Category Archives: Square Food Garden

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  1. We have been extremely busy the last several weeks. We are in the process of converting the fabric metal pole structure that covered the beetle (Matt’s Volkswagen) to a  wooden structure covered in metal.  I knew it would be a process but did not think it would take over a month.  We really focused on getting it under roof.  Last Saturday we spent close to 8 hours solid on it and I made the decision that it was not a worth to try and continue at that pace to get it under roof. The current plan is to get a door on tomorrow. A tarp is currently over the roof and  it will likely be a month before we work on the roof.  My current plan is to start sharing pictures tomorrow.
  2. Zach’s truck broke down in the school parking lot on Monday. We had it towed home and then after some working and investigation, it appears that the fuel pump is part or all of the problem. The goal is to get that replaced tomorrow however the part was delayed so it may take a little bit on Sunday as well.
  3. Working has been a bit much. I am struggling to get in a routine. But I am hopeful that things will start to improve.
  4. Next week Braxton’s baseball starts which means that we have at least 3 evening of games.
  5. I am planning to do some big meal preparation over the weekend. The current plan is to make a double batch of taco soup with half or more canned for convivence. The second big preparation is meatball. The Costco meatball are all gone and we have lots of ground beef that can be used.

5 Things Friday

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This first week back at school has been extremely busy, but not in the overwhelming busy way but as in productive busy.
1.We started working on  and almost finished adding pickets to the fence that our neighbor placed on the property line.  We ended up finishing this project on Wednesday evening. I am hoping to post pictures and more of the explanation on Saturday.
2.The chickens have taken more time than normal. On Friday and Saturday, we left the dog cage open and closed it at night. On Saturday night instead of closing the door we moved the new chickens into the coop. The new chickens have responded beautifully, they go up in the coop every night.  HOWEVER, two of our oldest chickens have decided that they do not want to go in the coop.   For the first three nights we moved these stubborn chickens but we have decided to let them be. The coop is secure but they need to learn.
3.On Wednesday, I noticed that my favorite farm stand had corn on sale for fifty cent an ear when you bought 5 dozen.   I purchased these along with several other good things. I was able to vacuum seal these into our family size portions.  Zach also worked on his truck most of the evening.
4.Both Zach and Kendall have been schedule to work every day this week. We did not complain as this is the last week before they head back to school. Zach has had football practice everyday along with a game on Thursday.
5. I want to end on a positive note, I have continued/restarted listing to my Bible reading in the afternoons coming home from work this has given me back a good half an hour.

Thursday Thoughts- Every Bit Counts/ Pantry Challenge/Goals

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I talked a little bit on Monday about the changes/ goals I have for the next school year. My goal is to use up  the food that we have both in the freezers and pantry. At the same time, I want to reduce the amount of money we are spending on food as well. My goal in that area is to spend less than $475 a month on groceries. I would also like to put at least $300 a month toward meat purchases next summer.  The final piece of that is that we have to have meals that are easier to fix on some days just because of your busy lives.

After watching a video on You Tube, I decided to start a meal rotation to make menu planning a little bit easier for me. I tried to make a good list of all the items we have to use for meals. Looking at this list I am estimating that I have at least 100 full meals that can be made with the items we already have on hand.  This should be at least 3 full month of meals. So in December, I may need to purchase some additional meats for the remainder of the school year. At that point it should be very easy to purchase what we need as we continue to use up the food we already have on hand. The hard part of this challenge is that we like certain foods and we gravitate to those foods/meals. I am going to have to be very diligent on making a variety of foods using what we have.

Part of my planning was to try a new recipe for each day for the next two weeks.  On Monday I made BBQ short ribs. It was very good and it will definitely be something we do again.  Tuesday was a Beef Enchilada, not a repeat, just not.  Wednesday was chicken parmesan casserole, this one will be a repeat.

I have been canning ALOT this week.  I always want to fill up all the empty jars so that we have plenty of food in the winter and this summer I am successful. I also filled the extra 5 cases of jars that I purchased from Walmart.  I added 10 quarts and 2 pints of beef stock, 18 pints of pears and 6 quarter pints, 2 half pints and 8 pints of pearsauce to the canning closet.

Not  bad for four days!

Every Bit Counts Challenge/Goals left

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The end of Summer break if fast approaching, in fact I have 8 days left. I have mention multiple times before that I begin working on the Every Bit Counts Challenge as soon as school ends because I ended up back at work several weeks before the challenge ends.  I am very pleased with the amount of food that I have been able to prepare for the school year. One of the goals of the next year is to use as much of the food that we have as possible and also to spend as little as possible at the grocery store as well. I do not have a source of diary so this will continue to be a huge expense.

We made a planned stop at a roadside farm stand on the way home from the beach. We purchased a half a bushel of peaches. These are some of the best peaches that I have eaten in a long time.  I have made a peach cobbler and everyone has eaten peaches this week as a snack. I was also able to can 26 half pints of peaches that will be used in lunches this year.

Before leaving for the beach, I harvested all the ripe tomatoes and threw a couple of quarts in the freezer. We came home to an explosion of volunteer tomatoes as well. With this bounty, I canned up 22 half pints of pizza sauce. I also made a big batch of spaghetti sauce which we used for meals during the week.

Finally, our pears have started to come in. One branch actually became so heavy and broke off. We have been able to can 12 half pints of pears for lunches as well. The goal for this next week is to can another 12 pints of pears for eating and then use the rest to make pear sauce which can be used in place of apple sauce and makes an excellent fruit bread.

The last thing I was able to preserve this week was Waxman peppers. These peppers are growing beyond belief. I am actually thinking that we will freeze as many as we need to use for salsa next year!

One finally way that I am making Every Bit counts was our dinner meal of Friday. I did not feel like pizza so I decided to use some chicken sausage and a couple of boxes of Rice A Ron.  The box called for a 14.5 can of diced tomatoes. I did not want to open two cans so I decided to try and use cherry tomatoes instead. I went out to the the volunteer bed and was able to use all cherry tomatoes for dinner. This turned into a very well received and need to be repeated meal. I doubt I will be using cherry tomatoes so the taste may be a little bit different.

Sunday Garden Update

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The garden has required some extra time and energy over the last week. Fortunately it continues to provide a decent harvest each day!  Here is today’s harvest

One of the things we did in the evening last week was to harvest the potatoes. I have already mentioned that it was a HUGE disappointment for me.

Matt has been working on a new bed to replace the old barrel and buckets that we were using. He made it specially so it would be easy to dump the dirt and find the potatoes. It turned out awesome but I am just no longer sure that we need to attempt potatoes again.

Good news is that our cantaloupe plant has taken off in the front. I counted at least 4 nice size balls.

I am continuing to be amazed that the production of our “volunteer” tomato plant in the back of the deck. Other excitement is the fact that we have several watermelons that are forming on the vine as well.

The waxman pepper plants that I struggled with to get started are producing nicely!

Finally for some beauty!

5 Things Friday- 5 Days of the Week

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I anticipated that this week would be fairly busy as it is between two vacations. The garden has produced as well.  What I did not anticipate was that I would drive to Mocksville to pick up a haul from the local farm stand. See below for details.  I am also listing things I did for “Every bits Challenge” as well. This is typical for the month of August but I return to work so that limits my abilities to do some things everyday. I will use these two weeks as the two final weeks of August. This is different but I hope it is helpful.

Monday- We arrived home, picked about 5 gallons of tomatoes and I spent a good couple of hours outside pruning and working on the tomato plants.  I was exhausted!

Tuesday- I decided to work on stocking prepared meals. I made 4 taco pastas and froze 3 for future use. I made the first double batch of Salsa, so excited to use all the ingredients that we already had.

Wednesday- Braxton and I harvested another pint of blueberries and several tomatoes. I also pulled some weeds. We planted some corns in our new planter box and also harvested potatoes. This was a disappointment as we harvest around 5 pounds of potatoes. I also made sourdough bread.

Thursday- After looking at what produce we had, I called and ordered 50 pounds of tomatoes. Braxton and I drove and we purchased a $10 box of cucumbers as well as peaches, green peppers and a watermelon. After picking up this produce, I have been very busy getting things in jars. Another loaf of sour dough bread.

Friday- working on canning and preparation all day. See the final list below. I attempted to make sub buns for meatball subs. They needed to be a bit smaller.

Every Bit Counts Challenge
Salsa 10 quarts and 17 pints
Pickles – 10 quarts of Spears and 12 pints of chips. Spears are a bit salty on first taste, hopefully this improves with time.
Spaghetti sauce -5 quarts and dinner on Friday

Prepared food
4 Taco pastas
4 Million dollar Spaghetti.

Garden Update

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This week has been both a struggle and exciting in the garden.  But the sunflowers have not disappointed!

With the excessive heat warning for most days, I planned to get up and out in the garden before 7am. I spent I think 4 mornings in the garden, catching up with weeding and harvest for between an hour and an hour and half each day. The blueberries are awesome, we have been able to freeze approximately 2 gallons.  More good news is that we have several watermelons that are growing and we have started the slow trickle of tomatoes coming in. Unfortunately, I dont think we will be able to harvest enough tomatoes for making all the salsa we need.  Some of the romas are already dying out. I even tried treating for blight.  We are also losing the majority of our peppers.  We lost our first 3 squash plants to squash bugs but I am hopefully that I was able to save a couple of our zucchini plants. I do have a second wave of squash plants in front of the sunflowers so that we may get another harvest by the end of June. I also planted a couple more zucchini plants but I am not sure if we will get any more of those.  We did start to make improvements to help things out, first our drip irrigation is just not working. The parts were several years old and just is not doing it. We decided to purchase a sprinkler. It arrived today and I will let you know how it works.

Another change is we decided to purchase a 3rd green stalk planter. This year, I have attempted to start more pepper seeds and it will have 30 pepper plants. My thought is that we can move the layers to the green house if needed toward the end of the season to give us up to an additional month of growing time.  Of course it was purchased on sale!

Food Preservation
I did mange to get some things preserved this week. On Monday, I canned 4 pints of green beans from our garden. We already have 2 quarts frozen. With this addition we should have a year supply. I also have both bush and trellis green beans still growing which is exciting.
I cooked 8 packs of chicken thighs which became 4 broccoli chicken rice casseroles, 3 are in the freezer for quick meals during the school year. I also made a batch of chicken broth which was 5 quarts and 1 pint.  This is exciting!
My main focus of the week has been to clean out and organize our kitchen and pantry. For the first time since February everything has a permanent home and is not on the floor!

5 Things Friday “How I Spent my Day”

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  1. We have been under a extreme heat warning all week. This means that the heat index is at least 101*  The only way that I am able to keep up with the garden is by waking up super early aka 6:30am and spending at least an hour in the garden. This morning I ended up around an hour and half. I was able to get a second planting of crops done. Pumpkins in the bed in front of the office, cucumbers to replace the ones that did not survive and cantaloupe in place of the bush green beans.  I also finished the chore of wedding all the beds, collecting a 5 gallon bucket for the chickens.  I dead headed our white rose bush, collected the small harvest and heavily watered the beds.
  2. 2 loads of towels were washed, dried, folded and put away.  With everyone enjoying the pool and working, it is not uncommon for most of use to take 2 showers a day.
  3. I have got the third load in the dishwasher, I am working on getting rid of any food that has gone bad. I also packed up everything in lunch containers, made desert and have started working on sour dough bread for the weekend. I have no doubt this third load will be ran tonight.
  4.  In my effort to use the food we have I ended up chopping up 4 items for a Big Mac Salad for dinner, lettuce, red onion, cucumbers and tomatoes.  I found a recipe for Big Mac sauce and then cooked a pound of ground beef in steak seasoning to use.
  5. I was able to pressure can 5 quarts of chicken broth that I made from the chicken thighs that were processed yesterday.

No wonder I am tired~

Sunday Garden Update

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I know I said there would be less pictures but I could not resist adding these! These sunflowers are gorgeous!   I am waiting for the ones outside the deck to catch up.

Next up is a volunteer tomato plant. I have now discovered it is a cherry tomato plant but I don’t think i have EVER saw some many blooms on a plant.

.And we even have some tomatoes forming

 

Last but certainly not least I did meet my goal for the week. To can one item and to add one item to the freezer for future meals.  I was able to can 9 half pints and 4 pints of Taco meat. 2 half pints did not seal. We used one to finish up dinner and one will be use for Totachos this week.   I was able to freeze 7 prepared baked ziti this week as well!

We are harvesting squash, zucchini, a few cucumbers, peppers and green beans! I LOVE THE SUMMER!