We finished our 12th month, we made it around the year! I’ll list this month’s consumption first and then I’ll discuss the yearly average. Gasoline. 7.4 gallons pp =18 % of the US National Average Yearly average: 24.8% I just saw that I never calculated DH’s miles on public transportation (shuttle). I’ll start adding those …
Category Archives: food (growing, cooking, preserving)
Independence Days – Week 10
Plant. Nothing: our winter beds are full. We did improve the bedding. Harvest. I didn’t plant any Fall vegetables, so I have few plants left in the garden: kale, chard, parsley. The peas and the beans are giving up in the seesaw of warm/cold, but I managed to harvest the last few. Harvested the three …
Independence Days, Week 9
Nothing much of anything happened this week: I’m a bit out of whack with DH gone, and I’ve also started working on the novel again (again!), while it snows. We had our first frost and our first snow, and the garden is in full Winter mode now. Plant. Planted pak choi. That will be it …
Snow
We had our first frost last night and this morning the forecast changed from rain to sleet to snow. There is no plastic on our hoop house yet. I harvested our last beans and carrots of the season, and tiny eggplants, then pulled all the plants. I rushed to transplant more seedlings and covered their …
Independence Days – Week 8
Amie’s drawings of a flower and Amie in the garden Plant. Did that! First planted the hoop house frame, sewed the row covers together for the quick hoops (3 5×10′ covers make 1 10′ x 15′ cover), and ordered more row cover from Johnny’s. Started sprouting fenugreek as an experiment – that count as planting, …
Hoop House Frame is Up, and Winter
Over the long weekend it took us – two adults versus one four-year-old – to set up the hoop house PVC frame. Initially we thought that the simple hoop house might not be high enough on the sides for the taller plants, like tomatoes, that we want to grow in it in summer. So we …
Stagnating and Sprouting
It’s Fall. Is that why I feel I’m stagnating? I’ve plenty to do: still a lot of canning and cooking, some harvesting, and a whole lot of work on next Spring’s garden, not to mention our Fall and Winter garden. But I feel the need to do new things, to keep the skill set growing. …
Independence Days, Week 7
Plant. Due to a miscalculation of the weather on my part – or the weatherman’s part? – I didn’t get to transplant the seedlings and sow more winter veggies today. Tomorrow, I hope. I did get to clean up the garden beds. Moved the pepper plants inside – but I will not call them houseplants, …
This Is What I Grew Them For
Frietjes, Frites, Belgian Fries. The Bintje, a very popular European potato but virtually unknown here in the States, is the best potato for fries. It has a starch solid content of about 20%, so it’s neither waxy nor floury. So what you do to bring out the best in it, is fry it twice. Fry …
Spudtacularly Disappointing
In the balmy 60F weather I dug up the last two potato towers. All in all there were three bins, 4’x4′ each and filled up to about 3′ high. In one I had put 2.5 lbs of Salem, in the other two 2.5 lbs of Bintjes each. I harvested 1 lb and 1.5 oz of …