Tag: Harvesting

Expanding the homestead and harvesting

What’s there to harvest and what animals did we get?

Well, that is just the way life goes. No baby, but back in action doing gardening and expanding our homestead.

My husband and children had finished planting all of de gardens. Some gardens did Ok, others where ratter disappointing. I will be reviewing our different type of garden beds after they have been harvested and prepared for winter.

Harvest

Meanwhile harvest has been somewhat disappointing. The onions where very small and I will not come around to buying onions in winter. I am trying to shorten the time that I will have to buy onions by using onion tops and spring onions as much as I can for as long as they are growing in stead of using the onions we have in storage.

The garlic did well and even had some nice size bulbs compared to last year. What I found so strange is that some of the garlic plants also made a small bulb in the stalk above ground level. I have never seen this before, but apparently some varieties do this instead of making a flower.

2 Garlic plants with nice bulbs and small bulbs higher up in the stalks

I am also saving some seed. The kale, unlike last year, survived the winter and bloomed beautifully. After the seed where done I cut all of the seedpods of and let them dry for a while. Deseeding the pods was a bit unpleasant, because the seedpods where a bit sharp and stung but with gloves on it was ok. We got enough seed to last us a life time.

Kale seedpods
Kale seeds in a jar
Kale seeds

We also collected seed from mustard, spring onions, lupine, peas, carrots, different grains and different flowers.

Seeds from carrots with some carrot seed heads
Carrot seeds

I am also drying some marigold flower leaves to make some calendula salve.

Marigold flower leaves on a paper towel to dry

We finally started to harvest tomatoes, but we are losing the plants to blight again. Surprisingly late since we are having rain for over a month already. Luckily we also have a greenhouse now and there is no blight in there yet. With the first chilli’s turning red in the greenhouse, I made a chilli sauce on tomato base. My husband enjoyed it very much after a few months without chilli sauce.

A harvest basket with tomatoes, chilli’s and a cucumber
2 jars with a home made tomato base chilli sauce
tomato base chilli sauce

Other then that we have been eating potatoes from the garden, but the beans have been very disappointing. We are also having some cucumbers from the greenhouse.

My sons Hokkaido pumpkin was the only pumpkin plant to really survive and thrive, so he is very proud of that and checks the crop every day.

An almost finished pumpkin with a small new still flowering pumpkin growing on a bed of straw

I have been trying to harvest some blackberries, but since they are wild growing most of them are hard to reach and will be enjoyed by the birds.

A blackberry with some nice fruit
Picked blackberries in a white bowl

As for our homestead

My husband left to collect sidewalk tiles at a friend’s house. He came home with 2 runner ducks (a couple). I’ve always wanted to have runner ducks to eat the so many slugs we have in the gardens. Apparently they also eat lettuce, so I did not let them in the main garden yet, but they where in our garden 3 with the compost bed with the potatoes. They seemed to find more then enough to eat there. As the type of crops growing will allow, they will be moved trough all of the gardens.

Runner ducks taking a swim

Well, since the runner ducks do not go into there coop we also bought some geese to protect the runner ducks against the fox. After that the potato bed, obviously, was done.

4 beautiful white geese on the look out

As the coop we build for the runner ducks stayed empty we also bought some meat chickens after which we where gifted some dwarf chickens we put in the coop with them. Well the coop was a bit small for all of these chickens, but after the meat chickens have been butchered the coop is a very comfortable home for the dwarf chickens (they are so cute).

4 dwarf chickens and a dwarf rooster sitting on fence

We got 5 female sheep, lambs from this spring, and we plan on breeding with them. They are still too young though, but next year in the fall we would need a male sheep as well.

4 blackhead sheep grassing

We went out for some hare to raise for meat, but now we have one female for breeding and 3 males which are the hare of the kid’s. It is unbelievable how much the kid’s love there hare and care for them and cuddle with them. I have never seen such tame hare before. Well, we can’t possibly butcher these, so it will just take a bit longer before we will eat some hare.

4 hare in there stables

Last but not least my husband gave me some fantails for our anniversary. They don’t really do anything, but are beautiful to look at.

4 gray fantails sitting in front of there coop

To finish up some beautiful pictures

A beautiful bright green grasshopper sitting on a hand
A beautiful bright green grasshopper
A little green frog sitting in the grass
A little frog
A beautiful pastel yellow sunflower against a bright blue sky
A pastel yellow coloured sunflower
Beautiful, compact grown, white borage against a bright blue shy
White borage

Saving the last of my vegetables out of my garden and putting them to good use

In addition to harvesting and getting the harvest pressure canned, I also urgently needed to plant the garlic for next year

When we came back from our holiday we had snow and it was cold. I was worried that my red beets (which I did not manage to harvest all before we left) would freeze and I could not use them any more. Therefore the first thing I did was harvest all of the red beets and processed them with the pressure canner to shelf stable soup.

Next thing was to pull out all of the carrots, root celery, root parsley and leeks. Harvesting is fun, so I had 3 little helpers.

Besides using some of the vegetables fresh I also pressure canned vegetable soup (all vegetables from my owm garden). I filled up the glasses with beef broth, which I am cooking almost daily to use up the bones in my freezer.

I am going back and forth between cooking broth and using it to pressure can soup or goulash and pressure canning meat on its own.

Also the broth on its own gets canned for later usage in lasagne or some thing else. I hope to reduce what is in the freezer to what will fit into one freezer and I can turn one freezer of. My shelf is getting filled nicely by now.

Some where in between I managed to plant the garlic for next year’s harvest. Just on time before the big frost came and froze the soil. Only my flower bulbs are still in storage. Hopefully we will have a mild period before we leave, so I can also plant these and enjoy the flowers next spring when we get back from our journey.

Garden Up-Date: The onions are high and dry

I love the sight of all of those onions hanging on the sealing and what else is going on in the garden

The garlic harvest was not as satisfying as I hoped it would be, but therefore I am very happy with our onions. We had 4 raised beds filled with onion sets and harvested around 25 kg of onions from these.

I had different varieties and all did Ok. In every bed there where smaller and bigger onions. Only with the variety Snowball there where a hand full of onions already going bad, but I do not know what the problem was. It could just be that I harvested them to late, or that they where to moist underneath all of the straw. I think I should not mulch the onions so thickly next year.

Onions already soft or with mold

I had my husband hang all of the onions under the sealing to cure and hopefully they will store a long time this way. We will see how long they will last us. With some of the onions the leaves broke of and I can not hang these, so we store these on an egg tray. This way I hope they will store long enough until I can use them up.

Of course there is more to harvest in the garden at this time of year. We already have eaten a lot of potatoes harvesting them as we use them. And there is nothing like home grown potatoes. There is no store-bought potato that tastes so good. With the early potatoes the plants all have died back already, but it is to warm that I can store them. I just leave them in the ground and hope we have eaten trough them before the mice find them and before the potatoes sprout again. They will need to endure for a few more weeks before I can think of harvesting them for storage.

And then there are the green beans and peas to harvest. Luckily the kids help with cleaning them and we have eaten a few and froze a few for meals in the winter time.

We already ate a few zucchini and have many more to come. What can I do with all these zucchini? I still have so many glasses of pickled zucchini from last year, so I am not making any this year.

Despite the fact that the one pumpkin I planted in the wrong spot I am very happy with all the small pumpkins it seems to be producing. And they are growing bigger. I have a few more pumpkins on another spot of the garden, but this one seems to be doing best.

I also have some herbs and also have harvested some of them and dried them hanging underneath the sealing. These are dry and jarred. Ready to use in the kitchen.

I totally forgot to take pictures while harvesting the strawberries and the raspberries, but they where very good and the kids loved them. They where very excided to go and search for some new berries every day. Coming up soon are the blackberries.

We have eaten lettuce and, the kids have no patience, we have pulled still very small carrots to snack upon. Also we harvested our first cucumber.

The tomato plants are growing and growing and growing. I missed out on pruning them and now it is a small tomato forest and I have no idea what to do with them. Therefore I decided to just let them be. I merely gave a few outer stems some support by winding a thick rope around them that is knotted to a small bar above. I hope this will do and the tomato plants will not break off do to the wait of the tomatoes that should be growing on them soon. There are already tomatoes growing, but no changing colour jet.

And then the last thing I wanted to mention in this post is that apparently with one bed with cabbage I was too late to cover with some netting. The cabbage white beat me to this bed. Luckily I found the caterpillars before to much damage was done and I cleaned out the caterpillars and damaged leaves. I will have to keep an eye on this bed just in case I have overlooked some.

And I almost forgot about the red beets. We love red beets and have already harvested a few for soup and as a side. Also I have pickled some for the first time. We can hardly wait to try them.