Happy Halloween

It has been a very busy month on the farm! The turkeys are growing before our eyes. The garden is still producing vegetables for dinner and lunches. The chickens are laying eggs galore. Walnuts have been dropping in abundance and there are pumpkins everywhere!

Sugar Pie and Fairytale Pumpkins have been harvested!

Pumpkins in the barn and lots of eggs such pretty colors.

Pumpkins at the garden gate

Pumpkin in the birdbath

Pumpkin Chocolate fudge. It is a new favorite on the farm.

Using sugar pie pumpkins from the garden, the puree is mixed into the batter

Happy Bats!

Hand knitted pumpkin by Tyler, age 8.

Turkeys roosting the yard and pumpkins at the well.

Kitchen full of fall and pumpkin goodies.

Sunshine streaming through the rainshowers.

Shadowy afternoons.

Walnut drying station! 

Produce weighing station.

I love you, Mom! xo

Masks and pumpkins

Pumpkin treats made for students  along with popcorn balls.

Early fall morning after the stormy night. So many walnuts ready to be gathered.

Walnuts for Sale!

~ Happy Fall and Happy Halloween! ~

Hope Floats Scarecrow

The school where I teach puts scarecrows up on the fenceline every year to greet the farmers and community members during the harvest season. This year our school is also attending to Breast Cancer Awareness month.  Students and staff have been encouraged to wear pink on Fridays and are writing letters and notes of encouragement to cancer patients receiving treatment. On the 30th of October, students will have a Hope Floats Assembly and enjoy ice cream floats as a treat. 

In the greenhouse is Hope the Scarecrow. I made her out of a sunflower head with walnut eyes and nose and red pepper lips. She has mini sunflower hands and barn boots. The pumpkins and gourds were painted with tempera paints and the gooseneck gourds were given a necklace of chicken feathers for a dressed up look! In celebration of all of the families and fighters of breast cancer and thank you, Mom for your incredible fight 19 years ago. ~ Keep spreading the Hope and Love! ~

Harvest Season

This is a very busy time of year on the farm. Everything is ripening at once, needs to be picked, cleaned, chopped, cooked, canned, sliced, frozen, dehydrated, or pickled! We love this time of year. The days are full as the sun starts to get lower in the sky. The past two days have been very hot in Southern Oregon and both days were nearly 100 degrees. Over the last two weeks we have been harvesting daily meals and meals for the rest of the year!

The harvest baskets, bushel baskets, and buckets are ready for a day full of harvesting!

Gala apples and Golden Delicious apples here. Others include Gravenstein, Fuji, Macintosh, and others.

Sweet Italian peppers, banana peppers, jalapenos, sweet bell peppers, and hot Thai peppers.

We like both the globe eggplant and the Japanese eggplant and use it for so many things including eggplant Parmesan, Spaghetti/garden sauce, roasted vegie pizzas, ratatouille and more!

The tomatoes this year have been especially sweet! The pineapple tomato is wonderful, so is the Cherokee purple tomato. We also planted Fourth of July, Medford, Early Girl, Amish Roma tomato, and Sungold cherry tomatoes. We make soup, salsa, sauce, and eat them fresh, canned, or frozen!

Roasting peppers, tomatoes and onions for several recipes.

These are delicious with the wood smoke flavor.

The fire keeper! We use madrona for our winter heat source and it also makes wonderful smokey flavor on anything we cook over the madrona.

A surprise clutch of eggs were found just below the corn. These eggs were not good to keep and eat, but it is always fun to come across a secret treasure.

Peeling back the shucks so that the popcorn can finish drying.

The first round of ears that are dry enough to harvest and shuck. We planted both Smoke Signals and Blood Red varieties. The Smoke Signals is a smaller ear of corn, but many of the kernels are well formed. Blood Red is a much larger ear and needs longer to dry.

We were surprised to find a couple of the ears of corn had already popped on the stalk! Like I said, it has been 100 degrees here in the Rogue  Valley.

Galeux d'eysines is a French variety of pumpkin. It has warts on the outside formed from the sugar content. It has also been called a bumpkin among other names. It is known for its rick, creamy,smooth flesh and for the beautiful markings and color.

Turks Turban winter squash has so much flare and festivity!

Sugar pie pumpkins are perfect for breads, muffins, pies,etc.  These little pumpkins are easily cut in half, laid on a baking tray with 1/4 inch of water and baked at 350 for about 45 minutes.  Pack the softened flesh in two cup increments and it makes it very easy to use every bit of this wonderful little sugar pumkin!

Butternut squash grew abundantly this year. We will used them for stir fry, sauce, soup, and casseroles!

The beans have been drying on the vine. These are called Hidatsa beans from the Missouri River Valley of North Dakota, Cannellini Beans are a bigger thicker bean and especially good in soups like Minestrone soup!

Digging potates. Ugh, hard work and we had a poor harvest this year.  The tell tale sign of moles and gophers were abundant down the entire row of potatoes.  We hope for more next year.

Filling baskets full of dried beans.  

The sunflowers are drooping in the garden now, but there are so full of seeds that will be fed to the  chickens and turkeys.

More apples are ripening. We have made apple syrup, apple butter, dehydrated apples, apple sauce, apple crisp and apple pie! 

Winter provisions! I guess the squash needs to be used before we bun through the other wood!

The great squash harvest included Hubbard Squash, Kabocha/buttercup squash, galeax d'eysines, butternut and pumpkin. 

Fruits and vegetables that will help feed us all winter long.

We are thankful for every day and each and every fruit or vegetable that we can harvest.
How does your garden grow?

Dehydrating Cantaloupe

Amish Cantaloupe from Seed Saver's Exchange turned out to be the best tasting surprise in the garden! This cantaloupe is what we remember the orange-fleshed melons tasting like when we were kids. 

The cantaloupe were anywhere from 4 pounds to over 9 pounds on the produce scale. We picked more than 100 pounds of cantaloupe and there are more ripening right now.  Wondering how to preserve them as we couldn't eat that many cantaloupe at once, we decided to try dehydrating them.

The book that came with the Excaliber dehydrator said cantaloupe aren't always a successful fruit to dry.  Still, we had to try.  So we simply prepared them like we would serve them: Cut the melon is half, scoop out the seeds, cut into quarters, peel, them slice each quarter section about 1/4 inch thick. Put them in the dehydrator at 135 degrees and in 10 - 12 hours, the slices were dry...and delicious!

This jar is holding about 8 cantaloupe! That's hard to believe, but true! Next we will try frozen cubes of cantaloupe for smoothies!

Every Color of the Rainbow

Every color of the rainbow is ripe in the garden right now! We are busy picking, chopping, slicing, brining, stewing, canning, preserving the harvest! What is happening your kitchen now?