Let the harvest commence!

Over the last few weeks, the garden has been ripening fast. Some things are already past their prime (strawberries, raspberries, peas), some have not yet ripened (plums, watermelon, cantaloupe, grapes), some are not ready to pick or harvest (dry beans, carrots, pears, potatoes), but lots of things are ready to harvest and process.

Believe it or not, I'm still harvesting blueberries. I'm down to the dregs, but I'm picking every last precious berry as it ripens.

I've been freezing them as I go. So far I have 17.75 lbs. and estimate I'll top out at 18.5 lbs. When everything is picked, I'll can the berries.

Here's a crate filled with garlic (at the bottom) and parsley (at top).

I spread the garlic to dry on a wire shelf. As usual, I'll can it later in the fall, and plant around 150 cloves for the enjoyment of whomever buys our house.

I had so much parsley this year, I couldn't fit it all in my dehydrator. So what I did was trimmed it...

...and loaded it onto cookie sheets.

Then I put the parsley in the oven and just left it there (I was at a juncture where I didn't need to use the oven for a while). Our range is propane and uses a pilot light, so whenever I need to keep things mildly warm (such as rising bread or pizza dough), I just tuck it in the oven. After four days, the parsley was perfectly dry and crisp.

To grind it up, I used my food chopper.

The chopper is small, so this was something of a messy process.

I was left with a lot of stems, so I used Don's paint roller screen to sieve out the biggest pieces.

I got a bit over a quart of dried parsley. I don't go through a lot of parsley, so this will be plenty to last a year.

One of our peach trees was so heavily overloaded with fruit, I was afraid the branches would break.

After picking, the tree looked much happier.

The peaches aren't big, but it's a thrilling thing to be able to harvest our own (peaches are my all-time, hands-down favorite fruit). I got 23 lbs. from this one tree.

I put the peaches on the surface of the cookstove to ripen.

After about a week, they were ripe enough to process.

I dropped the peaches in hot water to slip the skins.

Then cold water.

Jars lined up, ready to fill.

Skinned and pitted peaches.

Puréeing the peaches in the blender.

My faithful helper was literally underfoot.

Final result: 16 pints of purée, which I water-bath canned.

I haven't yet harvested the other peach trees, so I'll get more purée in the next couple of weeks. (For those curious about what to do with purée, there is no finer addition to homemade ice cream or homemade yogurt than peach purée. It also does beautifully in smoothies.)

The apple trees were also heavily laden, so I picked every last apple before they got too heavy for the branches.

This gave me about 20+ lbs. of very small but very tasty apples.

I haven't yet preserved them because I'm facing something of a dilemma on how to process them. They're too small for my apple peeler. The easiest thing would be to turn them into applesauce, but we don't eat a lot of applesauce. What I want to do is make pie filling, and for that I need to peel them. Before I embark on the laborious process of hand-peeling 150 little bitty apples, does anyone have a faster and more efficient solution?

I'll post more as I continue harvesting the garden. What a blessing to have such bounty from our own labors!

Along those lines, this year I'm participating in a bundle promotional called "Off the Grid Superstack" which includes tons of information on preparedness. I've contributed information on prepper gardening. I hope you'll all consider purchasing the bundle when it's available -- I think it has a lot of extremely useful information.

More info on tire gardening

Since putting up the the post on how we developed our tire garden -- and since it was subsequently featured on SurvivalBlog -- many people have asked additional questions about the infrastructure of our garden. Here is where I'll answer them.

NOTE: I had some sort of weird glitch which duplicated this post, so I deleted what I thought was the duplicate. In fact, I deleted the original ... which means all the comments were deleted as well. My apologies to those who left comments on the original post.

Billboard tarps
One question was where we got our billboard tarps -- which we use to block weeds and which are anchored with gravel -- and how much we paid for them.

I know billboard tarps (usually the gigantic ones you see on highway billboards) are available for sale on eBay and other online sites. The prices are fairly decent, but we decided to scout around and see if we could find a more local source.

So I called a tarp company in Spokane and inquired how much it would cost to purchase old tarps, and explained what we intended to use them for. They put me in touch with one specific fellow with the company, and he told me the tarps were FREE. I was shocked and delighted. Since at the time I was going into Spokane about once a week (the girls had music, French, or gymnastics lessons), we made this company a routine stop and brought home dozens of tarps the span of a couple months. I always called my liaison ahead of time to see if it was convenient for me to stop in, and I always thanked him profusely after we'd loaded up.

Then one day I called to inquire if I could pick up some tarps. My liaison, embarrassed, said no. Here's why.

Someone -- I don't like to think it was a blog reader, but it may have been -- apparently went into the same company and demanded free billboard tarps. He actually threatened the receptionist if he didn't get some. The poor woman was understandably shaken. As a result, a company-wide policy was enacted in which the tarps were no longer given away. Thus ended a wonderful free resource, all because someone acted like a bully and a jerk, demanding free stuff he had no right to and threatening innocent people.

I was horrified when my liaison told me what happened, but policy was policy. That ended the billboard tarps.

Now this was several years ago, and it was only with one company. If anyone is interested in billboard tarps, it's worth calling around and simply asking. Nicely.

Cutting tires
The other question I was asked is how to cut large tractor tires in half safely.

These tires can weigh anywhere from 150 to 600 pounds, so safety in handling them is paramount. Not all tires need to be cut in half -- it all depends on the depth. Most tires just need to have one sidewall cut out (use a Sawzall with a beefy blade) and it's good to go. But for very thick tires, it's helpful to slice them in half lengthwise (like a humongous bagel) to yield two open halves. Here's how we did it.

Originally we tried just propping a tire up on other tires. This worked, sorta, but it tended to bind the saw blade.

Instead, we learned it's better to stand the tire up. This is where pets and children should be kept strictly away. You don't want to risk one of these halves flopping down and hurting anyone.

We used a Saws-all to cut through the tires. Don't use anything smaller than a "fang-tip" blade. The really gnarly blades are designed to cut through thick surfaces. Start the blade at a shallow angle – lay the teeth at the spot you want to cut – and then tilt as the cut deepens. The blade should dive in. Like everything else, it takes a little practice.

Cutting tires is ideally a two-person job. To prevent the tires halves from flopping open when cutting, the second person should tie the tire halves as the first person cuts and works his way around the perimeter.

Even though a tire may be tied, it's still unsteady in this upright position, so be sure to cut it where it won't damage anything if it falls. And above all, never put yourself in a position where it can fall on you.

In this instance, the tire fell over just as Don finished slicing it in half, and the sudden unsteadiness of two loose halves sent it crashing into a small nearby trailer.

Tying the tire as it's cut has a secondary benefit -- both halves can be picked up by a tractor and moved at the same time.

Tires on or off the tarps?
Another mistake we made at first -- and quickly rectified -- was putting the tires directly on the ground and then cutting the tarps to fit around them.

Big mistake. Big mistake!

We did this early on mostly because some of the tractor tires were already in place by the time we started using tarps for weed control. We didn't want to have to move the tires, so we cut the tarps to fit around them. But of course weeds still grew up through the tires (I've mostly gotten this under control through diligent weeding), and forever after weeds continue to grow around the outer rims of these tires since there's a little space between the tire and the tarp. It's fairly controllable, but it's always an issue. Thankfully only four tires have this problem. The rest of the garden doesn't, because we rapidly learned tires should just be placed directly on the tarp.

Here we placed a couple of tires directly on the tarps with no gravel.

But once again, as part of our learning curve, we learned to put the gravel down first. Not only does this anchor the tarps, but the drainage it provides to the tires is superb.

I hope this info helps someone with their own tire garden!

Watch those bears

This made me smile.

Chalk this up under the "creative pub signs" category.

Prepping for winter -- the cheater's way

Here it is late August, and already it's time to start preparing for winter. While our house has received lots of interest on the market, we haven't had any bites; so we're getting ready to overwinter in place. Fortunately we're not in a hurry to sell, and overwintering is just fine with us. (It will give our girls a chance to come home and see how pretty the house now is.)

However because our focus has been making home improvements, we've had less time to devote to one critical winter prep: Firewood. So we decided to do something we've never done before -- buy firewood already cut and split.

Don answered an advertisement by a local fellow whose prices seemed reasonable. Last week, the gentleman brought in multiple truck loads of wood.

We were going through a hot spell (highs in the 90s), so he often started bringing loads at 6 a.m. when the air was still cool. Fortunately I'm an early riser, so this wasn't a problem.

After every load, Don and I stacked. After three days of hauling in loads of firewood, we had four cords of wood stacked and ready to use.

We stacked wood inside an inner pen (you can't see the rows stacked in back) ...

...as well as the outer wall.

We also have some stacked on the side porch.

We feel vaguely guilty for buying stuff already cut and split -- are we cheating? -- but hey, our focus has been different this fall and time is at more of a premium.

Four cords may not be quite enough to get us through next spring, but we also have some dead trees on the property we can cut and split ourselves. And I must say, it's nice to have our firewood already in.

It's miiiiiighty quiet around here

Sunday morning, as usual, I released the chickens from their coop.

All day long, I watched them and took a few photos.

It's a nice flock, though we have way too many roosters (six!).

On Sunday evening, I taped up a bunch of boxes outside the chicken coop.

The birds watched me with interest but no alarm. After all, they had no reason to be suspicious.

But as it turns out, they should have been suspicious -- because those boxes were meant for them.

Sunday night after dark, when all the chickens had gone to roost, Don and I started stuffing them into the boxes -- one rooster, and either two or three hens per box. We flapped the boxes closed and stacked them next to our pickup truck. When all the chickens were crammed, squawking, into boxes, we loaded the boxes into the truck and carefully drove to a neighbor's house about a mile and a half away. There the whole family poured out, all seven kids very excited, to watch and help unload their new livestock into the brand-new coop the oldest boy had built. Instant farm.

Unlike the difficulty in seeing the cows go to their reward in the freezer, at least our flock has an excellent home with wonderful people and happy children. If you're going to get rid of animals, it's always a comfort to give them to people who treat their animals well.

But my goodness -- if we thought things were quiet without the cows, it's nothing compared to now. No more crowing competitions among six lusty boys. No more clucks, cackles, and scratching from a flock of prolific hens. The coop door stays open day and night.

Just one more step on the road to moving.

Squeeeeee!!!

I was mentioned in a Chuck Norris column!

Holy cow, I didn't see that one coming! Thank you, Mr. Norris!

Silent book clubs

So here's an interesting trend I just caught wind of: Silent book clubs.

Apparently these quiet reading groups grew out of dissatisfaction with standard book clubs where reading material is "assigned" and, as often as not, members cram their assigned reading just before a meeting in a manner that's termed "demanding."

In contrast, members of silent book clubs meet up in a public space with a book of their choice, then spent an hour reading in silence.

"Liberated from the orthodoxy of traditional book clubs, participants can bring whatever they'd like to read and chat about anything, before and after the designated reading time," states the article.

As a further explanation:

The idea began with two friends reading together at a bar in San Francisco, annoyed by the assigned reading of a demanding book club.

"I wished that I had a book club where basically there was no assigned reading but you could just show up, hang out with your friends, talk about what you were reading and then just sort of read your book with no pressure to prepare snacks or vacuum your house or do any of the things that normal, traditional book club hosting entails," says Guinevere de la Mare, who co-founded the organization with Laura Gluhanich in 2012.

Thus was born what some are terming "introvert happy hour" (or "SoulCycle for shy people") with chapters meeting all over the country. They often meet in bars or other public areas, enjoy a drink, and act as convivial as only introverts can act when they have a good book and are surrounded by other book-lovers.

Here's how the founder describes it:

Once a month, a group of friends meet up at a bar after work. We sink into leather couches, we order drinks, and we pull out our books. There’s chatter about who’s reading what, author recommendations mix with gossip, and a few books swap hands. The drinks arrive, a cheese plate appears, and the books-and-wine tableau is snapped, filtered, and hashtagged. As conversation dies down, we put our phones away and begin to read. It’s a Monday evening so the bar is quiet. A classically trained pianist drifts from Bach to Adele without rustling a page of sheet music. We order more drinks. A few late-comers trickle in and are greeted warmly. We turn back to our books, and read.

Apparently many book swaps happen at these events ("Hey, I'm interested in reading XYZ, does anyone have a copy I can borrow?") and no one is pressured to get any "assigned" reading completed.

"By creating this sanctuary in a bar," notes a British chapter, "the club endorses reading as not just important, but also entertaining. It’s hushed, but don’t be fooled: Once a month, there’s no place more happening."

If I lived closer to a city, I'd seriously consider joining (or starting) a chapter. As it is, I can't justify a two-hour round trip for an hour's reading time in a public location.

But still, what a cool idea! Check it out.

Tons of manure

By happy coincidence, one of the things we need to clean up on our farm is something in high demand: Manure. You might say we're spreading a lot of it around.

For years, we took the science of composting fairly casually. Don would scoop out the underside of the awning each year (sometimes more often, depending on how much it needed it) in late summer or early fall. He piled the manure just outside the feedlot, where over the course of a couple of years it broke down into beautiful compost, which we then heaped on the garden tires when needed.

And since we have tons -- literally -- of this black gold, we're able to spread it around among neighbor who needed it for their gardens.

We have no problem leaving these fertile mounds for whomever buys our place (and hopefully they'll recognize the value of a good pile of poop), but nor do we have any problem handing out compost to anyone who wants some.

So when a neighbor fired up his ancient 1950s dump truck and brought it over for a load, Don happily filled it up. Twice.

He started by scooping out under the awning until he couldn't scoop anymore (the rest will have to be hand-raked out).

Then he turned his attention to the compost pile that is the favorite hangout for the chickens.

God bless tractors. Can you imagine moving this much stuff with a shovel or pitchfork?

The only problem is every time Don scooped up some compost, the chickens would descend en masse to gobble up worms.

They're fearless in the face of a tractor and refuse to move. No one ever said chickens were bright. (On the other hand, I'm convinced the compost pile and its inhabitants is what helps keep our birds as healthy as they are.)

This neighbor was able to help us clean out probably an entire ton of compost. Benefits for both sides!