Using up green tomatoes

We pulled our tomato plants out this past week. Both age and a small bit of blight were effecting them and they needed to go before the blight could spread. We got a great harvest from our tomatoes this year and other than a few disappointing varieties (one variety split open 9 out of 10 [...]

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Everything Has a Place

My grandmother used to say, “Everything has a place and everything in its place.”  I hated hearing it growing up as I was a messy child, but I began to understand the wisdom in that sentence when I started running a home of my own.  I see the value in this bit of wisdom working [...]

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Getting Saucy…Raw Tomato Sauce

Making raw tomato sauce, no cooking allowed on this one. Nutritious, delicious, and easy!

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Should I plant a cover crop?

It seems like I was just fretting about planting the garden, and now it is frenzy of harvesting and preserving.  But in the back of my mind on these cool nights, is that fall isn’t too far off and winter will be here before I know it. I plant a variety of cover crops, and [...]

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family medicine chest: kitchen herbs as medicine

a lot of people become intimidated when it comes to herbs because they don’t know where to start. most are familiar with the more commonly used ones such as echinacea and st. john’s wort but what a lot of people don’t realize is that they have a whole arsenal of medicinal herbs in their spice [...]

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A Little About Cornbread

After my last post a few weeks ago, we joked in comments about the passing around of cornbread and how I might write a recipe in my next post. Even though I don’t have an extra special cornbread recipe, I have certainly cooked enough of it and eaten enough of it to share a few [...]

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Deep fried olives!

Take pitted green olives; pipe some mashed seasoned goat cheese into where the pit was; flour them, egg them, crumb them (mix a bit of Parmesan mixed into the breadcrumb mixture); fry them in, yes, olive oil. Let them cool a little while before letting yourself pop one into your mouth to enjoy the burst [...]

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Improving the Soil

Soil is an extremely important “product”  as you surely know. I don’t care if you have thousands of acres or just one—-you must have good soil to have good health and good products. Not only does it make the vegetables or animals harvested taste better and be better for us it also can reduce or [...]

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The Gift Cupboard

I’m in the middle of food preservation season in a big way, I’m sure I’m not alone in that.   In addition to our food preservation needs, I keep my gift giving needs in mind as well.  See, I think home canned or dehydrated foods make excellent gifts so I try to make extras of things [...]

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Pushing Potato Pots!

WhooHoo…we harvested our first potatoes! We tipped over one of our potato barrels and one smaller pot…and had so much fun doing it! I haven’t grown potatoes in years and never before in barrels…it worked very well indeed! There was no worry about cutting into the potatoes with a shovel as your dug up the [...]

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