Produce Inventory

Much of Friday afternoon was spent reorganizing freezers and inventorying current produce supplies. I have enough peas blanched and frozen now, so I am going to tear down the vines. They are about spent anyway. I’ve still got some corn and collard greens from last year, but I will have to plant both of those crops next year. (I gave up on spinach in favor of collard greens because the spinach was only good for about five minutes before it bolted, and if you missed that five-minute window, too bad.) We have plenty of berries.

I worked in the garden for a few hours yesterday morning. I picked another two gallons of raspberries, finished cleaning the clover out of the lettuce bed and re-seeded with more lettuce, weeded around the beans, and dug up some of the volunteer potatoes so I could make potato salad for dinner. We move our crops every season—and some plants re-seed themselves with abandon—so I’ve got volunteer potatoes all over the garden. It’s like a mini-Easter egg hunt. I found Yukon Golds, Butter Reds, and Purple Vikings.

I wish I could get a good picture of the lavender hedge. It is just covered with bees and butterflies:

Maybe I should try a video next time. The whole thing is buzzing.

The grapes are coming along:

I don’t know if they are going to ripen before a frost, but we’ll see. This summer has been so different from the previous dozen years. It just hasn’t been as hot. The poor cowpea crop looks like it will be a bust. The seeds all germinated and the plants look healthy, but they are still only about 3” tall. I really needed to plant the seeds a month earlier. I’ll try again next year and sow some directly and start some inside.

My drying beans, though—oh my goodness. They look phenomenal:

I’ve got five different varieties. I didn’t know if some would do better than others, but they all look this good, and they still have a month to go. This makes me happy. We eat a lot of beans and if I can grow my entire year’s supply, I’ll be thrilled.

Despite a cooler summer, the tomatoes look good and I’ve got a nice crop of Oregon Star paste tomatoes coming on. We can keep tomatoes going until the end of September even if we have to cover them at night. We’ll have plenty of zucchini. I see several baby pumpkins starting, too, but I think our watermelon and cucumber crops are going to be less than stellar unless we have a hot August. Every year is different. You get what you get and you are grateful for it. I said to the husband yesterday that I was glad we took this year off from raising pigs and that we scaled back the garden a bit. I feel like I have things a bit more under control out there—or at least I have a really good illusion of having things under control out there. Next year, though, we’ll have to add back in some of the things we skipped this year, like corn. And pigs.

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When I came in from the garden yesterday, I spent a couple of hours cleaning drawers. I cleaned out and organized the junk drawer—you know, the one that everyone has in their kitchen that collects all the miscellaneous stuff—and cleaned out and organized the drawer where we keep all the pens and pencils. I had cleaned out that drawer previously, but a child graduated from college and deposited all her leftovers there. Oh, well. We have a goodly supply of pens now and I made sure I only kept the ones that worked. The rest of the office supplies are corralled in one spot and labeled now, too.

I have done some sewing. I’m not working on any huge projects right now, just trying to clear the decks of smaller projects. This week, I need to make some washable makeup pads for the girls. I have the cotton fleece and the serger is threaded and ready to go. All I have to do is cut the pieces on the Accuquilt cutter and serge them together. Last night, I worked on putting together another comforter top to tie at sewing on Thursday.

The husband got the rest of the metal up on the roof yesterday. He tells me that getting the bathroom plumbed and the floor poured are the next two things up on the schedule, but he’s happy enough to have the roof on and his trucks and trailers out of the weather.

That poor baby rooster is trying to be friendly, but every time he comes over to me for scratch grains, he gets broadsided by a girl gang of hens. He will be big enough, eventually, to elbow them out of the way, but I feel bad for him. The husband just did a garage apron for the guy who gave us the baby rooster. The husband has to give him periodic updates on how the baby rooster is doing.