The Big "Iron Out"

For the past week or so, a junk dealer has come out to the farm to get scrap iron and old vehicles and machinery that has been here for years.  Some of this stuff has been here since the late 60's.  It was definitely time to clean the place up.   Every guy in the neighborhood needs a "scrap iron pile", but hubby's pile was just a little too big!  I think all the useable parts had already been taken out of the cars and farm machinery and all that was left was just the body.  All the farms around here probably need a good iron out cleaning, so now I'm the envy of all the ladies in the neighborhood, as they have also been after their husbands to clean things up!  It must be a "guy thing" to keep piles of farm stuff and iron and cars out in the 'back 40' !  Every guy around these parts does his own welding and repair, but there comes a time when enough is enough.   (Of course, we won't mention that the ladies in the neighborhood have their own "iron pile" of cabinets full of quilting material and fabric for that future project, many sets of dishes for that special occasion, and clothes by the heaps in boxes for when we lose weight, ya know?) Ha!  Sometimes human nature is strange......

A 1954 White Co truck (used to be Harold's Dad's).  This one was actually in a neighbor's scrapyard!  I guess the guys around here share scrapyards??

One of many trucks of scrap

Ancient machinery!

The scrap dealer brought his tractor to load stuff.

One of the last loads.

 

The $12 Potato Lesson

I've been canning potatoes for years and never have any problems.  I have canned both red ones and white ones.  Canned potatoes are a good convenience for me in the pantry, as they cook up quickly for breakfast potatoes, and you can shred them up easily for hash browns.   So, last week I bought 10 pounds of beautiful looking white potatoes at the farm market from another vendor.   They were firm, and sized right.  I thought:  Ooh!  These will be great for canned potatoes!  WRONG!!  Apparently they were of a dry, baking variety.  I usually can up waxy-type varieties of potatoes, like Red Nordlands or White Kennebecs.  Not sure what these were, but they were obviously for baking or making mashed potatoes, or frying - but NOT canning!  They had a lot of starch in them, and when they came out of the canner, the potatoes became a gelatinous mush!  See the photo below, showing a jar of red potatoes canned, and a couple jars of the wrong kind to can!

A little research on the internet told me that only waxy type potatoes will be successful for canning, as they have a lower starch content and hold up well during the canning process.   I guess the potatoes I bought were the kind for baking, and were of a dry type, and during the heat of the canning process, the starch in the potato mixes with the salted water and become a gelatinous mixture.   They also soaked up every drop of water in the jar and were completely inedible.
So - all you ladies out there who like to do canning - don't buy anything other than red potatoes for canning!    I wasted $6 for potatoes, $3 for lids and at least $3 worth of electricity to learn this lesson.   Too bad, too, because those potatoes I bought would probably have made some lovely mashed potatoes.  Live and learn, ya know?

A Good Salad Dressing Recipe

I thought I'd share with you a favorite and easy to make salad dressing recipe that is really good on coleslaw or salads.   A full recipe makes a lot, but it keeps well in a jar in the fridge.  I usually make just half a recipe, which seems to be plenty for a few days of salads.  It's not exactly low cal, but a little goes a long way.  It is especially good on cabbage or pasta salads, but I also think it's great on spinach salads.  My garden produced a lot of spinach this year, so I've been eating this on spinach salads for the past few days.

Sweet Sour Onion Dressing

2/3 c. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 small onion, cut up (or half a medium onion, use your judgement and taste)
1/3 c. vinegar (red or white, but I prefer white)
1 c. salad oil (I like to use Crisco oil)
1 T. celery seed
1 tsp. dry mustard powder (optional, sometimes I don't use this)

Put all ingredients in a blender and whirl away for a minute.   Store in a glass jar.  When you want to use it, just shake it up.

A Quick Way To Dry Herbs

Being the avid gardener that I am, I also grow my own herbs:  basil, oregano, parsley, dill, cilantro, chamomile, peppermint and lemon balm.  I discovered an easy way to dry herbs using the microwave.

First, pick the fresh herbs in the morning, shortly after the dew dries.   Then I wash any sprigs that need it, and let the herbs dry on a kitchen towel for a couple days in my warm kitchen.

A towel full of parsley ready to dry. 

Then put a small amount on a paper towel:

Next, cover with another paper towel, and put the whole "package" into the microwave for 1 minute. 

After a minute, the bottom towel will be a little wet, and the top towel not so much wet.  Put the herbs on a fresh paper towel, cover, and microwave for another minute.  Keep doing this until the herbs are dry enough to crumble with your fingers.  For basil, you might have to do 5 or 6 minutes in the microwave, one minute at a time.   As you dry the herbs, you can often re-use the paper towels, as they won't be as wet.  When the herbs are dry, crumble them (discarding the stems) onto wax paper and then funnel the dried herbs into jars.   They will keep nicely for a year in a cool dry place (NOT in a sunny spot next to the stove!). 

Parsley dries quickly in just a few minutes.  Dill dries very quickly, too.  Other herbs might need a few more minutes.  Always do one minute at a time and change towels (or re-use the drier ones).   This is quicker than using a dehydrator, which needs an overnight time.  I have tried drying herbs in an oven at 200 degrees, but that uses more electricity and takes longer than just a few minutes.  If you like to grow things, try growing your own herbs and drying them this way!

Basil, parsley and oregano

August Already??

Wow - the summer is going by so quickly!  Can it really be August now?  One more month of summer and we are back into the "winter is coming" mode.  Ugh.
The garden is recovering nicely after the torrential rains of June, and we are having a very successful farm Market.   Yesterday we sold about 35 pounds of green beans, about half the honey we had left, all my breads, and a great many heads of romaine and leaf lettuce.  Harold built a nifty little cart to attach behind my riding mower so I can drive up to the garden and load 'er up with produce and then drive back home to the back door.  Sure beats lugging buckets of heavy produce by hand!  I'm getting too old for that!  Anyway, check it out.  Seems like my curious cats are checking it out, too!

Harold used some more of that "scrap iron" to build a great veggie cart that I pull with my lawn mower!

Speaking of market, this was our set up yesterday.  We are allotted an 8 x 10 space.  Market is every Thursday afternoon until freeze up in October.

Not sure what Harold is doing.  The cooler has gallon bags of leaf lettuce keeping cool.  Other lettuces are standing in plastic tubs of cold water, as well as the smaller tubs of cilantro and basil. 

Remember that Ferris wheel planter that Harold made for me?   The flowers are so pretty in it now:

Take a look at our beehives - lots of honey supers are on!  We anticipate a great honey year.  The bees are working like crazy now.

Another month to go and we will probably put on a couple more layers of honey supers.

Unfortunately, our grapes got a fungus disease.  Too much rain, too much humidity.  We might have prevented this with an application of a fungal spray, but we didn't get it in time.  With this disease, the grapes turn brown and shrivel up.  We will have NO grapes this year.  sigh. 

My poor dying grapes. 

Oh well, you can't win them all. 

Canning Peaches Today!

Today (on the hottest day of the year, of course!) I am canning peaches.   The peaches were a little early this year, as they are usually ready by the 31st.   This year I am canning them myself because my Mom isn't coming up here for the summer to help me with canning.   She is 92 now and the travel back and forth from Indiana to Minnesota is just a little too much for her.  Otherwise this has always been her favorite canning to do, and she has been helping me for the past 8 summers.   I ripened the peaches by the "damask linen method" (See my post from July 2013 under older posts)
     Canning peaches is easy and fun.  Here are the steps in photos to show the process:

First the ripened peaches are washed and de-stemmed.

While the jars are sterilizing in the big pot, I boil water to scald the peaches. 

The peaches are plunged into boiling water for 30-40 seconds to make the skins peel easier. 

Here I am peeling the peaches and putting them into water and lemon juice to keep fresh.

The peeled and sliced peaches are ready to go into the hot jars.

The finished product!  They all sealed, too.

This year I bought 4 boxes of peaches to can up.   You get about 8 or 9 jars to the box.  I had about 9 jars left from last year.  I always buy Mrs. Smittcamp's canning Peaches from the San Joachim Valley of California.  The supermarkets around here stock huge piles of boxes of these peaches (sometimes two shipments).  Just about everyone up here in these parts does canning - we're an "old-timey" bunch of folks here!  In the middle of winter when it's 30 below and the snow is deep, those peaches taste SO good!  You pretty much have to eat them as is, though, or with ice cream or whipped cream or in combination with other fruits.   I have tried making cobblers and pies with canned peaches and it doesn't work so well.  It is acceptable, but 'not like fresh'.  But canned peaches eaten as is, are wonderful.   I encourage you to try canning peaches.  You won't regret it.
     Last fall my husband bought me a stainless steel canner that he got at a garage sale for $5.  Because I can so many jars of various produce in a season (hundreds), I go through those black and white speckled canners like nothing.   They don't last more than a season and they are already burnt through on the bottom.   Those pots have a ridged bottom that doesn't seat well on an electric burner (sure wish I had a gas stove!).  Only about half of the pot really gets hot and the other parts are a waste of energy.   But this stainless steel canner has  a flat bottom and heats beautifully.   It should last me for many years.  Also stainless steel cleans easily and doesn't rust.  Finally after all these years of canning, I have a decent canning pot!
     I have always enjoyed canning.  Somehow it seems like getting back to homemaking roots.  My Mom and grandmothers did a lot of canning over the years.  Mom used to tell me that she admired the perfect peaches I am able to buy at the store because back in the 50's she bought peaches by the bushel at the farmer's market that came from Michigan, and they weren't always perfect and she would often have to cut out bruised parts and soft spots.  I found this photo on the internet of some unknown ladies admiring canning jars in the basement.   You can just see the pride on that lady's face as she is showing off her rows of hard work.   You just know her family was going to eat well that winter!  I believe this photo is from the 1940's.  Somehow I feel very connected to those ladies of the past.................

Still Being Blessed

Those of us who live in Minnesota KNOW how much rain we've had lately!  Pretty much the whole month of June and the early part of July now has been nothing but rain!  We are completely soaked.  In some parts of the state, there is even flooding.  I walked around today and shot some photos of the garden damage sustained this weekend.   We had "the worst storm yet" this past Saturday.  It kept everyone up in the wee hours of the morning, wondering if we were having a tornado.   The next day we woke up to this in my garden:

The torrential rains washed deep ruts in newly planted areas.

Poor little squash plant barely survived!

 

 

These ruts are about 8 inches deep.

Amazingly things are growing, though!  The rest of the garden seems to be OK, and our grapes are loving the warm, wet conditions.

The rest of the garden is doing as well as can be expected.

Check out these gorgeous grape clusters growing!  We'll have plenty of grapes!

Look what I found growing in the drainage ditch!  This year's perfect Christmas tree!

The grass and yard is basically a swamp, though.  Walking across the yard, everything "squishes" because of these conditions:

Would you believe more rain is expected today and tomorrow?  The yard is already a swamp!

The bees are doing well, too.  The wildflowers are nice and 'juicy' this summer with plenty of nectar,  and the bees are surviving nicely.   Here is another one of their favorite foods:  wild mustard.

Butterflies like wild mustard, too.

One of our two bee yards.  One hive has 2 honey supers already!  We have 11 hives.

After the fierce storm and high winds we got this Saturday, I thought my petunias were a goner.........but they look beautiful!   How they managed to survive the 50-60 mph plus winds is beyond me!

How did these petunias survive the storm?  What a wonderful blessing!

And finally, here's a little dose of "cute" - one of our tom cats in cooling off by the porch.  He doesn't have a name.  Can you think of one?  I've been calling him "Whitey" for obvious reasons and also because I can't think of any good names. 

What would be a good name for this tom cat?

All in all we feel very blessed.  Some things are not doing well (potato bugs have eaten up our potatoes and I sprayed with some bee-friendly insecticide which did nothing, and we have a skunk eating our hens' eggs), but all things considered it "could be worse" to quote a typical Minnesota saying!  We have not flooded, we have not lost our home, and the Lord has blessed us with plenty.   We'll still have lots of crops, lots of honey, lots of fruit, and life goes on here at Honey B Farm.

Show And Tell Time

Please allow me to bore you with some photos of a few new things around here!  A while back, if you recall, I showed you my new "lawn mowing hat" and I had a request to show a photo of me wearing it on my new mower.  So here it is:

My lovely new lawn mowing hat - very elegant, eh?

Then, check this out:  My welder husband took some old metal and a couple antique hay rake wheels  and made this great "Ferris Wheel" for plants!   It actually turns, too!  Bear in mind, I DO have to paint it with some rustoleum paint and then a coat of outdoor white enamel paint to make this look real cute.  But I just wanted to show you how it looks anyway.   I just planted the petunias in those planters that I started from seed, so they need a chance to grow.   I planted a cascading type petunia called "double ruffle" (deep maroon color) and some called "morning glory red" along with some plain pink ones.  Once they get to growing this will be really pretty, I think!   I guess I can't complain now about hubby's scrap iron pile  - especially when he makes pretty things for me out of it!  This planter is about 5 feet tall and about 3 feet wide and weighs about 300 lbs.  I am going to eventually put some crushed rocks underneath so weeds won't grow.   The hummingbirds will love this flower ferris wheel.

The turn-able flower Ferris Wheel my husband made.

Another view.  I will eventually move it a little bit to the right after I paint it.

Another close-up.

Then, finally, check out this great new wing backed chair I bought for $12 on a northern Minnesota online auction site.  (do-Bid).   This chair is practically new and larger than the photo shows.  I will put it in the living room since I now have more room in there, since we gave up our TV .  We discovered we can watch everything we like to watch on the internet, live, so why pay for TV?   We are not movie watchers and we don't care for most of the shows on now.   I will get more use out of a reading chair in the living room by the window than a TV set.   I love colorful furniture and blue is a hard color to find these days.  It seems that every furniture store only carries earth tones of brown, black and beige.   Those colors seem so dull to me!  Give me color any day!  And I have always loved wing chairs.

Think I got a good deal for $12?

OK - I think I've bored you all enough!  We have had so much rain that the gardens are in terrible need of weeding - but - more rain is predicted!  Uff da........