A New Perspective on Horror Movies

We have a small herd of sneaky, sneaky deer in my neighborhood. The stealth deer come in and mow down my cilantro, my lettuce, or whatever tender green shoots I have growing.

They tipped me over the edge when they mowed down my corn about 10 days before harvest. Two. years. in. a. row.

So this year I pulled out the big guns. I ordered this special stuff I discovered at Johnny's Selected Seeds when I visited Maine. When I first saw it, I didn't want to fly with the stuff. (Can you imagine taking that through security?) Remembered the name, so I could order it.

Product was ordered this year, and I opened the green bottle a couple of weeks ago. As I began to spray around, I thought I should look at the label in case my 3-year-old got curious and played with it. (Goodness knows, it stunk to high heaven.)

Well, it had an active ingredient. It contains 3% porcine blood. That's right folks, I paid good money for pig blood. In a vegetable oil solution.

Remember when they collected the pig blood in the movie Carrie? I truly do not know how they could not retch the entire time. Seriously. The 3% blood and oil solution makes my stomach do some flips as I spray. How could they have a huge bucket of the stuff and no one noticed?

Carrie is now ruined forever. I just won't be able to suspend belief.

Spring...

It's Springtime, and many seeds have been planted. I'm starting some seeds on the back deck-- Italian heirloom and Amish paste tomatoes, and Fish hot peppers. I've already stuck yellow squash and zucchini, pickling cucumbers, red beets, pod and snap peas in the ground. Also in are La Ratte and French fingerling potatoes. (Both are fingerling varieties.) My seeds were ordered from Seed Savers and Johnny's Selected Seeds. The potatoes came from the Maine potato lady.

DH and I have recently expanded our planting area by putting in a new garden bed. I still have more to plant.

My efforts are being thwarted right now by weather extremes. It was cool and rainy, followed by super-hot temperatures, and we'll be returning to cool and rainy tomorrow.

I hope it all survives.

Happy New Year

It's the cold time for the garden.

Does that mean that I've forgotten about gardening? Au contrare.

I'm focusing on two things right now-- preservation and planning.

You might think that there is nothing to preserve right now. Well, in late September my tomato plants kicked into overdrive. With teaching, toddler chasing, and harvesting, (ok, perhaps there was a bit of Viking football viewing in there, too) there was little time to get fancy with preservation.

I got the grand-daddy of tomato presses and got to work. I ended up with 2 3/4 gallons of canned tomato sauce and 1 1/4 gallons of frozen tomato sauce. Today, I'm thawing a gallon of frozen tomato sauce to make pizza sauce. I like it when I can schedule my work out for myself!

Yesterday, I made preserves from grapefruit juice, blackberries, and cranberries. Tart, but yummy! (I operate my canner outside, and we had the perfect weather yesterday.)

Now to peruse those seed catalogs!

A New Gadget

Oh my goodness, I am in heaven. I agonized for quite a while over whether to get a tomato press. Would it be clutter? Would I prefer the red plastic Italian version at Williams Sonoma or the stainless steel version from NapaStyle?

In a moment of frustration, I sent my Dear Husband into Williams Sonoma for a deep fryer and the red tomato press.

Wow. I have saved myself hours of work. Beautiful tomato sauce gets bagged and goes directly into the freezer. Pulp, seeds, and skin-- all dry-- get placed into the compost.

It's a beautiful thing, especially now that I've got tomatoes coming in. (Romas, finally! Of course you come in once I go back to work!)

Dead.

Peach trees, that is. One tree I'm not exactly sorry to see go-- we are talking about putting up a garage/shed and I inadvertantly planted it right in the way. It was the healthy one-- the other died right away.

As I looked through these posts tonight, I realized that my two big successes of the season-- peas and garlic-- were the ones that I messed up in planting. Tomatoes have been underproducing, fish peppers shriveled, and on and on. Not the best planting year for me.

On the canning front, I'm trying to get my water-bath mojo back. Three rounds of canning tomatoes at 85 minutes of processing time each did me in.

Steam bath

I am so direlect in these postings, it's not even funny.

But an update: herbs bolting include oregano and basil, roma tomatoes a bust, re-planted corn a bust (doggone deer), squash dropping blossoms (japanese beetles perhaps), and yellow tomatoes thriving.

It's been mainly farmer's stand produce that I've been canning.

And it has been a good year for that. Today, I put up three gallons of tomatoes. I have quarts and pints of plain tomatoes and 1 1/2 quarts of tomatoes with my oregano and basil.

I also have three pints of peach BBQ sauce, six pints dill beans, three pints of peach conserves, three pints of plum almond jam (runny, but oh well-- Chicken with plum almond sauce, anyone?), and strawberry jam/clementine marmalade from the spring and early summer.

Thank goodness for the farmer's stand.

Sprouts

Well, things are sprouting here. I have spinach sprouting, the pea plants are coming up, and baby lettuce leaves are popping up.

We also dropped in a bed of asparagus and planted two peach trees.

Good eating is just around the corner!