A productive day

We spent a couple of hours in the garden this afternoon.

I started off cutting all my pumpkins off their vines which had died back. Unfortunately on the undersides of them the skins have started to rot a little. So I won't be able to store these ones. I think I'll need to process them tomorrow before going away on holiday and freeze them. I will need to do some research about this problem for next year's ones.

The chickens have a good roam and scratch around and dust bathing.

Nathan wanted to get busy in the garden and asked if the corn stalks could be pulled out, so he set to work and pulled two entire patches. Then moved his piles away. He told me "if I put these stalks over here, they will turn into compost". Unfortunately he got a little over enthusiastic and pulled up my super large courgette plant thinking it was a pumpkin plant that had done it's dash even though it is still happily providing courgettes. Oh well, we've had plenty. He declared he liked working together as a team as it made the job fun.


We then harvested apples. There wasn't a huge amount of fruit this year as well back at the beginning of summer one of the large branches snapped off although the fruit continued to grow since it was still attached. A lot of the fruit was attacked by codling moth and the rest had blemishes that needed cutting out. So we decided to turn them into apple chips and this evening Nathan helped me as I prepared the slices for the dehydrator. His job was to place the slices into the water with vitamin C in it (to stop the flesh browning) and then placing on the trays. We filled 7 trays.

A belated first anniversary

I just realised that it's just been over a year since I started blogging and I missed it!

It's been an amazing journey...one that has really helped my dreams come to fruition, I've found new online friends to support me through the journey and gleaned fabulous ideas and inspiration from their own blogs and lives.

Lately I had been feeling like I'd lost a bit of momentum, but have recently realised that it's not that - it's more that I've become so immersed and familiar with this way of life that I don't really think of what I'm doing on a day to day. It's all so normal for me now. I have hit a bit of a plateau as far as extending beyond where we're at - but I think that really I'm just happy with where we're at for now and when I start to get tetchy with the status quo is when I'll pick up pace again. Perhaps it's linked to seasonal changes - we've had the most fabulous summer I've experienced for a long time. I had a successful spring and summer vegetable garden which was everything I had imagined despite never having had a garden before. It has been enjoyable for all the family, it's given us exercise, it's helped us connect with the outdoors, it's been relaxing and it's given us food!

But I think it goes beyond that too - having decided to home educate the kids has also allowed me accept and embrace being at home (who would have thought before becoming a mother that this was not a simple decision in itself!), simplifying our lives, living in the moment and (for the most part) loving it!

The course is almost over

Well, my organic horticulture course has only a few weeks left. I've really enjoyed going along one evening a week. Even if all of the material we cover isn't necessarily what I'm after, just being a part of a group of like-minded people has been enjoyable. The field trips have been particularly interesting and a great way to get to know the others better. We went and visited out tutor's permaculture property on Saturday and it was wonderful to see what they had built up over the past 20 years. They had a bit of everything it seemed - orchards with pigs and chickens (pigs that like licking bare toes I found out - wearing jandals perhaps wasn't the best idea), vege garden, swimming pool which had a natural water feed and filtering system with natural minerals instead of chemicals, grey water system, a barn decked out for WWOOFers to stay in, a wind turbine to power lights, solar power, bees, outdoor pizza oven, cool cellar for the potatoes.

We'll be heading away for a 10 day holiday this weekend to visit friends and family, so will miss a week and I'll have about 3 assignments to catch up on too! But since I will gain a diploma from it all, it will be all worth it.

Now, to find an interesting at-home contract role that combines my organic horticulture with proofreading/editing (not that you'd know from my blog posts lol) - that could be an interesting combination...

Bye bye Milly

Well, yesterday's egg wasn't a good thing. I went down to check for eggs today and found Milly dead under the nesting box. I have no idea what the cause was, but we all buried her and said goodbye. The other two chickens seemed to be looking for her and let out several loud sqwarks.

What is with *this*?!

I went down to feed the chickens and collect the single egg that I've been getting for the past few months. Two of my chickens are broody and sitting on the nest full-time. I have been tossing them off the nest several times a day and generally find one egg under them (they still let the third chicken up there to lay her egg and then take it and sit on it).

Today, one of the broody chickens was sitting on the ground which was unusual and I found two eggs in the nest after removing the other chicken - and one of them looked like this! It looks like green dye. Any ideas why??

Fresh corn

The other day I harvested almost the rest of my corn. So today I decided to cut the kernels off them since no one is wanting to eat them anymore (after eating 2 or 3 a day initially lol). I decided to make corn fritters for lunch using the fresh kernels. Usually I make these with tinned creamed corn, so I needed to google a recipe to use. I was interested to find that mostly New Zealand sites came up with recipes - are these not really eaten around the rest of the world??

Anyway, here was the recipe I went with...

1 cup corn kernels
1 cup flour
2 large eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vegetable oil
1/2 cup milk

Mix together, drop a large spoonful into the pan and fry.

They were so much nicer than the tinned corn variety. The corn kernels had a nice crunch to them and were very juicy.

6.3kg!

Yep, that was how big the first pumpkin is! That's 13.9 pounds for those who don't work in kg's.

I'm thinking, if the rest of my dozen or so pumpkins also grow this big then I'll be seriously looking at selling them to the organic shop the next town over that sells off excess produce from local people who grow spray-free produce.

Capsicums!

Yes, finally! I started growing these seeds way back at the end of September. So, 5-6mths later I have these wee things. They're not huge, but a decent size anyway.

I almost have another 2kg of tomatoes ready to cook up as well...

Muffins? Ah...no...

Nathan got all excited when he came into the kitchen this afternoon and saw the muffin tins up on the bench. He looked inside and asked if they were muffins? LOL.

I had HEAPS of carrots backlogged up in my fridge from several weeks of vege box deliveries where they gave us too many to be eaten, and then there were my own harvested lot.

Since they were starting to soften up a bit I decided to freeze them in portion sizes. After pondering how I'd do that, I thought the muffin tins would be perfect for holding one sliced carrot per tin. I will then be able to transfer the frozen lumps into freezer bags or the likes.

Wah! Is summer really over?

It seems that as 1st March rolled around that the beautiful weather we've had all summer disappeared as autumn officially started. Today we had a cold southerly go through, it was extremely windy, and rainy at times (has been for a few days). With the evenings now getting dark at 8.30pm as well, it seems that winter really is on it's way.

More tomatoes!

Over the last week I collected up another 3.5kg of tomatoes. So yesterday I cooked up some more tomato fondue. Tonight we used a thick portion on our pizza - it is so yummy, yummy, yummy and the kids love it (in fact Danielle ate hers off the pizza and left the pizza base). I'm just posting this as a reminder to myself how much I harvested this season. Strangely though, I only ended up with about 1.5 litres of sauce as a result (and that included all the onions). We scooped out the skins (I didn't bother to pre-peel them this time) and the hard lumpy top bit - but it wouldn't have been that much of a loss to the overall weight. I know that a fair portion evaporated since I like the sauce thick, but wow, I expected a lot more I guess.

There are still masses of tomatoes ripening. I think I planted about 15 plants and I ended up with about 3 self seeded plants. Next year I need to look at organically fertilizing the plants too coz the tomatoes are all pretty small (a bit larger than a cherry tomato) and I suspect that that is because of lack of fertilization rather than the variety.