Yum! Tonight's supper

Since we made chokecherry syrup this afternoon, we had homemade waffles with chokecherry syrup for tonight's supper!  Delicious!!

Making Chokecherry Syrup

Today I made several batches of chokecherry syrup.   The Good Lord gives us beautiful chokecherries to use, and this was a pretty good year for them.   We picked some ourselves, and a dear friend also gave us a couple of buckets of chokecherries, so we had plenty to work with.  We like this syrup over pancakes or waffles or French toast or ice cream.   The native Ojibwe here on the reservation like the syrup as a dip for Indian Fry Bread, which is really good.
     There are lots of methods and recipes out there, but this is the way I make it.   For every 4 1/2 cups of extracted juice, add 6 1/2 cups of sugar and 3 T. of lemon juice.  Yes, I know, it seems like a lot of sugar, but this IS syrup you know, and the chokecherries are really tart!   Everything is brought to a boil, then boiled for 2 minutes at a full rolling boil, then de-foamed, then put into jars and processed in a water bath for 10 minutes.  To extract the juice, simply cover washed chokecherries with water to barely cover and simmer for about 30 minutes.  From time to time mash then gently with a potato masher, but be gentle.  The seeds contain an arsenic compound if cracked and you don't want that!  It's pretty hard to actually crack the pits, though, so I wouldn't worry too much.  Then strain through either several layers of cheesecloth or a jelly bag.  I use a 600 micron mesh filter first, then a jelly bag.

Beautiful dark chokecherries.   The best syrup and jelly is made with really ripe, dark fruit. 

The juice and sugar is boiled and brought to a full rolling boil for 2 minutes while stirring constantly.

Take the pan off the heat, allow to cool for a few minutes for the foam to come to the top, and skim off this foam, which is basically minerals in the solution.  If you want really nice clear syrup, you must do this.

The hot syrup is ladled into hot jars. 

A jar of beautiful finished syrup!

At this time of year, my kitchen is usually a disaster with canning jars and pots and equipment all over the place.   I truly enjoy canning and preserving and putting up the bounty of our garden and what God provides in nature.  It is a lot of work to grow and process your own food, but at least I know what's in it!  Everything we eat is organic because we cannot use sprays of any kind because of our bees.  Our bees are part of our livelihood, and we certainly don't want to kill them by using chemical sprays around here.   During August and September I am so busy in the kitchen processing veggies and fruits and also making jams and jellies and syrups.   Next on the agenda of canning this week, is to do potatoes, and make chokecherry jelly and wild plum jelly, and some tiny dill pickles.    I also need to put lots of peas in the freezer.

Good thing I have a huge kitchen to hold all the jars and equipment!

Of course, after all the mess in my kitchen from canning, then we begin honey extraction - and that's a real mess!  In about a month, we will be extracting honey for the year and will have our annual "honey party".  We invite friends and neighbors and any interested folks to come and watch and help and visit and help themselves to a buffet which I always provide.   We sometimes have about 20 people in the kitchen, plus all the bee boxes, and there is still plenty of room.   This year I plan to have a crock pot full of a hamburger/baked bean hot dish, several salads, a crock pot of cheesy potatoes, some fruit, and a couple cakes.  We expect some students and a teacher from the tribal college to come out this year, too, as they have expressed an interest in learning about bees.  Next month my kitchen will take a beating, but isn't that what a working country kitchen is for, anyway??

Look At the Greenhouse Now!

It continually amazes me how much things grow in the greenhouse!  The difference between what's inside the greenhouse and what's outside in the regular garden is like night and day.   It's a jungle in there now!  Even my regular tomato plants are about 9 feet tall.  and even though I have given them massive trimmings, they are still wide and bushy.   Here is a photo I took just about an hour ago:

The ceiling in the greenhouse is about 10 1/2 feet high, and as you can see, the tomato plants are just about that height.   We have to stand on a ladder to tie them up to the ceiling!

Here's another view of how thick they are.

And not only tomatoes are growing like crazy - check out this row of lima beans.   They are growing out of the box and spilling into the walkway.   Every one of the blossoms is growing a lima bean.  

This is half of the limas, the other half is on the other side, even bigger.

It seems like just about everything grows in the greenhouse, even stuff I didn't plant!  I had some leftover soil in a tray of petunia flowers.  I threw the soil in the corner and forgot about it.  The other day I saw that what I thought was a weed growing around the tools stored in the corner, was actually a little petunia plant! 

Cute little flower that grew from tossed out soil.

Here's a view from the back of the greenhouse.   You can hardly see the door anymore!  If you look closely by the front corner near the doorway, you can see the little petunia growing among the garden tools.

Not only are the tomatoes tall, but the pepper plants are about 4 feet high, and full of salsa peppers.

Out in the regular garden, things don't grow quite as large.  In the natural garden, the tomatoes are only 3 feet high.   What a difference a protected environment makes!

The garden is doing well, but nothing is growing as tall as in the greenhouse!  These tomatoes are about 1/3 the height of the ones in the greenhouse.

Well, so much for the greenhouse.   The bees are doing well, too.   But we have a problem with the bees drinking up all of the cat's water.   Even though we give the bees their own water, they prefer to drink out of the cat dish.   And even if we MOVE the cat's water elsewhere, the bees come back to it.   At first this scared the cats, having to work around the bees all the time, and I was hesitant to pour more water in the cat's dish because the bees would fly up in my face.    But they didn't bite, and they don't bite the cats, so I guess everyone has to "share" the water!  I think the bees really like the shallow dish.

Of course, when I walked up to take a photo of the bees on the water dish, there were about 50 bees all lined up at the edges of the pan.   But they didn't want to be photographed, I guess!  Only 6  die-hard bees stayed for the picture!  At any given time they are lined up all around the dish and the cats have to drink right beside them.

Freezing Cabbage

Do you ever freeze cabbage?  If not, you should try it!  It is so easy, and handy to have on hand.  When you want to make a pot of vegetable soup or some other soup with cabbage in it, you can take whatever amount you want out of the bag and add it the last 10 minutes or so of the soup cooking.  I try to have about 10 quart bags on hand for winter soup making.  That's enough cabbage for at least 20 pots of soup, or maybe more depending on how many other things you have in the soup.   Summertime cabbage fresh from the garden or the farmer's market is so much better than the stuff you can buy in the stores during the winter.   Here's how to do it:

First cut up cabbage into quarters, then shreds.  If the cabbage is larger, cut the quarters in half to shred.

Throw away the core and any hard or big pieces you don't like.

Blanch the shredded cabbage for 1 1/2 minutes in boiling water in a colander.

Cool the blanched cabbage in ice water for about 15 minutes.

Drain the cabbage well, and put into freezer bags.   Figure on about one pound of shredded cabbage per quart bag.  The cabbage I used here was about a 3 lb cabbage.

This winter, when you make a pot of homemade vegetable soup you'll be glad you have some shredded cabbage to throw in!

My Big Adventure!!

Today I got to go for a ride in my husband's boss's plane!  Poul Sorenson has his own Cessna plane and this spring he got his pilot's license.  Yesterday he took Harold for a ride, and today it was my turn.  I have never been in a small plane like this, and it has been at least 25 years since I have flown in any commercial planes.   So this was a very exciting afternoon for me!   Poul took me over my house so I could get a nice photo of it, and we flew around some of the lakes here and around White Earth.   It was a sunny, but hot day here, and a little warm in the plane, but I really enjoyed the trip!  I would like to go again, but in the fall when the tree colors are pretty.  That would be wonderful to see all the fall colors from that high up!

Here is the plane I rode in.

A view of the inside.

Ready to take off .......then I had to put on safety belt and head set.

One of the many views of farm land around here.

Here is my house, far away and a general view of our 100 acres.

A closer view of the house and yard, and some of our area.  You can see my gardens, and the greenhouse, which looks tiny from 1200 feet up!  The lake in the background is what we call Two Squaw Lake.  Not quite half of it is on our property.

Another beautiful view!

Back on the ground - and I survived!

All in all, this was an afternoon I won't soon forget.  Thank you, Mr. Sorenson for treating Harold and I to some exciting adventure this summer!

Canning Season Begins Again!

Today I am canning peaches.  This is the first canning I have done this year.  I was a little worried that there would be no peaches this year, as the ones I like to buy (Mrs. Smittcamp's canning peaches from Cutler CA, Wawona Packing Co) come from the part of California where I thought they have had drought.  But apparently it didn't bother the peach growers there, as the peaches are just as lovely as ever and the price was the same as it has been for the past 2 years.   I always can up Faye Elberta peaches and they are always consistently good. 

The first canning of the 2015 season!

I've had a couple articles in the past on this blog regarding peaches.  If you are interested, see the link below for instructions on how to can up the peaches.
http://www.honeybfarm.blogspot.com/2014_07_01_archive.html

If you need to remember how to ripen peaches perfectly, see the link below.  I learned this method from a peach grower and it has worked perfectly for me for the past 6 or 7 years.
http://www.honeybfarm.blogspot.com/2013_07_01_archive.html

Hopefully these links will work, otherwise search for these dates of articles in Older Posts.

Messy Little Darlings

Every year we get barn swallows building a nest under the unfinished eaves of the porch.   They are beneficial birds, but they sure are messy!  They try to build nests over all the windows, too, but I always discourage that by hosing down their partly built nests.   I let them go under the eaves, though.   After all, they DO have a purpose - they are marvelous mosquito eaters!  They also do a good job cutting down the fly population.   So I have to let them live with us.  Just not over my dining room window!  Here's a close up of one of the nests and the young:

Three young barn swallows almost ready to leave the nest

Speaking of wildlife, I finally saw the bear that made the prints in our yard.  The other evening we had to burn some bee hive boxes because one of the hives had a very contagious bee disease.   The next morning we saw a huge bear sniffing around the burn pit right in the back yard.   I couldn't grab my camera in time for a photo, and by the time I opened the door, he looked at me and ran off.    There was a little honey left in the ashes, so I guess he was after that.  oh boy, yum, yum!  Ash flavored honey.

It's A Monster!

Here is a photo taken this morning of my cherry tomato plant.  It is 6 feet tall!  Never in my life have I had a cherry tomato plant grow to this size!  Greenhouses are amazing, eh?  It's like a jungle in there.   We have 2 more months of summer, so I am wondering what these tomato plants will look like by the end of August!  We shall see.   The rest of the tomato plants are at least 4 feet tall.   All of the plants have blooms and tomatoes growing, so pretty soon I'll have tomatoes to eat.

Look at this giant cherry tomato plant.  It's a variety called Chadwick Cherry. 

Here is a shot of the other tomatoes right now.

I grow indeterminate tomatoes.   That means they can grow to whatever size they want.  Determinate tomatoes only grow to a certain size and quit.  But since I only grow heirloom or open pollinated tomatoes, most of them are indeterminate types.   I try not to grow hybrid stuff because you cannot save the seeds from them.   Since my goal is to produce a garden for as little as possible cash-wise, I am very much into seed saving.
     So far I'm on my second crop on many things in the greenhouse.   The plants in the regular garden are only just beginning to grow.