Friday, March 1, 2013

More Homestead Summer

Once the garden began producing, there was something to harvest daily, hard but satisfying work. Here come Steph and Kent with a load - and a little help.
 
 
And also satisfying is sitting down to a meal and realizing that you grew most of what you are eating. Here's a dinner of chicken pot pie with our own chickens and veggies, refrigerator cucumbers and coleslaw.
 
 
We grew dry beans for the first time. These were called "French Horticultural". I thought they looked like Jacob's Cattle. And so easy to grow. Plant them, make sure they get weeded and watered, wait for them to dry out, snap off the pods and shell them at your leisure. We'll be planting at least three times as many this year.
 
 
Here's a homestead breakfast - pancakes with fresh milled grain, eggs, from our chickens, maple syrup from our trees and our own strawberries. Makes my mouth water. And maybe this year we'll add a cold glass of our own goat milk!

 
And maybe sometimes when we sit around the dinner table we talk of unusual and somewhat obscure questions, like:

"If you pull a vacuum on a marshmallow, what happens?" This was probably preceded by conversation about vacuum sealing food, the qualities of food being sealed and the science of what happens in a vacuum.

Which meant we had to immediately grab the Foodsaver and find out! It expanded impressively.

 


4 comments:

Dianna said...

Your beans are beautiful! I've always wanted to try growing some. Do they take much room?

Kristine said...

Hi Dianna,
Thanks! It was pretty exciting to see how easy it was and how beautiful the beans were. We planted 3 rows that were each 19' x 2'. We got 12 quarts of dried beans. I suspect we would have had more had not a woodchuck eaten the tops off all the plants. We do dense planting and mulch once the seedlings come up so that once the beans established themselves they shade out the weeds and need very little care. I would guess that was probably 8-10" between each plant. Hope that helps. Kristine

CAMPKAYAK said...

We grew Vermont Yellow Eye beans(heirloom, therefore no genetic modification, amen!)one year and had great fun threshing the beans. Our girls were very young at the time and we were able to tie in a Biblical lesson while we thrashed the dried bean bushes inside a metal garbage can lined with a new garbage bag. After threshing we used, if I remember, a large piece of fabric to toss the beans gently into the air. We had spread out a clean tablecloth on the ground in case any beans were dropped and had planned a breezy day so the chaff blew away in the breeze. It was cool to read the story of Ruth to the girls that night and explain about the threshing floor to them.

Kristine said...

Hi Carol, There are so many lessons to be learned in the garden. I find myself contemplating God's ways and Bible passages so often while I'm in the garden that I find I meditate more on things of God in the summer when I'm out in His creation all day than in the winter when I'm stuck inside more. It really puts things in perspective.