Our Squash Runneth Over

Luci's in the kitchen again, trying to use up our enormous supply of squash. If a body could live on squash and cukes alone, we'd have it made. Nothing else made much in the garden in the drought conditions---but the squash are happy.

I'm posting Luci's squash relish recipe. If you're in the same situation as we are, you have to try this. I hate squash, but I love to eat the relish. It tastes like a combination of sweet pickle relish and chutney. Great on grilled sausage or hot dogs, and great on beans and cornbread.

Squash Relish

10 cups finely chopped squash (we used a combination of pattypan, yellow straightneck, and zucchini, and we do it in the food processor)

4 finely chopped onions (we do this in the food processor, too)

2 Tablespoons pickling salt

4 cups sugar

2 1/2 cups white vinegar

1 teaspoon cornstarch

1 jar chopped pimiento peppers

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 1/2 teaspoons dry mustard

1 1/2 teaspoons turmeric

1/2 teaspoon black pepper
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Place all ingredients in a nonreactive pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a low boil, and keep it rolling for 30 minutes. If it's a little thin, let it simmer for another 10 minutes or so.

Pour into sterilized jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Seal with sterilized rings and lids. Place in boiling water bath, and boil for 10 minutes. (If you've never processed jars before, bring a big pot of water to a boil, making sure water is deep enough to completely submerge upright jars.) Remove jars from boiling water bath and set aside to cool. Before storing, make sure jars are sealed. (The lid will not "click" up and down if you push it--it will be vacuum-sealed).

This recipe makes about 12 half-pints, or 6 pints, with enough left over to put some in the fridge for immediate eating.

Forecast: No rain, plenty of snakes

This little fella had to die today. I went out to the chickens to feed them a pile of carrot peels, and this one was wrapped up in the corner happily swallowing a nice brown egg. Probably harmless, but with my kids around I don't take a chance. I tried to chop the head with a trenching shovel, but the snake slipped through the chicken wire to the other side of the pen where I couldn't get at it.

Foolishly, the snake stayed in the same spot while I went into the house and got the shotgun. I'd feel bad about killing this guy except I draped him over the fence next to the cattle guard and I know that by morning one of the woodland creatures will be happily digesting a free lunch. The last snake I killed only lasted about a hour before being dragged or carried off. Everything's gotta eat.

As for the garden, we are dying for a rain. Today we had 80 percent chance of rain. We got the twenty. With those odds we should have stayed in Vegas. Hasn't rained here in about a month. The grass is dry and brown and every county has a burn ban. I think the heat has just been to much for the tomato plants. They look dry and wilty no matter how much water they get. I have been waiting for a break in the heat to plant a few things for the fall garden. I went to the Extension office yesterday and got a list of plants that do well in fall gardens. The next couple days I am going to prepare for those plantings by re-tilling some rows like my green beans that are totally done for.

What the F, man! All my melons are bursting open!

Not a pretty picture. No, it's really freaking not.

Right now we probably have twenty to twenty-five watermelons of different sizes, but every time one gets to be a good size, the watermelon splits open.

Everyone I talk to says this is due to overwatering. Ok, it's like 9000 degrees outside and I haven't been watering that half of the garden...So how is it possible that the melons are getting too much water???

The only advice I have found is that I should snap off the ends of the vines so that the melon grows, not the vine. This seems like it would just make them split open faster, but as it stands now, we are not going to get any melons out of the garden if this keeps up.

The only good news is that, like the corn, the chickens are more than happy to eat the ruins. At least the melons are being enjoyed on a hot summer day, even if it is not my kids getting to have watermelon juice dripping down their chins.

Next year we will have a separate patch for melons and another for corn. This will allow us to better control the water and maybe we will be more sucessful.

Processing Tomatoes on the 4th of July

A long day started with picking the biggest batch of tomatoes we have had so far. In addition, spread out on the counter were tomatoes we let ripen in the house. We had too many to eat, although there is one tomato Luci has set aside for a BLT. No one can touch that tomato. She's threatened us with bodily harm. The most of the rest we processed into tomato sauce using our handy-dandy tomato mill.

Luci bought the mill on Ebay for twelve bucks a few years ago. It is pretty nifty. As you crank the handle the cylinder inside turns with a scraper/smasher, and it separates out all of the skin and seeds from the pulp and juice.

You can do it with completely uncooked tomatoes, but it takes more work to turn the mill. If you quarter the tomatoes and put them in a pot with a little water you can cook them until they are a little a soft, and then the mill is much easier to to turn.

We put the watery tomato sauce in ziplocks and will cook it down when we are ready to use it, but you could go straight from the mill to the best tasting pasta sauce you've ever had. Our older daughter begs us for a glass of fresh tomato juice every time we do this. She even scraped out the pan after we finished.

How to make garlic dill pickles

Hot Garlic Dills

4 quart jars, rings, and lids

Sterilize and keep hot rings and lids.

In each quart jar, place:

1/4 tsp. alum

2 peeled garlic cloves

2 heads fresh dill, or 2 tsps. dried dillweed, or 2 teaspoons dried dill seed

1 or 2 dried hot peppers

2 peeled pearl onions

Pack cucumbers tightly on top of all this, and place in open stock pot; bring to a boil and remove.

Also, in a separate non-reactive pot, bring to a boil:

2 cups white or cider vinegar

1/2 cup pickling salt

4 cups water.

Ladle hot vinegar mixture into hot jars, leaving 1/4-inch headspace. Place lid and ring on top to seal. Make sure jars are sealed tightly before storing. Pickles will be ready in 6 weeks.

NOTE: We left out the hot peppers since our little ones are the pickle-eaters in our house. That'd just be a dirty trick.

If man could live by cucumbers alone.

The corn may be messed up, the okra may have gotten too big to be any good, but we have cucumbers.

I mean, we have more cucumbers than we know what to do with. Over the last couple days we have been hatching our plans for next year's garden. We have realized that we have more than enough cucumbers to fill our kids' pickle cravings, eat plenty of light cucumber and tomato salads, make some spreads for crackers, give away a ton and feed a few to the chickens.

The plan was to pickle the okra too, but with four or five plants we haven't gotten enough to pickle. My youngest loves pickled okra, I mean LOVES pickled okra, but we get a couple ripe pods, and then we have to wait until the next ones are ready--so by then the first ones aren't good anymore. We have to plan on lots ripe at the same time in order to get a jarful.

Selecting plants for your garden based on what you plan to eat or preserve is as important as what will grow. I have eight banana pepper plants that have cranked out piles of great peppers, but next year I will plant more bell peppers and poblanos and less of the banana peppers.

The radishes are a good example of having too much of something you don't really need. On occasion, I like a radish, but I don't eat 'em enough, so most of them have waited too long to be picked and have gone bad.

We definitely need to get our balance right of what to plant and when. Next year we will plant more rows of green beans and stagger the planting times so they produce over a longer period of time. We need to do as much planning as digging.

Corn for us, corn for the chickens

We picked the corn today. This is what was usable out of all the corn we planted. I don't know much about growing corn, this I am sure of.

We have about fifty corn plants. Sounds like lot; doesn't look like much. Out of all that, this is our harvest. If we were depending on us growing a crop of corn to get through the winter we would be like burnt toast, done.

Most of the corn was eaten by some kind of worm, some destroyed before it produced, a little ruined by ants as far as we can tell and this is what is left. This has led us to spend lots of time discussing what to do differently in the garden next year.

Next year we will try to find a local variety that

produces well and is possibly more resistant to local conditions. On the One Million Gardens site, a few people suggested putting a drop of mineral oil on the silk as it emerges and using a clothes pin to tighten the husk to keep critters out.

The up side of our corn disaster is that our chickens will love to eat this corn, including the worms, which they will find a tasty treat. My kids actually took a couple of the worms off and hand fed them to the chickens. I feel a strange sense of pride seeing my kids pick up a worm and feed it to a chicken without being squeamish about it.

Living in Las Vegas you get a weird sort-of santized reality where everything looks clean but really, it probably has hepititis. In the country lots of things look nasty but are totally harmless.

No rain again, prepare for less tomorrow

Today, the rain came down for about a minute. Too bad, I ran out of water that I had been saving from rainfall on Father's day. I finally had to break out the hose to water the blueberries, the raspberries, fig trees and the peach tree. Each rainfall I have been collecting about 80 gallons of water. The rain came spaced out just enough that right when the buckets and the five gallon jerry cans that I have been using were empty we would get a down pour. I have been collecting since the beginning of April, I figure I have used around 2000 gallons of rainwater this year. I need to get a couple of plastic barrels and make some good rain barrels. They sell for around fifteen bucks at the feed store. I think I need to be able to store around four hundred gallons to get through the driest parts of the summer, maybe six hundred.
Like many people I talked to my dad on fathers day. He told me he only had two little cucumbers this year which amazed me cause we have already make eight jars of pickles and we pick bucket full every day. He thinks it is because it is not hot enough in northern California and they are not getting enough water. He also thinks they are going to raise the water rates. Living in any densely populated area the cost of water will soon outweigh they cost of gardening. Any kind of micro agricultural enterprise just wont be feasible on a large city lot because no one will be able to afford the water. There is a blog I like about homesteading in downtown Houston and starting what they call the high density home orchard, but water costs are just going to get exponentially higher over the next couple decades.
Orchards are the kind of thing you have to think of in terms of decades. They just don't happen in a year or two. We are really lucky to have plenty of water here. We have lived in the desert so we know what it is like to have a water bill that can double in a year. Living in the country growing some of your own food does make you think about the resouces around you what can you do with them? how do you sustain them? what are they worth? what I am doing to protect them for my self and my kids?