Honey Harvest

Finally! After a year of bee keeping, we have a sweet result.  We spent five hours last weekend extracting the honey (a topic for another post), bottled it today, and now have five gallons of honey!

Learning to Cook

School is out, so it is the perfect time to teach my teenager how to make some of our go-to dinners, using what we've harvested from the garden.

We started with her favorite, pesto pasta.

 Tonight we used basil (frozen in an ice cube tray from our harvest last summer), toasted pine nuts, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, and a little salt and pepper. (Nothing tastes better than fresh basil pesto, but our little basil plants are just getting started this summer.) 

Another pesto we like uses walnuts, walnut oil, and sage leaves.  Pretty much any combination of fresh herbs from the garden with toasted nuts and some oil will make a great pesto.

 

 She made a very simple salad while the noodles boiled. She tossed some fresh blueberries in a bowl of lettuce.  It doesn't get too much more simple, but it'll do.

 Making dinner is so exhausting.  Thank goodness there is time for a lie-down while the noodles keep on boiling.  If she is this tired in the kitchen now, I don't know how she'll manage making dinner after working all day when she's older.  (Add three children running around the house and maybe a cat and some chickens in the mix and I feel like having a lie-down starting every day at around 7:30 a.m.)

 Here is the plate she assembled for her littlest brother:

 Gotta love that plate.  It is by a company called "Fred". 

Here is the dinner everyone else got:

Very delicious!

Harvest Shot

The strawberries are in!

Just when I thought it would be a bad year for strawberries, I come back from a weekend holiday and find that the slugs, the birds, and the fox did not eat all of the fruit after all.

Harvest Shot

Harvest Shot

Spent some time outside with the boys picking blackberries this afternoon. I suspect that this basket would be full if the boys weren't sneaking so many into their mouths!

Now our fingers are pink as a fun reminder of the harvest.

Harvest Shot

Things are starting to get busy around here! We've pulled in several pumpkins and countless tomatoes.  Here are some more, stacked with potatoes in some very handy Clementine crates:

When the dining room table and most of our kitchen counters are covered in produce, it is time to start canning.

So far, all we've had time to do is can one batch of tomatoes.  We were up to our ears in blueberries and blackberries last month, but we froze them.

I'm not sure what we'll do with our eggplants...especially the one that has two little growths for arms.  How could we resist adding eyes?

He's our new pet.

I'm sure this will provide a nice excuse for why the kids won't eat eggplant now.

Harvest Shot

We often quiz the kids at dinner, "What on your plate comes from our garden?"

 For dinner last night, we had an egg frittata with parsley, roasted potatoes, carrots, and zucchini, and a sweet ending of yogurt topped with blackberries, blueberries, and wineberries (not shown in the above picture--as I was mixing the berries with sugar and cinnamon, I sent my oldest child to go gather a cup of them from the woods; wineberries are the wild cousins of raspberries and are plentiful around here).  The pole beans will be dinner tonight.  : )

Harvest Shot

Underneath the blueberries are some peas, arugula, and parsley.  I also brought in some lavender.  I've grown lavender for a few years, but this is the first year it has looked nice enough to notice.

Yesterday I picked a pint and a half of blueberries.  I need to get rid of the blueberries in my fridge to make room for more, so I'm making a pie today!

I've never made a blueberry pie, but I'm banking on my belief that if you add enough sugar and butter to something, it can't taste bad.  Wish me luck!

Harvest Shot

I love going outside on a rainy morning and coming inside with something like this.  The pop of a strawberry coming off the stem, the thrill of looking under leaves to find something red and round, the smell of wet dirt...it is a good morning.

This is the first day we've picked strawberries.  Last year, we got a very low yield after weeding out some Creeping Charlie two years ago. The weed wrapped itself around most of our strawberry plants, so to remove it required unearthing each plant.  We also had a drought that summer, so the weeding and replanting and baking in the sun was a bit too much for most of the plants to take. After two years, we're finally starting to get some strawberries back.  The ground ivy is still a problem, but I've promised the strawberries I'd be more vigilant about weeding it before it strangles them.

Oh, and I found a pretty egg when I opened up the chicken coop this morning. (See it nestled in the strawberries, above.)