Harvest House

We had such a large harvest from our garden this year that here it is mid-December and I'm still processing it. This is a long post, so grab yourself a cup of hot tea and join me on our harvesting and preserving journey.

Here's what portions of the garden looked like in mid-August:

I'll start with the popcorn.

I'd been interested in growing popcorn for quite some time, but every variety seemed to take too long for our short growing season. Finally I found what promised to be a suitably short-season heirloom variety.

Here it's "knee high by the Fourth of July."

And here it is late August.

It grew well, but it seemed the ears took a long time for form.

However the harvest was abundant.

Popcorn isn't like sweet corn. Even fresh on the cob, the kernels are hard and un-bite-able. But this particular variety was almost as pretty as Indian corn.

Over the next few days after harvesting, I shucked it all.

A chipmunk appreciated the underformed ears.

On the cob, the total weight was 89 lbs.

I spread it out on the floor of a spare room to dry. (The gap in the middle is where I spilled some water on the newspaper.)

Kinda cool, no?

After it was dry, and over a period of weeks, I shelled the corn. It's stubborn stuff. I couldn't just rub it off like regular dried sweet corn. Instead, I put several ears at a time into a small canvas bag, whacked it with a rubber mallet (which loosened the kernels), and then was able to rub the remainder off (while wearing garden gloves -- a must!). And in case you're wondering, I couldn't use a corn sheller because it would damage the kernel; if a popcorn kernel is broken or damaged, it won't pop.

It was laborious work, but in the end yielded 37.75 lb. of shelled popcorn. Since popcorn is one of our favorite snacks, this is wonderful.

Garlic.

I harvested this August 14. If there's one thing that grows well here, it's garlic.

The garlic just sorta sat around for several weeks. I actually gave a lot of it away to friends and neighbors for planting. In early November, I sat down and peeled what remained.

Then I chopped and canned it. Because I gave away so much, I only ended up with seven pints of canned chopped garlic.

I reserved 150 cloves for planting...

...which I did late (Nov. 8).

Once planted, I gave the bed a straw mulch.

Except for some light weeding next summer (and watering, of course), this is all I have to do with the garlic until next harvest.

Onions. We love onions, so I planted five tires' worth -- four of yellow, one of red.

This year we harvested 18 lbs. of red onions and 40 lbs. of yellow. Actually, we grew a lot more than that -- probably double that amount. We ate off the onion beds for weeks before harvesting the remainder in the fall.

Pears. I already posted all about the actions of the Magic Pear Fairy, who harvested about 100 lbs.

Potatoes. We planted five beds of potatoes: four yellow, one red.

Altogether we got 80 lbs. of taters.

I sorted them according to size, and (in the absence of a basement or root cellar) stored them in the canning closet (the coolest, darkest part of our house).

Poppies. Or more specifically, poppy seed heads.

I love poppy seeds and wanted to try growing my own. It worked.

Although I only planted one dedicated bed of seed poppies, I ended up scattering them in numerous other beds as well. They're a pretty and useful addition to any garden.

The seeds fall out of the pods easily enough. I tapped them into a glass jar.

Then I sieved them through fine mesh strainers to remove (most of) the debris. I did this several times.

I ended up with about a pint and a half of seeds. In retrospect, I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort by putting a handful of seed pods into a plastic bowl with a tight lid, and slamming them around a whole bunch. I'll do that next year.

Peas. I consider these one of the loveliest of garden crops. From two beds, I harvested (I think) five pounds (I forgot to weigh the amount from the second bed).

Yield: 15 pints.

Cayennes. They're a favorite with Younger Daughter, but in her absence I only planted one bed ... which, as it turns out, was more than enough.

Just before the first frost, I pulled all the plants, then sorted the ripe from the unripe.

I ended up with 0.75 lb. of ripe cayennes, and 5.5 lbs. of green (unripe). I put the ripe ones in a colander to dry.

I spread the green peppers on some shelves to let them ripen.

Over several weeks, most of them turned red. I gave a lot of them to a neighbor who loves spicy foods.

Tomatoes. As is typical around here, not many ripened before the first frost.

So we ended up picking most of them green.

We put them in shallow boxes with bananas (for ethylene, the fruit-ripening gas).

And then -- this was critical -- we tucked mosquito netting around the boxes to keep fruit flies out. This kept the tomatoes from rotting prematurely.

Over the next few weeks, the tomatoes gradually ripened. When enough at a time got red, we collected them...

...and ran them through the food strainer to make purée. (It goes much quicker with two people -- Don was the chopper, I was the grinder.)

It's a messy job, but the food strainer makes it a whole lot easier. (Notice the towel on the floor to catch the splatter.)

From the first batch we processed, we ended up with six gallons of purée, which we froze.

A couple weeks later, we processed the rest and got another four gallons of purée.

These bags are now in the freezer. Over the winter with the wood cookstove in constant use, I'll gradually cook the purée down into tomato sauce and can it.

We took the tomato skins from the second, smaller batch of tomatoes we processed, and started a batch of tomato vinegar.

Apples.

Our trees are still very young, and this year the plums and peaches took the year off; but we got a fair amount of apples for such baby trees -- 20 lbs.

I turned this into pie filling. First step, peeling. (Notice Darcy's interested nose.)

Filling the canning jars.

End result: Seven quarts.

Carrots. There's something so pretty about carrots. We planted three beds.

The funny thing about carrots is I absolutely hate them raw, but I adore them cooked. Absolutely stinkin' love them cooked. They're probably second only to broccoli as my favorite vegetable.

Because carrots are so forgiving about when they're harvested, I waited until early November to pull them.

Total harvest, 45 lbs.

Then they sat around in the barn for another three weeks until I finally got around to processing them, which I did just a few days ago. First, trimming off the greens.

Some of the carrots were pretty funny.

A few were just too small to bother with.

What to do with all the trimmed greens?

Why, give them to the cows, of course! Better than candy.

Next step, peeling.

Then dicing.

Finally, canning.

I did this in several batches over a couple of days.

Final yield: 48 pints.

The last thing I'm processing this season is actually something I harvested last season -- dried beans.

I dried the bean pods, but then they sat, literally, for a whole year. I decided it was time to stop procrastinating and get them shelled.

Prepper gardeners are almost obsessively focused on dried beans, with good reason. They pack a mighty punch in term of protein and nutrition. But they're not without their drawbacks.

Dried beans have a low yield when compared to other crops. From one tire, I can harvest 30 ears of corn, or 15 lbs. of potatoes, or 15 lbs. of carrots. But I'll only get eight ounces of dried beans.

For us, dried beans will only ever be an "overflow" crop, something to plant if I have spare room. That's because we have other protein sources -- chickens, eggs, beef, and eventually nuts. If beans are your only source of protein in a prepper-gardening situation, then yes, plant a lot. Just be aware of their low yield.

They're also labor-intensive. Sure, you can stuff the dried pods in a pillowcase and stomp around on it (highly recommended), but don't think for a minute that technique will dislodge every last bean. In fact, I've discovered it only dislodges about half the beans. There's no getting around the need to hand-pick through the stomped pods to maximize the harvest.

Still, it's not a terrible task. I found it rather soothing, akin to doing a puzzle. (These are calypso beans, by the way.)

Dried beans are a patient crop, allowing a homesteader the chance to get everything else processed first and shell them gradually over cold winter days. I'm still shelling them, but I'm going to guesstimate I'll end up with 10 lbs.

Now step back a moment and pretend you didn't read any of the above, and try to see everything with outside eyes.

One day in mid-October, we had a fellow come over to give us an estimate for some repair work we needed done to the outside of the house. He caught me splitting wood:

As Don showed him what he wanted done, I looked over things with fresh eyes, the eyes of a stranger, and I realized it looked like Harvest House around our place.

Outside was a wheelbarrow full of pears (I sent the gentleman home with two bulging bags)...

...a crate of garlic:

...some late-season watermelon and cantaloupe:

...and a tub bulging with cayennes.

Inside was a basket of eggs:

...a few pears reserved for fresh eating:

...two large boxes of ripening tomatoes:

...and canning projects in progress:

So there you have it, our Harvest House.

Scary smart phones

Younger Daughter, attempting with frustration to get her phone issues straightened out before her first deployment -- and knowing my general hostility toward smart phones in general -- sent a link to this comical Saturday Night Live sketch:



This sketch -- ending with the words "It's an old person's nightmare" -- puts me firmly in the camp of a crotchety fuddy-duddy who can't handle the latest technology.

I don't know about the "crotchety" part, but I'm unquestionably a fuddy-duddy loathe to embrace anything technological (my preferred description is "Luddite"). But once in a while my concerns about smart phones are justified.

Consider this article, profiled this morning on Drudge: Your apps know where you were last night, and they’re not keeping it secret.

Your smart little smart phone, it turns out, is pinging your location every two seconds. It maps your every move, your every stop, your every clandestine trip to Planned Parenthood or the apartment of the hunky guy down the hall. The apps doing this tracking then sell the information without the knowledge of the owner.

"As smartphones have become ubiquitous and technology more accurate, an industry of snooping on people’s daily habits has spread and grown more intrusive," notes the article. "At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information. ... The database ... reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day."

The article continues: "Businesses say their interest is in the patterns, not the identities, that the data reveals about consumers. They note that the information apps collect is tied not to someone’s name or phone number but to a unique ID. But those with access to the raw data — including employees or clients — could still identify a person without consent. They could follow someone they knew, by pinpointing a phone that regularly spent time at that person’s home address. Or, working in reverse, they could attach a name to an anonymous dot, by seeing where the device spent nights and using public records to figure out who lived there."

Does anyone else find this just plain creepy?

In dystopian literature, the future is dire because everyone is microchipped and monitored 24/7. But the future, it seems, is here. It seems smart phones are just as invasive as those under-the-skin chips.

Both our girls have smart phones, and I'll admit it fills me with concern. Fuddy-duddy that I am, I just don't like or trust the durn things.

Turns out I may have a very good reason for my hostility.

The most perfect renovation in the world

You want to see just about the most perfect renovation imaginable? Take a gander at this work of art.

A glorious abandoned century-old theater in Buenos Aires was renovated into a bookstore.

All the beautiful original architectural details were maintained and restored.

The mezzanine level has thousands of books, with views overlooking the entire interior.

The stage is now a café and coffee shop.

I cannot imagine a more perfect renovation (drool, wipe).

Maybe this will inspire some American entrepreneurs to follow suit.

Pearl Harbor Day

Today is the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A couple years ago, my mother (who was born in 1931) shared an extraordinary story as follows:

In the fall of 1941 my mother started making homemade bread every Saturday. She used yeast on the first recipe, but after that she would save a starter, a piece of dough. Of course we had no refrigeration, so she would just take the starter dough and put it in a bowl in the cabinet. The next week she would use the starter dough to make a fresh batch of bread.

My oldest brother had taken off for something, and he came home with a friend. The boy lived about a mile away from our house, but since we lived along a bayou, we had to cross a prairie to get to his house. He walked in the house and the smell of fresh bread permeated the place. He was wowed, and Mamma broke him off a piece of fresh bread for him to eat.

He had gone to school with us, but like a lot of kids his age he joined the Navy at age 17. He told my mother he was stationed at Pearl Harbor on the Arizona.

This took place on Saturday November 22nd. Thirteen days later he died on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. His name was William (Bill) Stoddard.

My mother stopped making bread. I was ten years old.

Needless to say, Pearl Harbor didn't just affect Hawaii. It also affected a tiny little town in the bayous of Louisiana, and a 10-year-old child's memory of a neighbor boy who died for our country.

Wood for the winter

Sorry for the blog silence on my end. The end of November heralded numerous writing deadlines I had hanging over me. When December 1 hit and the pressure was off, I engaged in some heavy-duty literary laziness. I didn't even delete the 75 spam comments I had piled up on the blog until this morning.

But we haven't been entirely idle over the last week. We did, among much else, a lot of firewood.

Normally we purchase a logging truck of pulp logs about every three years for firewood. We finished up the last of the logs in the spring, but rather than order another shipment, we decided to harvest some dead trees off our property instead. Lots cheaper and it needs to get done anyway.

Don's handy with dropping trees, but he called in a professional logger to deal with one massive pine in the bull pen. One bad cut and it would smash the barn. Don knows his limitations.

This logger is the fellow who normally delivers our logging trucks of logs, so we knew him already. Nice guy who knows his stuff. Since he was here anyway, we had him take down three other trees...

...as well as several dead trees just across the fence on our neighbor's property (with their permission, of course -- they also wanted the firewood).

The first thing we did was shoo the cows down into the pasture for the day. Can't risk them getting crushed.

The next thing was for Don to remove this section of fence. It was the only logical place for the trees to fall, so he took it down so it could be rebuilt later.

He also removed the railroad tie post.

The tallest tree in the exact middle of the photo is the tree coming down. There are a couple smaller dead trees to the right which will be cut.

The logger got right to work with confidence. As trees go, this one was a piece of cake for him.

Timber!!!

Big tree.

Don watched while the logger got started on the other two trees. Though the one he's working on is a lot smaller, it's leaning in such a way that would send it straight into the barn if not cut precisely right.

Half the job is using a chainsaw; the other half is the judicious use of wedges to get the tree to fall properly. (Everyone knows why they're fluorescent colors, right? It's so they're easy to spot on the forest floor when loggers are out in the woods.)

The logger was very careful and took his time.

Then the tree finally came down, it fell precisely where the logger wanted it.

Here are the three downed trees from the bull pen. The logger also took down a large fir a few yards away. Can you see why we won't need to buy firewood this year? The biggest tree is pine, the others are fir. Pine has a poor BTU rating for firewood, but it burns and it's free, so we'll use it. (And don't worry, we scrub our stovepipe free of creosote every month or so.)

When the cows were let back up from the field, they found their landscape altered.

The next day, Don started limbing the trees.

Meanwhile I split more rounds that had been cut earlier.

Don got through limbing one tree, cut it into lengths, and started yarding the logs in the driveway.

Then he cut them into rounds. (He's using an electric chainsaw, in case you're wondering about the cord.)

We split and stacked and split and stacked until the side porch was brim-full of wood.

A brief snowfall decorated the rounds and made them look very pretty.

Then we split and stack and split and stacked some more, until the front porch was as full as it could be.

This makes something of a wall right outside our front door, but it's a nice sight, in my opinion.

Mr. Darcy seems to find it cozy.

Some people have expressed concern about rodents and moisture when the wood is stacked so close the house. All I can say is, in 15 years of stacking firewood this way, we've never had an iota of trouble. If we kept it stacked like this over the summer, then maybe; but over winter? Nah. And we'll use it up before spring.

After this, we put the log splitter away. We have many more logs still to cut up, but this is all the firewood we'll need through most of the winter, so we'll wait on the others.