Using sound judgment to be more self-reliant.
Often when people start talking about integrating a garden or other food crops into the landscape, the design ideas still tend to focus on two dimensional diagrams. How many fruit or veggie plants can I fit per square foot? While there's nothing wrong with this per se, it means you're missing out on some great opportunities to optimize growing space you might not even realize that you have.
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My youngest loves homemade baked beans and cornbread, possibly even more than he loves sloppy Joes. He'll eat them for three meals a day if I let him. I like this recipe because of the earthy molasses, bacon (can't go wrong with bacon) onions and garlic (don't skimp on the onions, and use fresh garlic if you can). It's a simple recipe but really tasty. [Read more…]
Home canned green beans are one of the boys' favorite veggies, so I try to process about thirty quarts each season. Our last round of “green” beans actually started out mostly as Purple Podded Pole Beans (which turned green when canned or cooked), but our main crop most years is Emerite pole beans. I prefer pole beans because there is less bending and they produce over a longer season. Here's our system for cleaning and processing home canned green beans. [Read more…]
Our green bean season is all but finished here in northeast Wisconsin, but a friend of mine down in Texas mentioned that she just planted her fall crop of beans and it is coming along nicely. So, for my southern gardening friends, and for northern gardening friends to pin for next season, I'm sharing the dilly bean recipe that I made up earlier this year.
Home canned dilly beans are another recipe that always reminds me of mom, like the pickled beets I shared a couple of weeks ago. Vinegar pickles of all different types were a staple growing up on the farm, from the jewel red beets to the slippery pickled mushrooms. I remember one year when mom did a huge crock of some sort of cucumber pickles in a corner of the kitchen, but I don't remember what recipe she used. I have to ask my siblings and see if anyone else remembers. Pickled veggies add a great crunch to any meal and may help aid digestion by adding a bit of acidity to the mix. Pickling (adding vinegar and salt) also allows you to water bath can vegetables that would otherwise require pressure canning. [Read more…]
Annette at Sustainable Eats tagged me in a meme that asks participants to share “a day in the slow life”. I have to say, from what I've read so far, most of the “slow life” folks have pretty busy days.
In an effort to get this posted in time for Simple Lives Thursday, I'm going to try to recollect this past Monday. The days sometimes seem to run together. There's always so much I'd like to do, and then there's what can reasonably be accomplished (at least by me, an individual who requires sleep). [Read more…]
