Garlic Harvest Day

Today I harvested all the garlic from my high tunnel greenhouse.  It was a very hot day and especially hot in the greenhouse.   By the time I was finished I was dripping wet!   But after a couple weeks of drying, we will be able to sell quite a bit of the garlic at our market booth.   Fresh garlic sells extremely well.  If I had a half acre of garlic planted, I could still sell it.  Much of the garlic that is found in supermarkets comes from China, and I certainly would not want to eat that!   It's anyone's guess what Chinese garlic is grown in and what is used to water it.   I am glad that the harvest of garlic coordinates nicely with the advent of my pickling cucumbers!  This weekend I will be making Polish dill pickles with my fresh garlic and fresh dill from the garden.

Here I am digging out the garlic bulbs.  You can't just pull the bulbs - they must be dug.  The garlic stems are easily broken from the bulb.

I pull away excess dirt from the bulb.   This is a dirty job, but my gardener's soap takes care of filthy hands!  My favorite soap for cleaning dirty garden hands is from Perfectly Posh called a "snarky bar".  This is a gritty soap with sugar crystals in it instead of pumice.   It doesn't clog the sink with pumice, and leaves hands nice and smooth and clean. 

I put the bulbs in a large bucket until I can take them inside and dry them on the special garlic rack we have.

By the time garlic is ready to harvest, there are lots of weeds in the patch.  I never disturb these weeds about a month before harvest so as not to accidentally pull up a garlic bulb that isn't ready yet.

There are lots of different sizes to the bulbs.  I plant both large (elephant) garlic, and commercial sized garlic.   When the bulbs are dry and ready to sell, I cut off the dry foliage, and take a soft old toothbrush to brush off dirt from the roots.   Then I trim the roots to about 1/4 inch. 

I ended up with 3 buckets full of bulbs, plus about 8 bulbs extra to use right away for pickles.

This is called a garlic scape.  It appears as a sort of blossom coming from the stem of garlic that is almost mature.   Usually these are snipped off to encourage larger bulb growth.  There were a couple that I missed.  Some cooks use these scapes in cooking, as they do taste like garlic, but not quite as tangy.   I have tried them in cooking, but did not care for the mild taste or texture of them.   I have heard of some cooks pickling them to use in various recipes.  To my taste, scapes taste almost "grassy" instead of like real garlic.

It always amazes me that I plant garlic bulbs in the high tunnel in late October and they make it through the winter, and come up in the spring to be harvested in July.   We had a very long and very cold winter and I didn't think anything would survive in the high tunnel.   This winter damaged so many of the fruit trees around here.   Our apple tree has apples, but the tree looks sick, and the leaves are small and curled.   Everyone's trees look like that.   The chokecherry trees also took a big hit this year.    So that's why I am happy that the garlic survived the long tough winter.   It must be hardy stuff!

Canning Season 2019 Begins Today With Cherries

Yesterday Harold and I picked cherries at a friend's farm.  They have many cherry trees and they graciously allow us to pick what we want.  We also got some small cherry trees from them to plant in our own yard, which we did this spring.  Hopefully someday we will have our own cherries to pick (hopefully in my lifetime!).  Meanwhile today I worked with those cherries and began the canning season by canning up 13 jars of my favorite ice cream topping.   The rest of the cherries will be used for a Cherry Crisp for today's lunch dessert and I will freeze plenty for future use in sauces for angel food cake and sponge cake and future crisps. 
     After many years of canning I finally invested in a sturdy, thick bottom, stainless steel canning pot.   Those black and white speckled ones with the corrugated bottom that they usually sell in the stores for canning don't work well on an electric stove, and I usually burn out the bottoms of them in one canning season.   I got tired of always buying new canning pots, so when I found stainless steel ones I was thrilled.   I bought two of them.   I also bought a special canning coil for my electric stove, as I was tired of burning out those thin coils that come with today's electric stoves.   It sits up higher than most coils, and can take the extra weight of a jar-filled canning pot.

The sturdy, thick bottomed, flat bottomed stainless steel canning pot I invested in.  This one has been through 2 years of use already with no signs of wear.  It sits on an extra heavy electric canning coil on the stove that I also bought for canning purposes.  This pot also has a clear lid, so you can easily see what the water and jars are doing during the boiling process.

One of the buckets of cherries we picked yesterday.   Aren't they gorgeous?

After following my recipe for cherry ice cream topping, the cherries look like this.

I got 13 jelly jars of topping from a double recipe!  That's enough for one a month, plus one to spare!

Here is a jar from last year, looking pretty alongside some of my calendula flowers in a bud vase.

Next up on the canning schedule is peaches.   Next week the boxes of canning peaches - Mrs. Smittcamp's Canning Peaches - will be arriving at my local grocery store.  I'll can up 3 or 4 boxes of those.    After that, it will be green beans.  
     If you are interested in the recipe for making cherry ice cream topping, I wrote a blog post about this in July of 2016 called Cherry Time.  You can find it in the blog archives. 

Honeybee Heaven

Two years ago we planted two acres of sweet clover for our bees.  It takes two years for this kind of clover to grow.   Our hard efforts paid off, as just about every bee we have has been to the clover field!  The sweet clover field is just buzzing with bees!   The plot of land is humming like a well oiled machine.   We also planted some crimson clover in there, too, and it is up and growing, but the bees prefer the sweet clover.  Clover makes the very best honey, so we anticipate an excellent tasting honey crop this year.  Bees humming in a sweet clover field is music to a beekeeper's ears! Do I also dare say it is the sound of "honey money"?  Besides the sweet clover, the bees are going for natural plantings now, too.  There are birdsfoot trefoil, dandelions, wild daisies, wild mustard and garden blossoms.  It is a regular smorgasbord for them.   Very soon there will be basswood blossoms and the bees really love that, too.
     Here are some photos of our clover field and some happy bees:

Two acres of sweet clover.   Our bees go crazy for this!

A close up of the sweet clover.  Most of it is about 4 feet high.

One of our bees working the clover blossoms.

Here are TWO bees working a clover blossom!

This is crimson clover.  When the bees are done with the sweet clover they will work on this type of clover.

Besides the clover, there is birdsfoot trefoil for the bees. This is the path going to the pasture where we have the sweet clover planted.  The whole path is lined with trefoil flowers.   This flower is their second favorite plant, and makes excellent honey.

Meanwhile, back at the hives, the bees are lined up at the hive entrance waiting to unload the nectar into the hive.  Note that we have a live trap set to catch skunks.  We've had problems with them lately eating our bees.