Gardening on the Farm

I have been quiet here lately as I have been very busy canning and freezing all the veggies from my garden and other local produce that I don't yet grow. My tomatoes are slowly starting to ripen, so I finally had enough to can a couple jars of diced tomatoes. Sadly one of the jars was my first casualty of the year and broke in the water bath. There's a lot more out there though so hopefully there will be more to come! I bought some pickling cucumbers to make regular dill pickles since my measly two plants are not giving me many. The dill is mine though. I made my own pickling spice for this so hopefully they taste good! Peaches are now ready as well so I went to the orchard and bought a bushel of seconds to can. I already canned half a bushel and will be doing one more bushel since the kids love them. I've also been working away at getting my beans blanched and in the freezer.

The garden is doing well. I have some white spots on some of my cucumbers and pumpkins but the majority still look ok. I will have to look up what it is but I'm wondering if it's powdery mildew. I have trained my acorn squash up my tomato trellis. I didn't get a trellis put up this year for my viney plants but next year at a minimum I'd like to put one up for the cucumbers. We will see how this squash does and decide later if I should include it as well. I would need to buy a few more t-posts but we have some old calf fencing panels laying around that would be perfect. My tomato jungle is still growing like crazy, I'm going to have to tie it up again soon. Some of the plants are taller than me! The second planting of beans is producing now and the yellow ones are starting to ripen. I foresee lots of picking this weekend. My regular cucumbers have managed to survive the invasion of the pumpkin plants and I will soon have some big enough to eat!

I have finally made my first batch of pickles this year. Apparently two pickling cucumber plants is no where near enough to produce enough cucumbers at once for a batch of pickles, I think I need closer to 10-15 plants. So I bought some at the farmers market along with the bell pepper the recipe calls for since mine aren't quite ready yet. I made sweet dills. It is the Farmers grandmothers recipe. I'm not usually a fan of sweet pickles, I don't like bread and butter pickles but these are amazing! Here's the recipe: Edith's Sweet Dills: Ingredients: cucumbers fresh dill bell pepper onion celery salt cold water 1 quart of white vinegar 4 cups of white sugar 1/4 cup pickling (coarse) salt Directions: Cut cucumbers either into sandwich slices or rounds, let stand in cold water in the fridge over night, you can use ice cubes to cool quickly. Then drain. Heat the jars and in each 500 mL jar put in: 1 tsp celery salt 1 or 2 slices of onion or little pi

There was another basket worth of beans ready on the weekend! They were very tasty! I also made my first ever batch of dilly beans with these beans and some of my dill. You are supposed to wait at least 4 weeks before opening them so hopefully they turned out! The peas are coming along. There were a few ready, but they didn't even make it into the house. Peas fresh from the garden are so good! Two of my little farmers in training helped pick them and then helped eat them! The chickens out did themselves as well! Such pretty eggs! Not exactly garden related, more foraging. I harvest a bunch of plantain to dry and make a salve with. It is all washed up, once it dries I will put it in an empty mesh onion bag I have laying around and hang it to dry. Our lettuce is still doing great as well, but I'm getting sick of salads so I haven't been harvesting much of that lately.

The garden seems to enjoy the wet spring and summer we have had so far! Everything is doing well and I haven't had to drag the hose over to water at all so far this year My tomato plant jungle need to be tied to the posts again as they were starting to grow everywhere! I also trimmed of some of the bottom leaves and some of the suckers. Lots of little tomatoes are coming! Everyone is eagerly anticipating the first ripe tomatoes of the year My pickling cucumbers are slowly climbing their way up the tomato trellis. This is something I will definitely direct seed next year. I bought two already started at the garden centre and they just don't seem to do as well as everything I direct seeded. I have one last broccoli still growing, we only planted 4 as they take up so much space. My poor, very late planted cantaloupe plants are getting drown out by the massive pumpkin plants. It's looking like we may not get any melons. Next year I'm hoping to st

In addition to dairy farming and gardening, we also have laying hens and raise meat birds. While there is still a large portion of my food I buy, I do love to raise as much of my own food as I can. The Farmer was nice enough to help me with a project for my chickens. We put a coop in the old bank barn but it's not a great set up for meat birds, we built it mostly with layers in mind. So, we decided an outdoor grow out pen was in order, and it will also work for growing out layer chicks I hatch. We typically order our meat chicks from the feed store. I selected my layers for egg colour such as blue, green and dark brown so I haven't gotten into any good dual purpose breeds yet. The outdoor pen we built (mostly the Farmer, he's great at building things!) is 8x12 so it's a decent size. We are already talking about adding to it. My thought is to add a small coop area so they can be locked up night. We've had a lot of trouble with animals breaking into various set ups we