Around our house...

Winter = knitting...this is the softest baby blanket ever for a special brand new baby boy. No, it's not made of organic or natural anything, but this yarn was too soft to pass up. It's delicious!


Six pounds of pumpkin puree headed to the freezer. P.S. I love my new kitchen scale...thank you IKEA!


Good dog, Zoe! She's got a head scarf on and is being put to bed!

The Energizer Bunny Garden

This morning, I put up another gallon size bag of breaded okra and summer squash (mostly okra), fresh from the garden. I sliced up a zucchini for stir frying and sealed it up with the food saver...then it went into the freezer. I'm also drying a tray of cherry tomatoes...which have just, finally, taken off.

The chickens are not missing out, either...I left several cukes on the vine to fatten up and have been throwing them in with the chickens each day. Aside from red, ripe tomatoes and soft bananas, the cukes are their favorite treat.

I've also made two batches of chicken stock recently and frozen it in ice cube trays. Here are the instructions I've been using for chickens stock, except that I use my crockpot. The stock makes a fantastic, healing soup and adds tremendous flavor to canned veggies.

Could you pass me a tissue?

Take a gander at what I've been up to the last two nights:


Yup! Onions! LOTS OF ONIONS! I decided to go ahead and pull the remaining onions and freeze them. No one at my house will eat them raw, but we cook with them a lot, so freezing is perfect! I diced them into the size we generally prefer then slurped all the air out and froze them in the handy-dandy Food Saver bags to store in the freezer. (You don't need to blanch onions.)

I've still got 23 onions on the back porch waiting for their turn!

Your Freezer is Your Friend....

With garden harvests beginning to roll in, I started to weigh my options for preserving all this veggie goodness. I don't own a pressure canner (yet) and we are just beginning Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University, so I won't be dropping $100 on one anytime soon. I DO own a deep freeze and a Food Saver! (Although my Food Saver is an older model than the ones shown here...these are pretty!)

When my carrot harvesting was complete this morning, I ended up with this:

I was pretty ecstatic, to say the least! This was my first year to successfully grow carrots!

After cutting off the tops (and giving them to the chickens) and scrubbing the carrots, I blanched them according to the directions found here.

The final yield was seven bags of carrots for the freezer!

I added a little pat of butter to some of these so we can just steam them right in the Food Saver bag in the microwave. Others I left without butter to use in soups and stews.

We did spare this carrot:

Which the girls named "THE CARROT MONSTER...MWAH-HA-HA!" They wanted to save it to show to their dad and play with it a bit! THE CARROT MONSTER gave us an opportunity to talk about how carrots solve the problem of hitting a rock under the soil. Good stuff!

Apples, apples, who's got apples?

WE DO! They were on sale at our local grocery, so we took advantage of it and got 15 pounds of apples. I canned 7 jars of apple butter and froze four batches of pie filling. I had hoped to share some photos with you today, but my camera battery went kapooey, so you'll just have to wait a bit while it is recharging.

I couldn't help but look forward to our own trees putting out enough apples for us to preserve. It is so hard to wait! I know we're making improvements on our little chunk of Oklahoma that will really pay off in the long run, though, and I'm trying to be patient. It's a lesson God has been trying to teach me for years, peace and tranquility in the waiting, and I think He's found a way to get through to me in the garden...or at least force me to practice.

The girls have put their stamp of approval on the apple butter...they've already eaten the half jar that was not full enough to process.