3rd round of summer squash, 3rd round of beans, two more batches of lettuce
Harvest:
Lettuces, carrots, mini bulbing onions, green onions, garlic scapes, dill, basil, beets, broccoli, kohlrabi, summer squash, pickling cukes, bush beans, eggs, milk.
Preserve:
7 lbs butter, sorrel seeds.
Store:
another gallon of drinking water
Prep:Ordered pressure canner, butter crocks, cover crops,
Manage:
Weeded gardens, continue to eat down last year's stores.
Cook:
Made a double cream chevre.
Add:
CSA delivery to 10 families: lettuces, beets, end of kohlrabi, carrots, summer squash, beans, mini bulbing onions, green onions, garlic scapes, dill, eggs.
Reduce:
Besides the usual, I thought I'd try to share a tip or trick that has helped me in my reduction journey. These are ongoing and often things I've been doing for a while, and maybe folks have already thought of these long ago, but I thought I'd post about them anyway.
Tip: In order to help reduce our hot water usage, I put red electrical tape around the hot faucet handles to remind us to grab the cold instead of hot for small tasks. Obviously, this only works if you have separate handles for hot and cold water, but for us, it was a helpful visual reminder to break the habit of reaching for the hot.
Learn:
I continue to read and learn about cover crops and seed saving.
7 comments:
Hello Danielle,
I have that pressure canner and I love it. It really was easy to learn how to use and I have never felt intimidated by it: I think it's the hardware that helps! What's new for me this year is canning meat and meat-based soups/stocks. It's great to make a boatload of dried beans and then can those up to have a huge stash to grab out of the pantry as we need. It also helps ease up on the freezer space that's getting kind of precious lately.
That cheese though is making my mouth water!
Awww. I'm so jealous of your pressure canner.
I've yet to get a pressure canner, I've just done it in a water bath. One of our good friends sustained a very bad burn from one last summer causing him to be blind in one eye for a little bit and some significant facial burns. Not to scare you off but it did me a bit. I think he had a few cold ones in him so that didn't help.
Lastly, what are garlic scapes?
Have a nice week, Kim
What type of canner did you get? Did your neighbor want theirs back? Have you tried pressure canning yet?
Hope you'll post your recipe for chevre...
---linda :)
ps... Having grown up pressure cooking, and using a pressure canner, i know it won't be hard for you to master.
El, yeah, this one just looks and feels more reliable than the gasket one I have from my neighbor. Not to mention the fact that I have an actual user's manual with it. That helps a whole lot as well!
My goal this month is to start out canning some black beans and chickpeas from storage. From there, I hope to step up to chicken stock, which I've been freezing. Baby steps and all. ;)
Yikes, Kim! That would scare me off a bit, too. How did it happen do you know? (Garlic scapes are the flower stalks sent up by hardneck garlics. You cut them when young, way before bloom, so the plant will send all the energy down into the bulb. They can be chopped just like chives or green onions and make a great pesto if you have enough of them.)
Christy, I just didn't trust the one my neighbor lent me, and I kept avoiding it. Of course, I also kept avoiding shelling out the $200 bucks for something I ostensibly already "had." In the end, this seemed like a false economy if I wasn't using the dern thing, so I sucked it up and bought the one I really wanted—the All-American from Wisconsin Foundry.
See linda... this is one more reason I wish you still lived close by! Of course you know how to use a pressure canner, and you could've just come over for a visit and helped me do it for the first time. *sigh*
I just want a pressure cooker right now! Add it to the list....
I had meant to ask you what the red tape was all about when we were there! I thought it was to help one of the children remember which was hot or cold.:) I guess it is in a sense.
Post a Comment