Gardening – Page 25 – Beautiful Chaos

Red beets harvest and soup making

A simple soup made out of our own red beets

After a light night frost we started harvesting all of our red beets before the frost makes them useless. We love our red beets as a soup. Even our children eat this soup well, so I thought to shear the simple way I make this soup with you.

All you need are some red beets, an onion, a few garlic cloves, beef broth, a cup of cream and some dill.

Cut the red beets, onion and garlic cloves into cubes and put the vegetables into a cooking pan.

Ad the beef broth so that the vegetables are just submerged.

Bring everything to a boil and simmer for about 15-20 min. until the red beets are softened.

Now blend everything with a hand blender to the consistency you like and ad the cream and the dill to your taste and liking.

Enjoy

I made a bigger batch so after blending I put half in jars to freeze for a later meal

Hungry caterpillars

Caterpillars eat it all

It is autumn and the caterpillars are very hungry. They devour the leaves completely. Only the stamps are still there. I hope the caterpillars will find a good spot to endure the winter and will turn into beautiful butterfly’s next spring.

It is harvest time

And we have made ourselves a lot of work in the garden this year.

We have no useable soil on our property, so we have to work with raised beds and hillbeds in order to grow our vegetables.

This means a lot of work before we can even start with gardening.

As you can see on the picture we also mulch all our beds. Our location is ratter warm and dry, so this way of gardening is beneficial to keep the moisture in the soil.

Unfortunately this year was no good for the tomatoes. We only harvested a few handfuls of so many tomatoplants we had started from seed in the winter.

On the other hand we had an abundance of zucchini, even a few broccoli en a bunch of onions.

**Broccoli, Zucchini, Zucchinisoup and elderberry jelly**

A few red cabbages have been turned into sauerkraut and kimchi. And I hope I find the time to harvest and process the rest of the cabbage before the caterpillars eat them all.

The paprika was getting late to ripe due to the cold wetter now and then. So we had to harvest them green otherwise the paprika went bad before turning red completely.

Since we do not like the taste of green paprika I am fermenting and pickling them. Also the chilies are getting fermented.

**Paprika and Chilli pickled and fermenting**

We are so lucky to have a great potato yield. We had a number of different varieties. One did better as the other. Our favorite is the potato “Aromata” which tastes very good and gave us the best yield with a lot of very big potatoes.