It’s always encouraging to see how much the garden has grown in two weeks…especially with enough rain on a regular basis! Two weeks ago (May 21) this is what the lettuce and radishes looked like:
May 21, 2021
Today, the radishes are ready to pull and I could make a small salad with the lettuce:
June 3, 2021Radishes ready for a salad!Ready for the next batch of seeds!
These are the seeds I planted. I’m pleased with how they did.
The raised planter gets two thumbs up from me! It was easy to keep an eye on the plants…easy to water, thin and harvest without breaking my back! Thank you Kathy and Steve!
Most of the garden looks pretty good too:
SpearmintCucumberChamomileLemon Balm and Stevia (I’ve had to cut back the Stevia. It kept trying to make blossoms and I wanted a bigger plant).Basil and RosemaryRosemary and ThymeLavender with carrots on the left. Barely poking through the ground!Close up of the carrots.. 🙁 Green and Wax beans perking up.Tomatoes have blossoms!The Echinacea we started from seed still looks tiny compared to the three plants I bought. Oh well!
At the moment, the rain barrels are full to the brim, the big tank in the garden is full too. So, when it decides to stop raining (which often happens in the middle of the summer when we need it most) we’ll be able to keep the garden consistently watered.
Thanks for letting me share the garden with you! Enjoy!
Everyone says we should drink more water…from weight loss gurus to medical professionals. I know that! But how many of you really reach for a glass of water instead of a soda, iced tea or coffee? I really don’t mind having a bottle of spring water nearby most of the time, but it really isn’t the same as a cold, fizzy diet soda! However, I’m trying to make better choices.
I’ve had this book on my shelf for several years, Infused Water by Dalila Tarhuni (2017). It was a pretty book…lots of great pictures! However, given the choice, I always seemed to choose a diet soda over making (and drinking) infused water.
This book has a few short statements about why we should drink infused water, the benefits we might get from drinking infused water and how to make it…followed by 75 recipes! The pictures were so inviting. Certainly, I could find something that would appeal to me.
So, I found my special pitcher that I bought about the same time I got the book. It has an insert to hold cut fruit. When I checked on Amazon to see how much it cost I discovered almost 50 different models of infused water pitchers! Of course, this one was not listed any more. However, they all do pretty much the same thing…separate the fruit from the water so it can be removed easily after infusing.
Then I went to the grocery store to get some fruit. I found strawberries, kiwi and pineapple. I already had a few blueberries and apples, but I thought I’d start with just the first three.
I cut enough to fill the insert and filled the pitcher with filtered water from the tap. Then I set it in the refrigerator overnight.
The recipes in this book often include several fruits and an herb for additional flavor, like mint leaves, a sprig of rosemary or chamomile flowers. Sometimes a sweetener is suggested. My taste buds are probably out of touch with reality after years of artificial sweeteners, so I’ll have to re-sensitize my palate. Maybe then a sprig of stevia might be noticeable. Of course, none of those additives include caffeine! Yikes…how to find a natural substitute for that! I don’t care for coffee or tea so I may never wake up!
Why make it yourself?
Have you noticed how many brands and flavors of “water” are on the shelf at the store? Every brand advertises a different benefit, like detoxing your system or balancing the pH of your body; and for only $1.00 (or more)!
I’ve tried many of these brands and frankly I’d rather just drink our filtered tap water. However, I would still reach for my diet soda! Frustrating!
Are there health benefits to drinking infused water?
Bert had a few questions about why I thought this would make the water better or healthier, so I decided to do a little more research about infused water so at least I was informed about its REAL benefits, if there were any!
Diet soda on ice is very cold, which I like. When I put our filtered tap water on ice it’s good, but basically the ice doesn’t taste great, so the filtered water doesn’t either.
I’m hoping having really cold, better tasting water available will give me a healthier option to choose. We’ll see!
According to webmd and healthline,
“The main benefits of drinking infused water come from the simple fact that it’s water! Adequate hydration is absolutely key to being healthy. By infusing tasty flavors, many people tend to drink more water. Infusion can thus be a way to make water more appealing.”
Great! Every glass of cold infused water I choose is one less glass of diet soda I drink. I guess that’s a good thing.
After I took the fruit out of the pitcher and tried a glass of infused water, I could taste the faint hint of the pineapple and strawberry. It isn’t sweet but it’s cold and wet. I’ll keep you posted!
Take a walk with me around the gardens. We planted all our seedlings and seeds last weekend, hoping that the cold weather is gone for good. My patio planter with lettuce and radishes is doing well!
Lettuce on the left, radishes on the right.
Right off the corner of the patio is a big pot with 4 Spearmint plants. I know this will get huge over the summer and the bees should love it.
Spearmint
The small garden beds near the patio with my herbs and cucumbers look sparse…but I know that will change by the end of the summer. It’s always tempting to fill in the spaces with more plants because I forget how big some of these plants will end up. For now, I’ll try to curb my enthusiasm!
These small raised garden beds have removable fences so I can weed easily but the greens are safe from roving bunnies! It’s funny to watch them hop all around the fence trying to find a way in.
CucumbersChamomileRed basil, regular basil, rosemary and thymeLemon balm and Stevia
The regular garden up on the hill will have flowers on both ends (Echinacea and Lavender).
Echinacea. The larger plant is one I bought at the plant sale. We’ll see how our little ones do.Super Sauce Tomatoes (from Burpee seeds)
Four rows to the left of this picture are planted with green and wax beans, carrots and beets. Nothing to see here until they sprout. On the right are 8 lavender plants. I’ll use the flowers for my projects!
Since we planted everything, we have had no rain. We’re grateful for the big tank of water at the corner of the garden. Bert has pumped the rain barrels twice so far so we should have about 200 gallons of water to work with. Now we just wait for the plants to grow!
Yesterday was HOT! Not the best time to have the oven on all morning, but I had put a frozen chicken in the refrigerator to thaw on Sunday and decided today and tomorrow would be even hotter, so into the oven it went! My plan was to cook the chicken and take the bones, etc. and make a big pot of soup stock. Why not keep the kitchen hot all day!
While the chicken cooked, I pulled out my biggest stock pot (12 qt.) and started pulling assorted vegetables out of the refrigerator that could be used in the stock. I had celery ends, onions that were too strong to eat raw, and I even had a handful of dried apples that had been shoved to the back of the shelf. If I had planned ahead, I could have saved other vegetable trimmings over the last few weeks and put them in the freezer instead of the compost bin! Next time! Then, I added the giblets from the chicken (neck, heart, etc.). They will add to the flavor. I set this pot aside until the chicken was done.
Next, I picked off all the meat for other meals and put everything else (bones, skin, juices) into the stock pot. I added about 1/2 cup of vinegar to help get the nutrients out of the bones. Then I added water until everything was covered and put the lid on. I brought it to a boil and reduced the temperature until it was just simmering.
For the first several hours the vegetables all float to the top, while the bones sit on the bottom. I stirred the pot about every half hour. About 3 hours into simmering I added about a quart more water to keep things covered.
After about 6-7 hours most of the vegetables had lost their color and the bones were separated and soft.
Doesn’t look very appetizing, but the broth will be delicious!
Next, I started scooping out the juice a cup at a time and straining it through a colander. I tried to avoid scooping up the soggy vegetables. Any bits of chicken that made it through the colander will stay in the stock. If I wanted clearer chicken broth, I would line the colander with cheesecloth and strain it again.
When I finished scooping out as much juice as I could, the leftover vegetables and bones are pretty soggy looking!
On a cold day/night I would usually put the lids on the pans of stock and set them in the cool garage before packaging them up. I like to skim the fat off the cool stock before freezing. Last night was too warm so I just packaged it up as is. When I use a container of the stock I might have to remove a layer of fat, or not. It was more important that I get the stock into the freezer before I went to bed. Warm chicken stock sitting around for hours is asking for bacteria to move in!
However, I ended up with 12 pints of stock to put in the freezer with another quart left over to make chicken vegetable soup today! Yea!
I’m sure it’s easier to pick up a container of chicken stock at the store, but I just can’t waste the opportunity to make my own. I’m set for a while! Give it a try!
Please comment or email me directly if you have questions. marykisner@comcast.net. Enjoy!
Exactly one year ago we had a killing freeze. With that memory of ruined tomato plants that we had grown from seed in mind, we are being very cautious about putting out plants too early. Hopefully, by this weekend it will be safe. Today we are giving the plants a shot of sunshine and fresh air, but will move them back into the shop in case tonight is still cold.
Echinacea, cucumber and tomato plants.
The tomato plants are doing well…they are 12″ high!
Some of the echinacea plants are doing well. Who knew they would be so hard to get started! (The three large plants in the middle of the small ones came from the plant sale last weekend!) They will be planted along one end in the garden and hopefully come up each year.
The cucumbers that we planted just a few weeks ago to get a head start are huge. We’ll plant the rest of the seeds directly in the garden.
I went to the Plant Sale last Saturday and picked up most of the herb plants I wanted. It was a cold, damp day but the sale was busy.
I found Thyme, Rosemary, Lemon Balm, Regular Basil, Purple Basil and Spearmint.
The Spearmint will go into a big pot on the patio. The other herbs will be in the small raised garden with the Chamomile that is already perking up from last year. You can sort of see it at the far end of this garden.
This year we are trying out a new raised planter that Steve and Kathy have designed and built. It sits right outside the patio door so I can keep an eye on it. I planted two kinds of lettuce and radishes there a week ago and they have already popped! This planter is also easy to cover right now if it gets too cold.
Bert is rototilling the garden today and the sun is shining. Soon it will be time to get out there and really dig in the dirt!
Please comment or email me directly if you have questions: marykisner@comcast.net! Enjoy!
We’ve had over 1/2 inch of rain since we set up the rain barrels on April 27, 2021. That’s 10 days! The rain barrels were probably full after the first rainfall, but today was the day Bert got around to pump them up to the holding tank in the garden. I tried to document all the details of the equipment he used, but hopefully you’ll get the gist of the process.
First, Bert put one end of a long garden hose into the holding tank in the garden. Then he ran the hose down the hill to the little pump sitting behind the shop. He says it’s about 100 feet.
This is the first barrel he will pump. He removed the lid and screen. You can see how much pollen and junk the screen collected. The red hose on the side handles the overflow if the barrel is full
And the barrel is definitely full!
The first batch of water to go up to the holding tank gets about a cup of Clorox added to keep bacteria from growing in the tank.
This is the motor he uses. It’s a 1 HP Portable Lawn Pump. It pumps the water about 100 feet uphill at 70 psi.
Here are the various hoses and cords ready to assemble.
The garden hose (red) is in the foreground. Bert is holding a siphon hose. It is larger around than the garden hose and has a quick-attach adapter.
This is the other end of the siphon hose…called a foot valve.
He fills up the siphon hose with water.
Once the hose is full, he quickly attaches it to the motor. He also adds water to the connector on top of the pump which primes the pump housing.
Hard to see in this picture, but then he loosens the bleeder valve to release any air in the pump.
Next, he attaches the garden hose to the motor and tightens it. He also tightens the bleeder valve.
The other end of the siphon hose goes into the barrel. He tucks the hose between the barrel and the supporting wooden stake so it doesn’t come out while it’s working.
And then, he turns the motor on!
In 8 minutes or so, the barrel is almost empty. He quickly turns off the motor so it doesn’t suck air.
The lid and screen goes back on the barrel and it’s ready for more rain!
Bert picks up the motor and hoses and moves them to the other rain barrel to repeat the process.
When he’s done with that, he goes up to the garden and removes the garden hose. The holding tank is now about 1/3 full (about 120 gallons). It holds about 360 gallons.
Whew! I learned a lot today. We should have a full tank by the time we transplant our seedlings.
Thanks for following this story. If you have any questions leave a comment or email me directly at marykisner@comcast.net. Enjoy!
Over a month ago, I bought a bag of nice small apples just to eat. The bag ended up in the garage temporarily while I was doing other things in the kitchen. I totally forgot to reach for them…out of sight, out of mind! Needless to say, they still looked OK but the they were getting soft. Before they were too soft to eat (that’s called rotten!) I thought I’d just dehydrate them. I know we’d eat them that way as snacks! Here are the 15 small apples:
First, I had to uncover the dehydrator. Most of the year I keep it covered and store it right outside the back door. It is already plugged in and ready to go. We keep a board on top to protect it from damage because that seems to be the place where we pile things…stuff to go out to the shop, packages delivered by UPS, etc. I went out to take a picture of it before I uncovered it…and sure enough, UPS had dropped off a package already this morning!
Then I pulled out the manual to check how long to dehydrate apples. They provide a color-coded map to help determine how long to dehydrate foods, based on location and season. Fruit should have 10 to 20% moisture content to store well.
For May in Pennsylvania, it said a range of 51 to 70% (indicated by yellow) or 71 to 80% (indicated by green) in the instructions. Then I look up Apples and find the yellow means 11 hours, and green means 13 hours. This is very important if I want to store them without refrigerating them.
So, curious challenge for today. It was already 2:00 p.m. when I finished peeling and I don’t like to leave the dehydrator running after I go to bed. At 9:00 p.m. I turned the dehydrator off and put the apples in a zip lock bag and put them in the refrigerator. They are still a little moist inside. In the morning I can always lay them out on the trays again and finish drying them for another 5-6 hours. I think we’ll just eat them!
Here’s the process to dehydrate apples:
After washing the apples, I made a bowl of lemon water to put the sliced apples into as I peel them. That will keep them from discoloring.
Then I laid the apples on the trays.
And put the trays in the dehydrator.
I set the temperature to 135 degrees.
After 7 hours, the apples were dry on the outside but still a little moist inside. They would need another 5 hours or so to be dry enough to store on the shelf.
Those 15 apples made a small pile of dried apples.
Next time I want to dehydrate apples, I think I’ll get larger apples and use the apple peeler/slicer attachment on my mixer…much easier! At least I didn’t waste this bag of apples and we have snacks for a few days!
One of the things I treasure from my parent’s generation was their foresight to save many written stories of their lives. Sometimes it was an envelope of letters from a loved one overseas, or stories they wrote for historical societies documenting life “back in the day” like my Grandfather did.
Sometimes, they specifically wrote “Autobiographies” with photographs, assembled in their later years. My mother had even saved a handwritten autobiography she wrote in high school (around 1926) that shared her life up to age 12 or so.
As I get older, I feel like I’ve let the next generation down. Somehow, I was never able to document my life adventures as it happened with daily journals. In 2013, I had written several letters to my grandchildren which summarized my early life. The first story, which I posted here on April 14, 2021, titled “Born in the middle of the story,” shared some of my earliest memories. This account of my visit to the pyramids in 1956, when I was just 9 years old, was the second story I wrote for them. After this, I’ll try to continue with more memories from years ago and build my “Book of memories from Grandma Mary.”
***
In 1956, when I was 9 years old, my family was visiting Cairo, Eqypt for a few days as we traveled from the Philippines to London. We had spent a year in the Philippines while my Dad worked at the University of the Philippines.
One of the places we visited was the pyramids and the Sphinx on the edge of the city of Cairo. I thought we were going to make a long drive out into the desert because in all the pictures I saw, the pyramids were way out in the desert. But the city had grown and was quite close by.
It was hot, noisy and unfamiliar. There were camels everywhere with colorful tassels, bells and blankets on them. When they walked the bells would jingle. The men leading the camels around offered to take us for a ride…for a price, I’m sure! My brother, Mark, wanted to take a camel ride. My sister, Jean, said she would sit on a camel. I wasn’t sure about it at all.
We went to some camels that were lying down on the ground. They didn’t look so big. First my brother got on the back of the camel. He didn’t seem scared at all. Then my sister tucked her skirt to look like pants (remember, in 1956 girls and women wore dresses not shorts in public) and got on another camel. Then I was lifted up to sit right in front of her. Much higher than I expected!
THEN the men had the camels STAND UP!
We were VERY high off the ground! The men holding the camels led us around a little. I held on tight but it felt like I was going to slide down the camel’s neck.
Finally, it was time to get off the camels. First, the men had to make the camels kneel down. The men took their canes and hit the camels in the back of their front knees to make them bend down. Of course, the camels didn’t like that! They made a terrible noise! It sounded like they had been hurt but the men didn’t seem to be worried.
Once their front legs were bent, they lowered their back legs to rest on the ground. Finally, I was lifted off the camel. What a ride!
Twenty years later I was teaching 5th grade in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania. That year we had a unit on Eqypt where we learned about the people who lived there long ago and built the pyramids. Most of the students had never seen a camel. In 1974 there was no zoo nearby. The students researched how big camels were and we built an almost-life-sized camel in our classroom. Bert helped by building a wooden frame. It was so big he had to build it in the classroom! Then we padded it with newspaper and covered it with paper mache’.
The students painted it brown and it was part of our class while we studied Eqypt. (I couldn’t find a picture of the finished camel.) We didn’t want to tear down our camel friend at the end of our studies of Eqypt so the floor under his belly became a cozy place to read. He kept us company the rest of the year!
***
Watch for more adventures from my past…posted under Around the Kisner Homestead: Memories from Grandma Mary.
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Today was a beautiful day to set up the rain barrels. Each rain barrel holds about 60 gallons of water. They collect most of the runoff from both sides of the shop roof so we put one on each far corner.
Bert stores the barrels in the shop in the winter. If water froze in the barrels they would crack so we don’t use them during the winter months.
Below you can see Bert has removed the bottom section of the spouting that runs out into the yard. The concrete slab is the base for the barrel. The post just behind it will be used to tie the barrel down…if the barrel is empty the wind can just blow it away!
The he adds a shorter extension up high that will funnel the water into the barrel. He said he had to add a little piece on the end to slow down the runoff so it goes into the barrel. Otherwise, it zooms straight past the lid of the barrel!
Here’s a close up of the extension. The small piece on the bottom edge is a flap that seems to do the job of slowing down the water.
Then there is a piece of screen that came with the barrel that is held down by the lid. This filters out big stuff like pine needles and bugs.
Then the lid (with holes in it) is screwed on to the barrel.
Finally, Bert ties a rope around the barrel and to the stake so it doesn’t blow away when empty.
He stores the spouting until fall.
This barrel is ready for rain!
On the other corner of the shop the steps are the same. Here’s the logo printed on the barrels.
Finally, when the barrels are full, he will attach a hose and use this little pump to get the water up the hill to the larger storage barrel. It holds about 360 gallons of water. Then we use that to water the garden.
Seems complicated, but we’re not hauling water to the garden and the plants seem to like the natural rainwater!
I’ll share more about the process of pumping the water when we do that. First…it has to RAIN!
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Today was a beautiful day…gives us hope for more days like this in the near future! I wanted to share a few pictures.
The garden plants that Bert started several weeks ago are coming along. The tomato plants will soon need to be repotted into larger pots. We still have a month to go before we risk planting them in the garden. Soon he’ll set them outside when it isn’t too windy.
The echinacea plants are struggling. We planted four different varieties and many did not even sprout. We’ll see what we get a month from now.
I wandered the yard and wanted to share that the redbud trees are finally in flower. They are especially pretty with the yellow goldfinches for contrast…but of course they fly away when I get too close.
Across the street the wild redbud trees are one of the first to blossom in the spring. They really show up when everything else is still brown.
The dogwood trees…in the foreground…are still waiting. That’s a good thing. We’ve had two nights of freezing temperatures, so for now their pretty white blossoms are safe.
Our son-in-law has provided us with a nifty planter to try. He’s experimenting with making them to sell to a local nursery. They are great for older folks that don’t (or can’t) get down to garden down low. I’ll use this right by the patio door for lettuce and radishes. They are not in the ground for very long and don’t have deep root systems.
We enjoy having our wind sock in the back yard. It’s pretty and Bert likes to know which way the wind is blowing before he burns wood in the shop.
Unfortunately, the weather is pretty hard on it and we’ve had to replace it more than once a year. This year he finally decided to go with a REAL wind sock like they use at the airport. Hopefully it will survive better this year. The neighbors must wonder if we anticipate low flying planes!
Bert has also recorded daily rainfall for 20 years! Imagine that! He reads the gauge every morning from March 1 to November 30. It has been helpful to know when to water plants because even though the weather folks might say we’ve had substantial rain, sometimes our specific location has had more or less.
It was time today to empty the compost pail. I notice when I buy a lot of vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli, I have a lot of vegetable scraps. I think we avoid an extra bag of garbage each week by composting.
The composter is made by the YIMBY Company (Yes In My Back Yard…cute name, right!). We have two of them. When one is full, we let it sit and start on the other one. Bert will rotate them both every week or two.
You can tell by the color of the grass in these pictures we have a beautiful lawn this year. Bert is cutting it today for the second time this spring.
We got a postcard in the mail yesterday advertising a plant sale at the Centre Furnace Mansion, sponsored by the Centre County Historical Society. Just the right time to see what’s available for the garden!
I hope all of you are having a great April day too. We may not have the earliest spring around here, but we certainly appreciate it when it gets here!
