Harvesting, processing, drying, fermenting, pickling and eating the bounty 2013!

Our apologies for not keeping the blog too active this summer.  we realise as the homestead transforms itself ever more into a functioning farm, and as the number of people who visit us during the summer increases, our time spent on the computer decreases.  Which is a good thing :) and there will be plenty of time to catch up and retell our season's stories during the colder days. 

Like today :) this morning is a beautiful but crisp sunny September morning, with the thermometer indicating barely 40F (4C), so I am inside with my hot chocolate, and while Leo takes his usual morning nap, I will start catching up.

First things first I want to send some big hugs to our friends who came to visit the homestead this summer, and were such a help in keeping on top of everything!  Chantale :) Zane :) Chloé and Nat :) thank you so much for taking the time to come see us even with the long distances that separate us, and for sharing some great meals, and hard work. We miss you and will think of you as we open every jar of preserved food this winter :)

Garlic, Cukes, Basil, Tomatoes and Rhubarb!

Leo and his best friend Chantale, cleaning beets and carrots!

Building the wood shed lean-to

mmmm, vegetable paella

This season had started very slowly, with all the rain and cold weather we received in June, but we managed to still have a pretty good harvest, considering that we have increased the size and diversity of our gardens six fold this year.

HARVESTING:

We regularly take a stroll into the garden for our daily harvest.  Leo is carrying the cherry tomatoes back to the house, in his hands and his belly!

The harvests started with field strawberries, regular strawberries, raspberries, kale, lettuce, radishes, cukes, zuchinnis and eggplants, and then went in full force with basil, chives, herbs of all sorts like lemon verbena, chamomille, red clover and mint, tomatoes, garlic, potatoes, celery, cabbage, oats, ground cherries, blueberries, onions, peppers, carrots, leeks, and winter squashes. And now we are getting into the end: we still have lots of production, the weather has been reasonable so eggplants, peppers, carrots, celery and cabbage are still growing, but we are finally able to start harvesting horse radish and dry beans!  I regret not growing more varieties of beans this year, as Alex and I are realizing that Leo LOVES beans! Oh well, next year.  We do have hundreds of jars of sauces, tomatoes, pickles, pesto, etc. already stored in our cupboards, but the tomatoes and all curcubits have been pulled out by now, as they were infested with septoria and cuke mosaic virus.  We are not complaining, everything else is surviving well.  The only tomatoes which are still growing are the ones in the greenhouse and the cherries, which I actually planted way later in the summer.

We added hay down in July, to suppress the weeds, next time we will do it WAY earlier, it really works, saves so much time and water and protects the plants from soil born illnesses!

The Schimmeig tomato that we are growing for a local seed company is growing strong and green

PROCESSING:

All this food needs to be dealt with in some way.  We grew oats, as a small test field, partially for us and partially to have local grains for our chickens.  Well once the oat kernel is no longer milky, the field needs to be scythed, and the kernels need to be separated from the shaft.  Lenghty process if you don't have access to special threshing equipment.  Chantale and I (mostly her!) ended up spending quite a few hours removing the kernels by hand from the straw (which smelt so good!), and when we ran out of time for this project, we gave the rest to the chickens, kernels straw and all, they had a party!  And it made some good scratch area for a while.  The kernels that were separated for us will one day this winter be turned into oatmeal, ummmm I can't wait to try them! 

 These are the tomato seeds I am growing for a local seed company this year, it is quite a lengthy process from start to finish.  Grow the tomato, when ripe harvest, cut tomato in two, separate the seeds from the flesh (at this point they are in their protective gel sacs), ferment the seeds and gel for one to three days, until the surface of the mixture becomes all white, then rinse so that you remove everything but the seeds, then dry as quickly as possible so that they don't germinate.  Redo this as often as your tomatoes become ripe!

DRYING:

We also have been doing a lot of drying, to perserve some of the harvest, like pears and apples, zucchinis and crookneck squashes, kale chips (I even did Ketchup Kale Chips, yum! a Canadian twist :))

Drying the summer squash for later use in soups and stews

EATING:

And finally eating :)

We have been eating a lot of the bounty right away, fresh from the garden is the best way :)

Leo loves all the veggies, or almost, he's not too keen on horse radish yet, but we are working on him, haha!  It is also hard I find, for him to eat leafy greens, so I have been making him a daily smoothy with banana, yogurt, pears (or any other ripe fruit from the homestead) and kale, and this way he eats plenty of greens.  And he loves his smoothy!

 

 Alright he is awake, so I'll leave it at that for this time.  I still have so much to catch up on (I even have to skip over fermenting and pickling!!!), but I'll be back.
Until then be well,

This photo is too cute :) but its true, he just wants to be outside, rain or shine

June at the Homestead

So much time has passed since the beginning of the season, I can hardly believe that this will be the first post I write this year about the gardens, and the vegetables that have been in the ground now for close to two months!!!  We have had a more than bizarre start this year, with ground preparations being delayed by our trip to Norway, a very late spring, strong heat wave in late May, then rain, rain and more rain in June.  But the garden isn't worse for wear.

End of June, the garden is finally starting to look full

What is that beautiful double fence around the garden you ask?!  Well it's a chicken moat!  This winter, while reading about permaculture and gardening, I found this idea in two different books (The Permaculture Garden and Edible Forest Gardens Volume II) and thought it would be a great way for us to expand the area in which the chickens can roam, without having to move them in a chicken tractor.  Plus, they can eat all the bugs trying to come into the garden, and the double fence stops the deer. Brilliant! Basically it is a 4 foot wide corridor all around the garden, made of black locust posts that Alex made from trees from the homestead and of 6 foot high chicken wire.  There is one entrance way for us to go into the garden, and there, the chickens have a little tunnel to go through to get to the other side.  Some people put a gate at the entrance, we haven't so far, and it is working very well.

Alex splitting the Locust logs to make the fence posts

Pounding in the posts in the ground

This year we expanded the main garden by 3 folds, so yes three times more work, and even more because we now have a separate garlic patch, fruit & berry garden, a (tiny) field of oats and two smaller veggie plots so more like 6 times more work! But it also hopefully will mean six times more veggies! :)

This is the old site of the garden, overgrown with weeds, mid-May

We pulled as many dandelions as possible and rented a rototiller for the weekend

Beginning of June, all the beds are made and all the veggies are in

We are still doing ok so far, and that is partly thanks to the fact that we have community and friends helping out in many ways. 

My best helper, ALWAYS there to lend a hand :)

poule poule poule!

The tiny field of oats, today they are much bigger.

Our berry patch, with currants, high bush blueberries, strawberries. raspberries, thornless blackberries and my favorite... nanking cherries!

Leo, Lila and Ruby together on Leo's favorite toy, the John Deer :)

One afternoon I spent 2 hours eradicating the poison ivy, its actually pretty simple, just don't forget to wear protective gear!

Besides the garden fence, Alex has also been playing around with different fencing materials for the area under the big maple, trying to find a good use for the smaller twigs and newest growth on the norway maples he's been cutting down for fire wood.

In a future post I will be talking a bit more about the bugs that are trying to colonize the veggie patch and eat all my veggies.  I am not letting them :) and it's in the most eco and inexpensive way I know so far: picking and squishing!

This will be the first year we'll be trying to put enough food by for the whole year, and it feels pretty amazing. We've already started blanching and freezing lots of kale, beet and radish greens, cutting up and freezing rhubarb, and now I am trying to harvest as many black raspberries as the mosquitos will let me :) We also already made a big batch of homemade kim chi (with young cabbage, bell radishes and celery). On our walks around the property and in the neighbourhood I also collected some medicinal plants, like yarrow, red clover and mullein (my favorite plant in the whole world, it is some beautiful... and useful) which I have dried and stored in paper bags.  And yesterday I saw the zucchini flowers for the first time, that means we will soon be putting to the test the amazing picked vegetable recipe we learned in Norway, and don't worry we'll put the recipe on the blog.  thank you Erik!

We hope your gardens are doing well, send us some pictures!

Until next time, be well.

looking past the mess at the future plans for the homestead

The landscape on the homestead currently looks more like a logging operation than a farm.  In a sense, that is what it has been, as we slowly clear away the Norway Maples that have taken over the orchard (those Norway Maples haunt me, I feel like they are mentioned in every single post!).

Ira and Ian visited from Montreal in March and helped a bit with the cutting

Piles like this one dot the property, we tried to burn one, but the wood is too green

It's sometimes hard to see past the mess, but we quickly use our imaginations to remember our dreams and plans we have for the homestead, and as you can see, we are far from troubled ;)! We just tell ourselves that the endless mountains of brush aren't clutter :) they are resources, materials that will be used for the various projects we have planed: trails, fences, lumber, sauna, outdoor shower... They will soon disappear as these projects come to life.  

Just yesterday, with the beautiful sunny weather, Alex and his friend John practiced some tree climbing techniques, to be able to begin pruning even the tallest of our apple trees, big and small.  They climbed our prized and magical crabapple, which we hope to turn into delicious homemade hard cider this fall.

We have been doing all this clearing to make room for the garden (which is already in full production indoors!), but also for our new trees which are set to arrive in May.  We will be diversifying our fruit trees with the addition of some cherries, plums, pawpaws and we'll add some protein with walnuts, hazelnut and butternut.

Getting ready to transition to the greenhouse

Tomatoes nice and warm next to the stove

Meanwhile indoors, our garden grows. In the cold winter months I got to reading The Seed Starter's Handbook by Nancy Bubel (great book, part of the collection of farming books gifted to us by the previous family who lived here), and in order of plantings, we now have seedlings of onions, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, celery, kale, basil, cabbage, lettuce, leeks and potatoes either sprouting in the greenhouse or next to the woodstove or already growing and luscious under the grow-lamps.  For the rest of the vegetable varieties we plan to grow, I think I will simply wait to do direct planting.

One cool technique that Sabrina and I started doing last year: pre-soaking the seeds in water, it works!  It's like starting sprouts, and this way you give your seeds a headstart.

The temperature inside the greenhouse already gets up to 95F (35C) in April, when its sunny all day, luckily Alex planned for good ventilation!

One exciting plan that is currently under way is the relocalization of the chickens to their permanent home.  We also got to reading the Permaculture Garden book by Graham Bell and the Edible Forest Gardens Vol II book by Dave Jacke during the colder months, and we got the idea from both these books, to design a chicken moat around our largest vegetable garden plot. By creating a gated 4 foot wide corridor all around the garden, where the chickens can roam, our new garden 'guardians' will be ridding us of any potential weed seed or most insects trying to enter our coveted food pantry, all while foraging for their food. 

So far we have moved them into the summer coop on top of the knoll, have created their pen, complete with roosts and access to the compost pile, and this week the rolls of 150 feet of 6 foot tall chicken wire will arrive.  Currently, the chickens are busy eating away at all the weeds that grow where the garden will be :) Thank you chickens! More on this project later...

And I leave you with these photos of Léo, who is now 10 months old :) has four teeth, will soon be walking without the help of the table or chair, and does poo poo in the potty everyday! It's the little things in life... ;)

Seems crazy I know, but he is really regular ;)

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Until next time, be well