The garden is going into production mode. With over 6″ of rain this month I’m just grateful the garden drains well and the sun comes out once in a while! Time to show you how things are growing.
First, we have the row of lavender and the first row of carrots.
Hope you can see the lavender buds ready to pop. I’m so hoping the whole row will eventually be in bloom at the same time. I have good memories of the lavender fields in California that were so impressive. Plus, I can dry the buds and use them in my soaps and skin care products.
The second and third partial row of carrots are doing well. The end of that row has a few green bean plants. That’s where we tried to grow beets, but nothing came up. Must be the seeds. Oh well. I can buy beets at the Farmers’ Market.
I couldn’t resist pulling a few just to see how big the were.
This section had two rows of green and wax beans. My California granddaughters helped me pick them and we ate them right away! Very good!
The extra beans went into the dehydrator and now fit in this little bag. Storage is easy and they are ready to toss into soup anytime.
These are the second two rows of green and wax beans. Yesterday I picked the largest green beans. Today, the largest wax beans were picked. By Monday many more will be ready to pick.
We have lots of tomatoes…only one was ready to pick.
The Echinacea is finally making flowers. Who knew we had such a mix of colors? I hope the bees enjoy them!
As I walked down the hill, I passed the cucumber plants and peeked under the leaves. Surprisingly, the few plants that are left are making cucumbers!
So, this is my early morning harvest today! There are still some hot days ahead this week so things will start ripening fast.
We do not have a huge garden this year, but it is fun to check it out each morning. If I really want a quantity of produce, the Farmers’ Market is still my best choice. At the end of each season, I can usually get large bags of cucumbers or tomatoes to make into relish or spaghetti sauce for a good price. Enjoy!
Ted’s family has been visiting us from southern California for the last two weeks. It’s been two years since we’ve been able to give them all a hug! Luckily, Ted is able to work remotely and Erin is a teacher and can travel in the summer. The girls are 15 and 12. We try to plan a few activities but mostly we let them explore the area as they like.
Here are some photos of their visit. (Thank you, Erin, for having your camera ready…you took some wonderful pictures of your activities!)
Of course, no visit to Boalsburg is complete without a guided tour of the Boal Mansion Museum & the Christopher Columbus Chapel.Near the Mansion are lots of new trails with blueberries along the way.It was time to bake a cake to celebrate birthdays!Happy Birthday Erin, Annika and Aislinn!The girls were very helpful at bean picking time!There are always lots of craft projects at Grandma’s house.We had to try my new soap molds. (Gee, I look like I’m gritting my teeth! I wasn’t, really!)They couldn’t resist the local swimming pool. Lots of updated stuff since they were here several years ago.Ted remembers learning to swim at Whipple Dam, so they had to check it out.Most of the time Ted was hard at work……but who can resist a game of horseshoes!They couldn’t come to see Grandpa without a little shooting!This is what they were aiming for!And of course, a trip to the Penn State Creamery was necessary!They said the Creamery offered only one size of ice cream cone! Riiight!Can’t come see Grandma without checking out the greyhound kennel on the edge of town.This hound got special attention from Aislinn.The most exciting event of their visit seemed to be the huge thunderstorms we had this past week! California is dry right now and all that rain invited dashes off the porch to feel the rain.Three power outages gave us a chance to light all the lamps and remember why most people went to bed at dark way back then. Of course, we all had backlit e-readers and phones, so we were fine!The rainbows after the storms were impressive!That concludes some of the adventures with our California kids and grandkids! They will head out tomorrow to get home in time to get ready for a new school year. It was a great visit!
Today is our 54th Wedding Anniversary! I know! Hard to believe! Actually, we celebrate the date we eloped in 1967…
My goodness we were so young!
…not the next August (1968) when we fessed up and told the family. Long convoluted story for another time! We renewed our vows and had the reception! Who knew it would last 54 years!
Bert, Grandpa John Bixby and Mary.Bert made me this beautiful box/picture frame last year. A real keepsake!
Our family now has two grown kids with kids of their own! We were thrilled to spend time with all of them over the last few weeks. Ted’s family lives in California and it’s been two years since we’ve been together. Luckily Kathy’s family is near Pittsburgh so we’ve seen them more recently. We are blessed!
What a pair!All four cousins got to bond and Erin was able to get into the picture too! Not sure how Steve got away with not being photographed!
What a wonderful visit! More pictures about what they did at Grandma’s house in the next post! Enjoy!
Things happen…or they don’t! A large thunderstorm rolled through the area last night (not related to the approaching hurricane from the South). Ted is visiting from California; Erin and the girls arrive this evening. Around 7 p.m. the power went out and apparently to about 4,000 homes around us. State College did not lose power. Since it was still somewhat light outside, we gathered a few flashlights and Bert found two oil lamps that were ready to go.
I think the clock says 9:20…when I got around to take a picture.
Bert plugged the small wired princess phone in that we save just for these occasions so we could call out if necessary. The land line still worked but the cordless phones would not when separated from their bases. Of course, our cell phones still worked.
Ted was headed out to visit a friend in State College…and then we remembered the automatic garage door would not open without electricity. Undaunted, Bert and Ted manually lifted the door and Ted went off to visit.
As it got dark, we found ourselves sitting at the dining room table where the Aladdin lamp was. Bert was able to play Solitare and with the help of my Powerjak, I charged my phone while I finished reading a book on Kindle. No problem. Luckily, the dinner dishes were done and no machines were running. We had turned the air conditioners off when the storm started because surges of energy are hard on them.
We had a nice evening. West Penn Power said the power could be back on by 10:30 p.m. so we stayed up for a while. It felt like we were at camp…with indoor plumbing!
I was reminded of all the women way back when who had to do their mending and quilting by lamplight. Carrying a flashlight from room to room I could see all the projects I could not do right then, from my sewing machine to the computer. Not enough light from the oil lamps to do my hand stitching for my old eyes either! How times have changed!
When we went to bed the power was still out. It was amazing how dark it was…no tiny lights from various electronics; no dusk-to-dawn lights shined across the yard; no light from the neighbors. However, a glow in the sky told us that State College still had electricity. Power came back on about 1:00 a.m. We got up to turn off lights and reset battery backups.
This morning, we found bits of debris from the trees littering the ground but the plants near the patio did just fine. It’s still raining, so I’ll wait a while to check out the garden on the hill.
No big limbs down, just lots of leaves.The lettuce and radishes were fine.The Spearmint was a little beat down in the middle, but it is fine.
And of course, it was time to recharge my Powerjak…get it ready for the next time!
I’m expecting to hug the rest of Ted’s family later today. We have not seen them for two years due to Covid travel restrictions, so we’re ready for some hugs! Enjoy your day!
I always have winter vegetable soup in mind when I’m planning my summer garden. Eating fresh produce is wonderful, but in Pennsylvania if we depended on our small garden for everything, we would be pretty hungry this time of the year. Lots of tiny green beans and hard green tomatoes, but that’s about it. Even with local farmers’ markets, most of us are limited by our frost dates. Yes, there are some folks with greenhouses, high tunnels and cold frames, but if you look at where much of the produce at our grocery stores is shipped from, you’ll notice locations and countries across the globe.
One of the books I re-read every spring for inspiration is by Barbara Kingsolver, titled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, (2007).
This is a non-fictional account of her family as they move from Arizona to a family farm property in Virginia. She documented their efforts to eat only what could be grown in their local area, beginning with asparagus in the early spring through the next spring, using foods they had grown and preserved. This account is a good reminder of how many of our families had to survive before foods were transported from far off lands. It was a very dedicated family project!
To me this was an incredible effort to show how it can be done by adjusting our daily recipes to use local foods and finding ways to preserve the foods we do grow so we can use them in the winter, spring and early summer.
I have no interest in trying to duplicate their year-long project, but I am inspired to find ways to preserve the foods we do grow so they are available in the winter. I have grown basil, parsley, thyme and oregano in the past. I still have little jars of dried parsley, thyme and oregano in the cupboard. I needed more basil flakes, so I made sure I had some in the garden this year. Last year I dehydrated kale just for fun. That made a nice addition to vegetable also.
A quick buzz in the blender made kale flakes to add to soup!
Our tomatoes will be cut up, cooked enough to soften them and canned or frozen to be added to soup or made into spaghetti sauce. (Sorry…no pictures of canned tomatoes…all gone! It will be several months before I have any ripe tomatoes.)
No ripe tomatoes yet!
We did not grow corn this year, but we will eat it in season when it’s available at the farmers’ market. We’ll cook a little more than we eat each time, cut it off the cobs and freeze or dehydrate it. At the end of the season, I can pick up a bushel of corn and do a marathon of dehydrating!
This early corn…from someplace else…was not very sweet but will work in soup this winter!
We will eat green beans fresh and the extra is snapped, blanched and dehydrated. They will take up so much less room than frozen!
No meals from beans yet!
I always try to have dehydrated onions and celery available. They are easy to store and fill in if the celery that has been shipped from California or Mexico doesn’t look good.
And of course, stock! There is usually canned stock or broth in the grocery store, but if I have it in the freezer, I prefer that. When I cook a chicken, I always try to make my own stock. Canning is worth it if I have a huge batch. Otherwise, it goes into the freezer. Check out how to make chicken stock in an earlier post from May 20, 2021.
As you know, vegetable soup is pretty flexible. After dried vegetables have simmered a while in the broth to reconstitute, I check the refrigerator to see what other vegetables or meat could be added. Adding fresh carrots, onions or potatoes is easy.
If the weather is miserable outside, there’s nothing like taking time to make a batch of soup noodles! That was always fun when the kids were little. Bert has memories of making noodles with his Grandmother…there was no other choice but to make them yourself! I have not made noodles since I discovered I couldn’t eat eggs, so I’ll have to find a different recipe!
I always feel like I’m the Ant in the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. It gives me such satisfaction to know I could pull a hearty soup together from just what I have in the house. Give it a try with the resources you have! Enjoy!
By this time in the garden…about 5 weeks after planting everything…we are seeing some successes and some failures. Frustrating, but totally expected. Between the weather and the bugs, it is almost guaranteed that some plants do very well and others don’t. Things can change even in few days. Ahh, the adventure of gardening! Thank goodness for the Farmers’ Market and even the produce in the grocery store.
It has been 15 days since our last measurable rain. We’ve had some dark and cloudy days, a little sprinkle now and then. We know this because Bert has tracked our rainfall for over 20 years, every day from March 1 to November 30. Our rain gauge measures to the 100th of an inch. Remember, Bert’s an engineer!
We’re grateful for the rain barrels to keep everything watered.
Two weeks ago, the cucumber plants that Bert started indoors back in April were doing very well.
Two weeks ago, these were the cucumber plants.
Over the last few days, I even found 4 small cucumbers that I ate immediately! Yummy! Yesterday the plants were wilting and even with watering they did not perk up. Absolutely dead! With a little online research, Bert found that the culprit was probably a bacteria in the soil. That particular raised garden has had the same problem over the years…first with strawberries and last year with cucumbers. Looks like we need to try to find seeds/plants that are resistant to that issue, or at least plant something else there. Anyway, Bert pulled out the dead plants.
Now we’re left with the plants that we planted directly in the garden from seed. So far, they are doing well but I’m not optimistic that I’ll get any cucumbers! We’ll see.
Now how about the rest of the garden! My raised planter is doing well. My second batch of radishes are almost ready and the lettuce has been picked and replanted.
Radishes almost ready to pull.Second planting of lettuce…only Black Seeded Simpson this time.Chamomile…flowers ready to pick!Lemon Balm and Stevia.Basil…ready to pick and dehydrate.Thyme and Rosemary.Carrots and Lavender. Looking healthy!Carrots looking good…however, the beets (at the top, two partial rows) didn’t even come up at all!No beets…just weeds!The first tiny bean! Yea!Lots of green tomatoes. These are Burpee’s Super Sauce tomatoes. Should get twice this size before ripening.However, Bert found these aphids on the back of all the tomato leaves! Time to spray!Echinacea plants finally look healthy. Even some flowers are starting! I sure thought they would be much taller by now.And of course, the Spearmint is doing well. I plan to use some of the leaves fresh for infused water and dehydrate some for tea.
That’s the tour. We certainly don’t grow all the vegetables we like to eat, but over time we’ve decided to let local growers handle the things we don’t have room for (like corn) or the things we don’t eat very much of (like squash and potatoes). Every other year or so I’ll go to the Farmers’ Market at the end of the season and pick up a pile of cucumbers to make relish, or even tomatoes and make ketchup. Our carrots will stay in the ground until probably Thanksgiving and we’ll just dig them up as we need them.
The older we get we know which vegetables are labor intensive and which we don’t want to mess with anymore. As the season goes on, I’ll start preserving any abundant vegetables by canning, freezing or dehydrating. More on that as I do it!
I finally found a recipe for a Vegan Banana Blueberry Walnut Muffin that actually rises and tastes good! I’ve tried adapting regular recipes by removing the eggs and substituting the milk with almond milk, but for some reason that just doesn’t work.
When I find a recipe online, I’ll print it out, put it in a plastic sleeve in a notebook. As I experiment with the recipe I’ll write directly on the printout and even write comments like I did on this one (Tasty).
Once I’ve made the recipe several times and like how it turns out, I’ll retype the recipe into the format I’m most comfortable with (see below). This format seems to be common with the Joy of Cooking cookbook that I’ve been using for years. I can glance down the bold-typed list and easily see the ingredients I will use.
This morning, after I retyped the recipe I decided to make a batch.
First, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees. Because I could see (down the list of ingredients) that I needed bananas and blueberries, I got them out of the freezer first to let them thaw. Then I chopped the walnuts so they were ready to go.
Step 1: I put all the dry ingredients into a big bowl:
Step 2: In the small bowl with the smashed banana I put the oil and the almond milk and mixed them up.
Step 3: Then I added them to the dry ingredients and stirred them up.
Step 4: I folded in the walnuts and the blueberries.
Step 5: I divided the batter into the muffin cups.
Step 6: I put them in the preheated oven for 23 minutes. They needed that extra minute because the bananas and blueberries were still pretty cold when I mixed them in.
We had over 2 inches of rain last night and I thought I’d better see how beat down the garden was. Luckily, there are no puddles in the gardens so it looks like the garden beds are draining well.
The dogwood tree blossoms are still looking good, but I don’t know how long they will last.The radishes on the right in the raised planter look pretty beat down. The lettuce looks ready to pick!The geranium flowers always need to be trimmed after a heavy rain.The Spearmint looks a little bedraggled. It will perk up!Cucumber plants are starting to spread out.The first cucumber!Just planted more cucumber seeds two weeks ago so maybe we’ll have cucumbers later in the season.The Chamomile always looks like it took a beating after a rain, but you can see the beginning of flowers.Lemon balm and Stevia. Time to pick and dry some lemon balm leaves.Basil and Rosemary. I’ll snip a few basil leaves today when the plants dry out a little.The Thyme is finally starting to perk up.Carrots and Lavender. Even after 2 inches of rain, wet but no puddles…good drainage! Right now we need sunshine!Green and yellow beans.Second planting of beans.Tomatoes.Blossoms galore!And then there’s our diehard Echinacea! Come on guys…let’s get going! We have faith you can do it!
I must say, it’s days like this that give me hope that everything is right with the world…well, at least in my little corner of it! Enjoy!
In 1955-56 my family spent a school year in the Philippines. My father was on a sabbatical and taught at the University of the Philippines near Manila. My sister had just graduated from high school, my brother was 15 and I was turning 9.
Many animals in the Philippines were different from what I saw every day here in State College, Pennsylvania. Instead of tractors in the fields (or even horses like the Amish) the rice fields were being plowed by Carabao, or water buffalo.
Chickens were wandering near homes in our neighborhood and the roosters woke us up each morning. I remember my brother having fun fashioning a trap with a box, a stick attached to a long string, and some bait to try to catch a chicken. As I recall, he was successful, but the neighbors were not too happy. Of course, he had to let them go and the chickens continued to wander the neighborhood.
We were offered the opportunity to “adopt” a pet monkey while we were visiting in the Philippines. This monkey had been living at a nearby lab and was probably used in experiments…who knows (remember, this was 1956)! She was being “retired” and we could have her for a pet for a few months.
She lived outside our back door and was chained just like a dog. Her sleeping area was a box high off the porch. She had a bar to run across and could reach the ground with the chain on. She would leap off the bar and then climb back up the chain to her perch. My brother loved putting her on his shoulder and walking around the house.
When we were first introduced to this monkey in the living room, she looked so sweet. Her long arms could wrap around your neck like a big stuffed animal. I was sitting on the couch with my legs crossed and we watched her explore.
As she moved around, I uncrossed my legs and ACCIDENTLY bopped her on the head! She instantly leaped on me in anger and started pulling my hair! Yikes Not fun!
She finally calmed down, and everyone felt that she would be OK, I had just surprised her. From that day forward, she did not like me. She was smart and knew when I was around. I stayed out of her way!
Several times over the next few months, she would get loose and run to the roof of the house. It was hard to get her to come back. Soooo…Mary became the bait!
I would stand on the porch and call her. She would come running across the rooftop, jump onto my shoulders and start pulling my hair, screeching all the time. Mark would quickly grab her off of me and take her away.
Needless to say, I was not sorry to see her go back to the lab when we were getting ready to leave. My brother had a nice pet for a few months, but I don’t have fond memories of the animal. I hope she had a good life…someplace else!
I’ve been told that the memories that “stick” are ones with strong emotions attached…good or bad. I guess that’s why this one stuck with me all these years!
Just a quick post about freezing bananas. Why would you even want to do this? I use half a banana and a handful of frozen blueberries in a breakfast smoothie. Since it’s a real pain to keep ahead of bananas to use them before they spoil, I’ve found that if I slice and freeze them, they make the smoothie even better!
I try to buy bananas that are about the same ripeness so I can cut them up all at once. Folks must think I run a restaurant or have a big family!
I get the small snack-size Ziplock bags and start slicing.
I have a bowl ready for all the peels and an extra paper towel to put all the stickers on. Since I will add these peels to the compost bin, the stickers need to be removed. One year I did not remove them and after we had put the compost into the garden, I was finding the stickers intact years later!
I slice the bananas into 3/4″ slices and lay them flat in the bag; one banana will fill two bags (approximately).
When finished, the stickers go in the trash, the peels go into the compost bin and the bags of slices go into the freezer!
These slices are great for my smoothies and they also can be used in other recipes that call for mashed bananas. They thaw quickly and are easily incorporated into baked goods…and no over-ripe bananas sitting around my kitchen! Give it a try! Enjoy!
The second and third partial row of carrots are doing well. The end of that row has a few green bean plants. That’s where we tried to grow beets, but nothing came up. Must be the seeds. Oh well. I can buy beets at the Farmers’ Market.
