This Year's Harvest

This year we braided our garlic. Aren't they pretty?

Pumpkins

For fun we grew pumpkins in our front flower bed. They filled in the end of the bed that we weren't quite sure what to do with quite nicely. In fact they took over! and climbed down the hill all of the way to the mailbox.


We planted three plants and harvested one pumpkin from each. Here is one as a baby. They grew quite large.
Two of them were cooperative and grew up in the flowerbed. The third grew over the edge of the hill. It was quite a challenge for William to get it up and of course it was the largest!


I had Coleen and Biscuit pose with the pumpkins after William rolled them around the house. As you can see Biscuit is a little distracted...

by the cat!

Flower Garden

One of the magic things about a garden is that it is always changing. Plants start blooming and stop. They fill in empty spots and then die back and create a new space for something else.

I try to get out every week or two and take pictures of our front flower bed. It is mostly perennials and so far this summer it has put on quite a show. I changed spots this last week so I could include the giant pumpkin that William added to the end of the bed as "filler". It's now trying to take over!

Spring

Spring is being signalled this year by small things-

The trees have not leafed out yet, but small little blooms have started appearing: crocus and daffodils,

various wild flowers I don't know the name of.



The cacophany of sound when you open the door- the birds are back. Friday at work, I could watch them gathering materials for nests. Right now I can hear cardinals and a woodpecker and various song birds. A moment ago a pair of Canadian geese flew over. I never notice how quiet winter is until it becomes so noisy in the spring.


The other day, a wood duck landed on the factory chimney across from our house... it seemed a funny place for a duck to be.



Spring also means the start of the garden. Last weekend we had three days and gorgeous weather so most of the beds were prepped with two truckloads of compost

and we planted potatoesand onions.

Garlic

We planted garlic this weekend.



Most of it was what we had saved from this year's crop, but we did buy a third variety to supplement. Clockwise from the back left is Spanish Roja, German White and Chesnook. They are all hard-necked garlics. The Chesnook we bought this year at the farmer's market in Madison, WI. The heads have large cloves and have a beautiful red skin. Most importantly, it had good flavor too. We ended up planting about 75 cloves this year. This should be enough to hopefully have enough to eat next winter as well as plant (this year most of our crop went to seed.)

Here we are adding compost to the bed before planting the garlic. We then laid out a grid of holes and put one clove in each hole. We'll put straw over the bed after the garlic comes up to help keep the cold out and then it will sit there all winter.




As soon as it starts warming up next spring, it will start growing. This picture is from last April. We then harvest in July when the tops start dying back.

mmm mmm... summertime

I love all the fresh food of summer. Even though grocery stores try to rob us of a sense of season by having everything all of the time, there are times when things are going to taste better because it is their season.

And for a lot of fruits and vegetables that is high summer. We grow a garden and there is always anticipation for the first of the season and then there is the point of gluttony where you wonder what you will do with one more zucchini.

Welcome summer eating in a northern clime. This week was our first zucchini and our first cherry tomatoes. We can see the peppers and eggplant getting bigger and anticipate eating them in a couple of weeks along with tomatoes if they hold out against the wilt.

We were able to get corn for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It is one thing we don't grow. It is so abundant in Wisconsin, you can go any direction out of town and run into a roadside stand selling it. It is so delicious! We usually just boil it and slather it with butter and salt and pepper.
This year, though, because I was feeling a little bit homesick for where I grew up,the first corn and zucchini went to calabacitas! This is comfort food from New Mexico. Saute corn and zucchini with onions and green chiles. Season with salt and pepper and top with cheddar cheese.

But the best part about summer is the fruit. It starts with strawberries in June, moves into sour cherries and blueberries in July and continues with apples and grapes in September.

There are several pick your own places in the area, so we'll go out on a weekend and pick enough to enjoy fresh, make jam and freeze some for treats later in the year.

Strawberries were ready at the end of June and we were able to find rhubarb at the farmer's market at the same time so we made strawberry-rhubarb jam and William made the most delicious pie.

Next were cherries. We drive a couple of hours south of our home for these. These are sour cherries, make great pies and jam, but not necessarily an eating cherry - the crop wasn't very good this year, but we got enough to make jam and froze enough for about 10 pies.

We will be picking blueberries next weekend. We went last year and they are fun to pick (ie. no prickly thorns or scratchy branches to attack you) and were very abundant. I love to go to the freezer and grab a handful for a snack and then the pies...

If you hadn't guessed we make lots of pies, but that is the subject for another post.

Welcome

Welcome to the journal I will be keeping on sewing projects and the rest of my life. Hopefully, I can offer some inspiration.

To start things off, I would like to offer this picture from our flower garden. Gardens are always a work in progress, but I thought this combination was particularly fortuitous - especially since the Echinacea was not the color we had picked out at the nursery! Both William and I spend quite a bit of time out in the garden. In fact the gardens, both flower and vegetable, sort of take over our lives in the summer. I find I get frustrated with the lack of time to sew and knit, but when I look outside and see the flowers or am able to cook a whole meal with produce from our garden - I know it's worth it!