
1 1/4 cups hot water
If your blend does not already have xanthan gum then add 1.5 teaspoons

Time for me to figure out how to make pickles, I have never done that before so this will be a new adventure!

I was able to get the bales for next years bale gardens!

This morning my son asked why some plants, like trees, are so tall while other plants are so small. I explained to him nature’s balance and related it to the Three Sisters Gardening that I do. How both the popcorn and pumpkins consume nitrogen from the ground while beans put it back in. How the beans also climb up the corn plant to reach the sun. The pumpkin vines and leaves will shade the ground which both retains moisture and shades out the weeds. It is a technique long used by Native Americas long before my ancestors arrived on this continent.

We were able to have our first servings of cauliflower!

Three and a half years ago I started to experiment with making my own gluten free flour. Obviously you can go down to any large grocery store and buy it but I just prefer to experiment and to be able to do things on my own.

I tried several different blends that I found online and then made my own tweaks. What I have learned/discovered is that no one flour or starch will allow you to bake food that approximates wheat flour but creating a blend can get you close.

I have been using the following.

This is the garden where I grow my large pumpkins! With the spring's cool soil it took a bit longer for the pumpkins to emerge but they came up and are doing very well. In a couple weeks there will be no need to weed as the vines will form a living mulch that shades out any weeds that try to grow. The pop corn and beans (can't see the beans in this picture) are now tall enough that they will be able to see the sun!

The plants are super healthy when many flowers! The beans definitely loved the cattle panel I put up for them to crawl up! Soon, very soon, I will be able to eat them!

I just went out and harvested some and there are plenty more on the way!

A garden tended
Is a life being rebuilt
With hope now restored