Using the Garden II

The plums are ripening....

...and the Gravenstein apples have been dropping.

Our last house was a rental and it was next door to the elderly owner/landlord. I learned a lot from her, including the fact that red-striped Gravensteins are wonderful, and that you should gather the funky windfalls and simply cut out the bad parts.

When we moved into our own house seven years ago, El Professor bought four apple trees at a local nursery. The tags had fallen off the trees and the trees could not be identified. The nursery sold them for $5/each. A few years later, as the trees began to produce, I was thrilled to find that two of them were red-striped Gravensteins! Yesterday, I filled a bowl with Gravenstein apple pieces mixed with plums. A bagful went into the freezer and the other portion became oatmeal apple-plum crisp.

The plethora of zucchini continues. Zucchini stir-fried in olive oil and garlic is good, and is even better topped with a little parmesan.

At the end of a day filled with garden bounty shredding/baking/cooking/drying , I baked chicken breasts in a baking dish with apple pieces, plum pieces, Walla Walla onion, and a drizzling of teriyaki sauce. Then, I served it over zucchini/pasta from lunch.

MMmmm.

Using the Garden I

This morning I decided to take on the produce that has been piling up around here...

...Zucchini grated for the freezer to use in future zucchini bread or cake. Who knows??? Maybe I'll compost it next summer! :)

Low fat Weight Watcher's chocolate zucchini cake from a recipe I quadrupled and will freeze in pieces for the kids to have for quickie grab snacks....

If you're ever planning on being stranded on a desert island and can take a finite amount of survival things with you, consider zucchini or zucchini seeds. This 'caveman club' is from last summer!! A year later it is still hanging around our house.....

Zucchini thinly sliced and dehydrated with olive oil, glacial salt, garlic powder, and parmesan cheese.....

Zucchini bread from the Jane Brody cookbook.....

I also peeled and used up the windfall Gravenstein apples that were languishing in the backyard and some of the plums that are ripening daily. Now, what I really need to do is defrost the freezer to get ready for the bounty!

Ignoring the Garden.....

It's the first of August, and the garden is beginning to crank out some excellent bounty. It's been a weird summer....

-It rained incessantly throughout the month of June.

-We have been busy organizing/painting/living/hiking/etc. and have been, other than some weed-pulling frenzied touch-ups, ignoring the garden.

We bought landscape fabric for the vegetable area to avoid our usual weed-choked, high maintenance routine, as well as to avoid the incidence of 'cat visitations'. It started out like this....

....and it has filled in nicely. It has been a fairly successful Ignored Garden.

The landscape fabric has been great for keeping weeds and cats out of the vegetables, but it has been a bit difficult to water and, despite the five-year 'promise', the stuff is beginning to deteriorate. Still, it has kept the weeds at bay while we have been working on other things.

This summer we have enjoyed a decent raspberry harvest,

the Gravenstein apples are beginning to fall, and we've had a small but steady supply of blueberries. The yellow plums are on the cusp of ripeness, the basil is ready for a pesto-fest, the cucumber plants are offering a steady supply, and the zucchini is CRANKING it out.....

Annie made this:

And I sliced zucchini and dehydrated it with olive oil, garlic and salt. Mmmm.

I'm off now to fuss a bit in the Ignored Garden. The tomato plants are insanely tall/full/overgrown/unproductive, and I'm going to do some selective pruning. Maybe after a bit of pruning followed by ignoring, I'll get some tomatoes.

It's a Salvage Christmas.....

Last year I had such a great time working on handmade gifts for our extended family, so handmade was definitely a repeat for this Christmas. One difficulty in chronicling this, however, is that my camera is broken and the kids' newish cameras were in various states of dead battery/lost charger/left at a relative's house during the handmade process. Hmmm. Most of these photos had to be taken on the 'hunk-o-junk only-10-photos-at-a-time-and-many-will-be-blurry' camera. This year's Christmas projects were garden gathered, or shopped for at the salvage/recycling center with a few thrift stores thrown in the mix.....

In early October, El Professor and I dug up and divided perennials such as the campanula that grows in our front garden and potted them for gifts. El Professor carefully researched zones as we have relatives that range from the high Oregon plateau desert to the marine San Juan Islands. El Professor potted Shasta daisies, daisy mums, lamb's ear, pink calla lilies, ground cover rose, butterfly bush (one sister actually wants those), campanula, and purple iris taken from a patch that originated from a tuber that my dear 82 year old aunt gave me. The iris ended up being especially precious because we just learned that this cherished aunt has terminal colon cancer.

The irises are on the far right.

White campanula

Last summer as the days grew shorter and the blue explosion of the hydrangea bush changed to a bluey-green, I cut and cut and cut the blooms and let them dry in vases all over the house.

The dried blooms became wreaths and they really and truly aren't such a sickly green. Thank you camera.

Some of the summer pepper bounty became chili strings. Remember--NEVER rub your eyes when you are working on these.

The apples from our tree and from the local orchard were made into applesauce, but the skins were cooked and jelly bagged and made into apple jelly.








Our raspberries were mixed with some blackberries that were gathered along a nearby bicycle path (El Professor insists you only pick the blackberries that are above the potential dog pee elevation), and the mix made a lovely jam. (We don't have dog, so the raspberries are exempt from the elevation requirement.)

Our friends were in the process of adopting a little boy as well as residing their house at the height of their grape season, so we were given many of their grapes. We gave some of them back as a lovely, dark red grape jelly.

I canned and canned in a one day session; the juices and purees were carefully frozen in late summer and early fall, ready to be made into jam or jelly.

Last summer out in the Oregon high desert, I picked up an oil drum lid that was lying out on the dry landscape. There is all kinds of treasure lying around on my father-in-law's acreage--arrowheads, interesting rocks, dried pinecones, rusty metal this-and-thats. There was something beautiful about that old oil drum lid complete with bullet hole, so I decided to try my hand at sign painting. (I'm not a painter and I don't have nice handwriting, so this was no small task.) The 'bomb' for me? CARBON PAPER!

1. Print text in a cool font

2. Tape cool text onto carbon paper

3. Work over oil drum lid with soapy water and steel wool

4. Tape carbon paper/text onto dry lid

5. Press hard and trace with pencil to transfer the text

6. Paint

The end result was a family sign for one of my sisters.

I got hooked on the idea of painting metal salvage, so I hit the recycling/salvage yard hunting for another piece of cool junk for my other sister. Our local building/recycling/salvage center is another place full of treasure. I found an old tool box with the lid half off, full of machine parts. I dumped out the parts and paid a whopping $4 for the prize.

More steel wool, carbon paper, painting......

...the lid became a family sign and the rest of the scrubbed out box made a great gift box for the jams/jellies, wreath, pepper string, with the transformed lid wrapped and tucked in. (Can you tell I blocked out part of their name? )

The oil drum lid sign/gift ended up in a cool old wash tub found at the recycling center. It really was cool, but the photos are awful. Oh well.

Much creative fun was had..... we'll have to start thinking up ideas for next year.