restoring the roost

North Carolina Country Living and Farmhouse Style

North Carolina Country Living and Farmhouse Style
since 2010

gardening

Scenes from the Porch

· decorating the roost, gardening

….the back screened-in porch that is.

We’ve been having such amazing weather lately and it’s nice to be out here enjoying it with some shade. We especially enjoy eating meals and entertaining out here- it’s the perfect party spot.

This green onion is about to bloom- it was so pretty and sculptural that my husband placed it in some water as a centerpiece.

This half of a KY bourbon barrel is planted with ferns and moss native to our property….

…..and garlic dries and cures on the potting bench.

I hope you are having a wonderful start to your summer. My two little cutie pies sure are keeping me busy. I hope to post with some updated pictures soon 🙂

Spring Greens

· gardening, Homesteading

Our garden is brimming with spring greens!!!

kale

romaine lettuce

Greens are usually the first thing we get to harvest and enjoy from the garden at springtime, and currently we are enjoying arugula, romaine lettuce, baby kale and collards, and spinach. Yum!

Most greens you can sow directly into the ground in the early spring, although there are times in the past we have started things like kale and collards and then transplanted.

arugula

the onions (and garlic in another bed) are almost ready

Once all of these greens are harvested or stop growing we will reseed and do some succession planting for multiple harvests during the growing season.

collards

We like to eat greens as salads, or cooked in eggs, soups and stews, on pizzas, or simply sauteed by themselves. In the basket below we have all the fixings for a salad with our pizza for dinner: romaine lettuce, baby kale, and a white radish. All homegrown in our garden! 

How do you like your greens best?

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Homestead Barn Hop

Spring is Coming!

· decorating the roost, gardening, Homesteading

It’s always exciting to me to see the first harbingers of Spring. After months of winter, even though I do love the snow, those early warm sunny days tease and remind me of how wonderful North Carolina Springs are.

Some of the first signs here are the blooming of the daffodils, or as some people down here call them, the “buttercups,” and tops of tulips pushing through the ground. In our yard, the Hellebores are in bloom!

In the vegetable garden, tiny seedlings are sprouting while colder weather lettuces, collards, cabbages, kale, and onions are growing stronger and bigger before harvest.

Last year’s pullets have all begun laying now, and we are getting armfuls of eggs each day! Perhaps later this spring we will let another hen go broody and hatch a clutch of chicks.

Inside the house I’ve stripped winter’s decor and added some lighter Spring touches to enjoy and remind us of the season we are in.

I like for us to reflect the season in our diet too. We will be eating in-season vegetables such as cold-weather greens, asparagus, spinach, and the like. Traditionally we should be eating what we “put up” and preserved last summer (if only I had done more to preserve our harvest). This year I’m determined to be more motivated since I’m not carrying the weight of two babies around anymore. Of course, those babies now keep me extremely busy in other ways!

Because of all the extra time that goes into caring for the twins, we will not be raising turkeys this year 🙁  I’m really trying to simplify and do a good job with my top priorities in homesteading and maintaining a healthy lifestyle before delving into too many new pursuits. I must master the big things first!

Happy Spring,

Autumn Preserves for the Pantry

· gardening, Homesteading

The end of the summer doesn’t necessarily mean the end of canning season. Autumn offers several opportunities to bring your canner back out–and as a result make a mess in your kitchen again!

For me, I decided just to make a few things that we could freeze easily without having to bust out the canner. Perhaps next summer and fall I will be more motivated to preserve more but being hugely pregnant has a way of zapping your energy 🙂

Fall is traditionally the harvest season and, thus, there are still several fruits and vegetables that can be grown and preserved during this time. Winter squash and pumpkin especially are great examples. Here are just a few:

-pickled beets
-apple and pumpkin butter
-green beans
-snap peas
-fall radish relish
-dried beans and dried southern peas
-squashes
-pumpkin puree

beans for pickling, preserving, drying, or eating fresh!
Later in the summer we went to a local orchard and bought a large bag of delicious peaches and a variety of apples. I decided to freeze most of the peaches and apples in plastic baggies for making pies, dessert toppings, in yogurt, or as a fresh winter treat warmed up anytime.
Here’s how I froze the peaches:
Step 1- wash peaches and working in batches, blanch for 30 seconds to 1 minute in boiling water

Step 2- transfer to ice water bath and when cool, peel skins off peaches.

Step 3- cut up or slice peaches, remove pits, and put in large bowl

Step 4- Cover all peaches with water and put equal parts of a teaspoon of lemon juice to cups of water to prevent browning. Some people like to add sugar to the peaches and/or water, but I left that out.

Step 5- after soaking a bit, transfer peaches to plastic freezer bags (I used quart sized), label with date, and place in freezer on flat surface. I’m going to try and use my peaches up within the next 4-5 months to hopefully avoid them getting freezer burn.


For apples, you can basically use the same process but you may want to layer the peeled apples onto cookie sheets first, freeze for an hour or two, and then put into plastic freezer bags so that they don’t all stick together in one clump. We also used the apples to make a couple of jars of yummy apple butter in the crock pot that we put straight into the fridge for eating.
Crock Pot Apple Butter
Cinnamon Peach Jam
I reserved some of the peaches, especially the ones that were overripe or going bad, for making jam. I combined several recipes into one and decided on a small batch of cinnamon peach freezer jam without pectin. I used about a tablespoon of lemon juice instead with about 1 cup of sugar and a couple sprinkles of cinnamon to taste. You may also want to add a little bit of coarse salt.
Step 1- peel peaches (or blanch and peel) and place into food processor or blender to process until peaches are cut up into small bits. Place blended peaches in pot on stove.

Step 2- Add sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon and bring to boil, cooking for about 15 to 25 minutes or until jam will set up. You can test this by sticking a spoonful of the jam into the freezer for a few minutes and when taken out if it does not slide off of spoon too easily or fall off in drips it is done cooking.

Step 3- Ladle peach jam into clean jars, leaving about 1/4 to 1/2 inch headspace. Wipe rims and apply lids. Label tops of jars after cooling. Place into freezer or refrigerator if planning to use immediately. Peach jam can be refrigerated for up to 2 months!
What have you put up lately to have on hand for the winter? 

Summer Harvest

· gardening, Homesteading

Here are the Roost we are busy harvesting from our summer of 2013 garden. A few things didn’t pan out as much as we had hoped, and the constant overload of rain we received caused some mildew and mold problems. But, overall we did pretty well with trying to improve our harvest from last year.

The spring season was perhaps our best yet with a constant supply of lettuce and TONS of kale and collards. We also harvested onions and radishes for the first time this spring and our garlic crop turned out rather well too.

Below are some highlights from our gardening efforts:

Cucumbers: We had a great harvest in the beginning with tons of fruit coming in, but eventually from all the rain the leaves succumbed to mildew and the plants died back. We planted more cucumbers so hopefully we’ll get another big late summer harvest. I made refrigerator pickles and canned relish with our cucumbers this year.

Green Beans (“lazy wife greasy bean,” half-runners, and rattlesnake beans)
The beans have grown wonderfully this year! We have been blessed with basketfuls every couple of days or so during the growing season. In addition to eating them fresh, we plan to dry a bunch for shuck beans and also preserve some in jars.

Note to self: do NOT place basket on porch railing while harvesting green beans or the turkeys WILL try to eat them!

Our Squash plants were pretty much our only major failure this year. They were all growing beautifully with leaves and flowers, but no fruit was being produced except for some zucchini. We figured out it was probably squash borers that go through the stems of the plants that caused this. Surprisingly, we do have some pumpkins actually producing a couple of fruits as well as a mystery squash.

We were pleasantly surprised with how well our Potatoes did and wish we had planted more. In a very small space, we planted yukon gold slips and reaped a very good harvest! They are so yummy. We also planted sweet potatoes along the edge of the screened in porch

Tomatoes (Romas for canning and heirlooms for eating)
Several of the tomato plants didn’t make it and died to disease, but of the ones that did we are got only one decent harvest from. It has been disappointing because as soon as they started producing they all began dying. I think the heavy rains for so long really affected them followed by the short heat wave. I always wish we had planted more tomatoes when it gets to be the middle of the summer, and the same is true this year. You can never have enough! To satiate our tomato fix, we bought a big flat of home-grown romas and some slicing tomatoes from a local farm.

the tomatoes pictured here are from our garden

This is the first year we have been able to harvest Carrots. Although a small, one-time harvest, we enjoyed them!

carrots and some potatoes just pulled from the ground earlier in the summer

Peppers (bell peppers, banana peppers, and hot peppers)
Our peppers are doing pretty decent considering everything. We’ve harvested mostly banana and hot peppers thus far, with a couple of bell peppers. The bell peppers on the vines will hopefully get a little bigger soon, but we aren’t getting a ton simply because we didn’t plant many pepper plants.

Herbs (basil, rosemary, chives, oregano, parsley, mint)
The herbs are fairing pretty well! The basil is looking great, and everything else seems to come back year after year.

The okra is starting to come in, and soon we should have a fair amount. So far I’ve gotten a couple of ziploc sandwich bags full of okra waiting to be pickled! You have to watch okra almost daily when a new pod starts, because it will get huge and tough very quickly. You want to pick it while it is still small to medium sized and tender.

Still growing in our garden are peppers, okra, sweet potatoes, beans, winter squash, zucchini and pumpkins. We plan to plant a late summer/early fall crop of lettuces and other greens as well. Some of our plants don’t look too great simply because we (mostly me, especially being tired and pregnant) haven’t had time to tend to the garden as much as we’ve wanted. The squash plants look like they are starting to get a fungus on the leaves, I’ve spotted squash bugs on some things, and the garden needs a good weeding.

This year we actually succeeded at succession planting, and will definitely keep it going next year. Replanting crops as they ran their full cycle supplied us with a fairly steady stream of produce to where something was ready for harvest most of the time. Even when our cucumber plants, which had already given us tons of fruit, were stunted from a powdery mildew due to all the rain, we replanted and the new growth is doing okay.

Hopefully we can keep several things going this fall if we have warm enough weather. Even if the temperature gets chilly, we can still grow a few things in the cold frame!

Happy Harvesting,
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The Scoop Link Party at the Farmhouse Porch