Height of Harvest

'Tis the season for the harvest. We gathered lots of tomatoes yesterday along with the pumpkins, the last of the rhubarb and cucumbers, some oddly out of season strawberries, some grapes, a watermelon, a potato that we missed during last week's harvest, and 3 pea pods. We got the Sweet Dumpling squash (2), acorn squash (1) and one cantaloupe in over the weekend.

All of this harvesting plus a whole lot of weeding was brought to you by ...

Sleeping Baby!

We went on a lovely afternoon walk and she was sleeping so soundly when we got back that we just started the yard work and kept her in the stroller.

Later, Isabel decided it was her turn to nap in the stroller.

Digit preferred to keep Willow and me company.

What I would do with two free hands...

It's lucky she's so cute because there is a lot of work around here that isn't getting done (or done veeeery slowly) because of her. As sweet as these newborn days are I'm hoping she'll start being able to nap in the crib in a couple of weeks rather than in the sling on my chest.

Q has taken on the Whole 30 Challenge with a bunch of people at his gym so I'm counting down the days until October 12. I feel very guilty about continuing to eat several things that he's abstaining from right now - grains, dairy and the occasional sweetened anything being the major ones. There are benefits though -

1)We're eating way more veggies than usual and I'm surprised by how many meals don't really need the grain that they're usually served with. Tacos are fantastic wrapped in iceberg lettuce instead of tortillas. A vegetable and chicken curry is just a delicious thick stew without rice beneath it (although we were careful to not make the flavors strong enough to be overwhelming when it's not cut by rice). Especially since grain growing and processing is so labor intensive it's nice to seriously look at how much of them we really need to eat.

2) Q's been doing most of the cooking - and he's a fantastic cook!

Here's the braised cabbage with pan-fried chicken-apple sausage that was dinner on Saturday. Every woman should marry a man who can cook. He's even been feeding me "birdie bites" when I'm nursing Willow and don't have hands and things just smell *too good*.

Amusingly, most of the stuff we seem to be harvesting lately is not on his current diet. Last week's marinara and curry were made with almost exclusively homegrown ingredients (have I mentioned the pound of garlic we harvested?) but the big crops we planted that are just coming on now are currently forbidden - edamame, potatoes, corn, and oats. The edamame is in the freezer and the oats are still waiting to be threshed and winnowed.

Q dug out the two little potato patches I planted on a whim this spring when some rotten potatoes started sprouting in the compost bin. Ten pounds isn't bad for a crop that had no financial outlay and about an hour of time put into it.
We packed them in a paper bag with alternating layers of straw and potatoes. After the main crush of summer produce is done I'm going to try to fit the bag into the fridge since we still don't possess a location with appropriate root cellar conditions.

I started making a dent (literally) in the corn "field" today.
After I strip off the ears, the stalks get chopped off at the base. I'm cutting them into 4-5' lengths and have been setting them under the canopy to dry out.
They're sitting on the large pile of oat straw I put under cover a couple of days ago when it started looking rainy. When the stalks have dried thoroughly the current plan is to send them through a chipper for composting or path mulch.

I got about an eighth of the bed done today and got 30 ears (not including the little unripe ones that went to the grateful chickens). 8 x 30 = a whole lot of ears of corn, especially since Q can't eat any of it fresh this year. Normally, I'd be worried that over 200 ears wouldn't be enough to fulfill his seasonal sweet corn appetite. As it is, the neighbors got a dozen of the prettiest ears I found and the rest of today's pick got blanched, cut from the cobs, and frozen for winter.
There's a lot of this stuff where I feel like we're working against the clock because Q goes back to work next week and the little that has been done is because we're taking turns on baby duty. Of course, one way or another it will all get done to some level and it will all work out. After all, there isn't really an alternative. If the big jobs get done, all I'll be left with is the regular tomato pickings and small batch marinara making and freezing, which can be done with a baby tied to my chest.

Green peppers were on sale at the farm this weekend so we got 1/2 gallon of diced peppers into the freezer. Tomorrow is canning diced tomatoes with a friend. Saturday (Willow's one month birthday) will be apple picking and applesauce making. I'm so grateful that Q's such a willing helper and participant so we'll be able to eat locally and well this winter.

Small Scale Oat Harvest

If you found your way here from Fight Back Friday, welcome! Anyone who hasn't been there before, consider heading on over and browsing the links, a lot of interesting stuff going on among the "Food Renegades". I'm definitely from the "slow food" category and hope the "paleos" don't mind all this grain!

To review, in case I've got new visitors today, we planted our first test patch of hulless oats back in late April. It's a bed to one side of our suburban driveway that's about 5' wide. The first bed was about 18' long and a second planting of about 8' went in at the beginning of June, making for a total of about 125 sq. ft.

Yesterday I did a test run of starting the oat harvest because they are supposed to be gathered before they reach dead ripe and they're currently at hard dough stage. (By that point, when they're super hard and ready for storage, they are also not well attached to the rest of the plant anymore and there is apparently more crop loss.)

To begin, I followed the advice of some other small scale experiments and began clipping the heads off with kitchen shears but quickly realized that this was not as efficient as just pulling the heads off by sliding my hand up the stem. Knowing we're going to want to use the straw as chicken bedding this winter, I also used the kitchen shears to chop the straw off about 3-4" from the ground and lay it down to dry.

Since it's been overcast, I brought the grain inside and spread it out on drying trays on the kitchen table and covered it with thin dish towels to keep it clean. I still haven't decided what the larger scale curing solution is since I only did about 2' of the bed and used most of the kitchen table for that amount. I'm leaning toward the big drying rack and netting weighed down with rocks sitting in the driveway for a few days when I know it's going to be hot.

After about 2 weeks of drying or when it gets to storage dryness (hard kernels that can no longer be dented with a fingernail), we get to have the fun of threshing and winnowing it to get our final grain! Depending on how much we get, I'm seriously considering splurging on a cereal flaker since our flour mill doesn't have that feature. Rolled oats just work so much better for us since they take so much less time to cook.

I also have to leave you with a picture of the corn, which has literally grown a foot taller since I posted pictures of it last Friday! (If you think I'm exaggerating, notice that it is now taller than the 6' fence.) Neither the back sweet corn bed or the front popcorn bed has any ears started yet but I live in hope. After all, our summer here in Eugene started very very late this year.

Summer in Full Swing

I've always been the only person on the planet who can't get a squash or zucchini plant to live to production but some how I thwarted the snails this year and I'm scared of what I may have unleashed. It never occurred to me that all my transplanted starts would survive!

The rhubarb's also been going crazy and I got our first cucumber today. I think that there are only a few blueberries left, just enough for eating by the handful probably.

Today's total: about 6 1/2 lbs

1lb. 6 oz blueberries

9 1/2 oz. zucchini

1 lb. 6 oz. yellow crookneck

6 5/8 oz. cucumber

2 lb. 5 oz. (!) rhubarb

3 1/8 oz. radish

2 1/2 oz. carrot

Today's Harvest

Almost 7 lbs. all together! I still only managed to get about half the strawberry bed though; thank heavens they'll still be there tomorrow.

First Blueberries

Bowl of Berries

The strawberries are finally enough that it's not a few berries here and there as a snack. I got 1 lb. 5 oz. today - apparently the maximum my sweatshirt pockets can hold.

Third trimester tummy muscles don't agree with harvesting position very much so it looks like Q might have to take on more harvesting duty this year than he's previously done. Luckily he's always been a good sport about it. I left a lot of "almosts" on the plants today, so I'm guessing there will be at least another 2-3 lbs. ripe for a pick on Friday.

The squash we planted out over the weekend are still looking great and these guys have another week or so of hardening off before they go into the garden. I haven't had my usual problem of "sunburn" this year with the starts, so I may have to show a little gratitude for the cloudy days we've been having.

I never got any basil started, does anyone have experience with direct sowing it outdoors in the Willamette Valley this late in the spring? I hate to buy starts for something that grows so easily and our good weather here usually lasts into October, so it seems likely that it would work.

Here are the oats and corn...