Gardens - My Vegetables and My Garden of the Soul

Good morning and Happy Saturday to each of you. It's the weekend, and even though I have to work today, I'll have tomorrow off to attend Renaissance Festival. It should be a lovely day, even though it will be a short one because we'll want to return home for football. Still, some time outdoors with friends and acquaintances, a bowl of Pho from the Vietnamese stall, and music here and there isn't a bad way to spend a Sunday. 

This photo is a bit more classed up than the Pho we 
purchase at Ren Fest, but it's basically the same 
meal. Rice noodles and a meat (we usually choose 
chicken), in a broth. He adds a lot of spicy sauces 
to his bowl, I add a bunch of Hoisin sauce to mine. 

The leaves are beginning to turn - orange and scarlet blazes across the Cities with greens fading into the background and reserved for evergreen trees. Fall is my favorite time of the year - I adore the colors, I like the cooler temperatures, and I love football season, which started last week. There's just something about that little nip of cool air in the mornings, fresh apple cider, cinnamon snapping in the air, pumpkins turning orange - ready for carving and/or cooking. Squash returns to the menu, along with the more robust foods for the season. It's a grand time of the year. 

The majority of trees around me turn orange and red 
in the Fall. Most of them are maples, and maple trees 
are very colorful. I do miss the golden Aspen trees of 
my youth, but I'm stunned by the orange and scarlet 
trees of Minnesota. 

I have to get my latest dehydrator batch pulled out this morning and put into containers so that I can put the dehydrator away in the cabinet once again until the next batch. I had more than 40 habanero peppers that I harvested yesterday and put in to dry. It was a veritable feast of brilliant orange peppers. I can't wait to add them to soups and stews over the winter months.  I also harvested Serrano peppers and ... hmmm ... I'm not remembering the exact type of my red peppers, but they're lovely as well. And one other pepper plant that has really tiny (but very potent) peppers is just coming in for harvest now. I harvested my first few yesterday and added them to the dehydrator batch. 

Here are my peppers cut and ready for the dehydrator. You 
can see I had  2-1/2 shelves of Habanero peppers, but there 
also were red and green peppers and four little guys all on 
their own that probably will be super hot because they're 
so small - LOL. Just an assumption. I haven't tried them 
yet. But I have to get my dehydrator emptied before I leave 
for the shop today. 

So, hot foods for the cold season to come. I'll be using all of these over the winter to add to my soups and stews. Having a garden can be a wonderful thing! But I also have a garden of the soul which is populated by my friends, both near and far. You're the ones I visit time and time again to give me the strength I need and show me the kindness that often is missing in my life. Thank goodness for every one of you! Know this --- you're treasured! Slava Ukraini. 

Harvesting, the Olympics and ... Well, There's Not Much Else, Right?

Yesterday was a "day off" for me, and I spent the day with the garden, the dehydrator and the Olympics. In other words, it was a delightful day. I barely touched the computer at all, so I have a lot of catch-up to do with my friends' posts and reading'/voting for stories on LJ Idol. BTW, I hope you've had a chance to read my own story, and if you feel it has merit, I'd appreciate your vote. If you need the URL, just message me or comment and I'll pass it along, otherwise, check yesterday's post. 

I still have a good amount of thyme left in the pot, but 
I harvested quite a bit also. The new dehydrator works 
really well with my herbs. I'm very pleased. It even has 
two mesh trays and catch-basins for the small things 
like these little leaves when they dry. 

I harvested lots of thyme and almost the last of my rosemary yesterday, and put them into the dehydrator overnight. I just spent 1/2 hour in the kitchen stripping the branches and putting them into containers. I'll check the appearance tonight, and if necessary I'll put them through the grinder to get a uniform cut for cooking use. 

My fresh rosemary is almost all harvested. That's a shame, 
because it's such a lovely herb. I use rosemary whenever 
I bake salmon, so it actually gets quite a lot 
of use during Lent since I bake salmon every Friday for 
my dinner. 

I also harvested a bunch of cherry tomatoes, but I usually have quite a few with my evening salads, so I'm not worried about having them go bad before I eat them. I have them in a container on top of the microwave, looking bright and cheery in their brilliant red and yellow colored skins. So good! I ended up with seven jars of dried and ground peppers. I'd really like to get those jars out of the cupboard and onto shelving so that I can use them in my cooking. I'm thinking maybe some very small shelving on the sides of my spice cabinet. I'll have to talk to DH about that, though. If I install something like that without consulting him, he'll have a total hissy fit. 

My cherry tomatoes (I have several plants of them) are 
doing beautifully. I'm harvesting some every day. I picked 
quite a lot of them yesterday. If I get overwhelmed, it'll be 
more things for the dehydrator. Options abound! LOL

The Olympics was marvelous, as always. So many things to see. Here at home, I'm stuck - I watch the channel that DH had on, and I have no idea what the other channels are that are holding the games. So I'm watching network, and that's often not the sports I'm most interested in. At the shop, I have all three channels written down, so no problem switching from this to that. By the time I get the home channels figured out, they'll be over - LOL. Now we're starting track and field, so different athletes, and almost no swimming or gymnastics (there's still some, but not a lot left). That's good. I think it's time to move on from those two dominant categories and onward to running, throwing and jumping. 

Apparently each medal awarded has an actual small piece 
of the Eiffel Tower inside them. I think that's actually a 
pretty cool thing. 

Well, I've got to get an order scanned in and sent to one of my suppliers, so I'll end it here. I hope you have a truly lovely Saturday and weekend and I'll be back on Monday. Hug your loved ones, do something you really enjoy, and share it with me in comments on Monday's post. Slava Ukraini. 

I'm Getting My Final Harvests for the Season - Peppers and Soup

I actually slept in until my alarm went off today, so I'm a bit rushed today. I got in my meditation, but now I only have 30 minutes to get this blog posted before I have to leave for the swimming pool. I was glad to get some sleep, however. I really needed it. 

My Tabasco pepper plant is doing really well, 
with a lot of peppers for me to pick. I'll leave that 
until this weekend, allowing them to get as much 
heat as possible over the next day or two. Then 
I'll stick them into the dehydrator and I'll have 
a lovely batch to grind into my own chili powder. 

Yesterday and today are gorgeous days - a bit of a fall-back into summer with warm temperatures. The garden is responding accordingly, and my peppers are ripening quickly. I have hopes of getting one more really good harvest from my Jalapeno peppers and a wonderful end-of-season harvest from my Tabasco peppers. I took some photos of my plants to share with all of you, and if they transferred correctly, I'm showing you here. 

These three large (and they're REALLY big) 
Jalapeno peppers are the last ones I'll probably 
get from this plant this year. I'll leave them on 
the plant for as long as possible to allow them 
to ripen more, but yesterday's 80 degree day 
was wonderful in getting them towards a 
beautiful red color. Hopefully today's 80 degree 
temp will be all that's needed for these guys, 
because we'll be colder and rainy over the 
weekend. 

I decided to make my Roasted Peppers and Tomatoes soup yesterday, and also have all of the ingredients for chicken fajitas in the refrigerator, waiting for tomorrow's cooking time. That soup is one of my favorites. It takes a bit of oven time since I'm broiling the red peppers, tomatoes and an onion before combining everything into my blender and making the soup. But the time is well worth it. It also tends to smoke up my kitchen a bit since I'm blackening the skins of the veggies and fruits in the oven (yes, tomatoes are a fruit). So I also had some smoke to contend with. But the kitchen was pristine by the time DH got home. 

My roasted red peppers and tomato soup is one of my 
favorite blender soup recipes. I broil the veggies, 
then put them into the blender with some clear stock 
(veggie or chicken, usually) and some herbs and 
spices, set the blender to "soup" setting, and let 
it do its' thing. Less than seven minutes later, I have 
a hot, steaming batch of soup that will last me for 
several days. Yummy! 

I was so distracted by cooking, however, that I forgot to turn on the clothes dryer for my final load of bedding! Duh! I turned it on shortly before dinner, though, and had everything folded and into the linen closet right after dinner. Silly me! 

Of course a blender soup would be impossible without a 
top quality blender, and my Wolf manual setting blender 
is more than up to the task. It cost a FORTUNE, but I 
use it every week, often more than once a week, and it 
continues to perform above my expectations. 

So, today's post is a bit short, but I can already feel that today's going to be a good day. I'm determined, so therefore, it will be - LOL. I hope you also have a wonderful Thursday. I'm heading out to the swimming pool and then to the shop to work for the day. I'll be back tomorrow. Slava Ukraini. 

Autumn is Creeping In on Tip Toes, But I'm Not Ready Yet

I'm ahead of schedule today, on a very busy day, but not because I was really good at setting my alarm. Rather, I awakened a bit after 2:00 am and simply couldn't fall back to sleep. So, I got an hour's jump on my day. All things totaled, that's not a horrible thing. I'll actually be able to sleep in a bit longer than usual on Sunday since we won't be going to Renaissance Festival,. We'll be going to the MN Gem and Mineral Show instead. 

We always look forward to the MN Gem and Mineral Show. The 
new State Fairgrounds location has been a great shift for them.  
The number of people attending the show has gone up a LOT. 
One of the vendors dropped into the shop yesterday for a few 
supplies and said that it's been a great move for them - much 
more room for each vendor, and a LOT more customers. 

This time of the year is always a more difficult adjustment for me than any other seasonal changeover. We're moving into Autumn now, and Winter is knocking at the door. I'm NOT ready for that at all. The garden looks sparse in sections because DH has been transplanting a variety of plants to new locations for next Spring, and because the colder temperatures are slowly causing the plants to either go dormant or die back. 

At this time of the year, our growing season is coming to 
an end. My tomato plants aren't getting as many ripe tomatoes, 
and those that are unripened might well remain unripe. 
We still gets lots of sun, but the temperatures are colder - 
enough that we're skirting with frost. I expect we'll have 
our first frost before too long and that will be the end 
of this year's crop. 

My tomato crop this year actually ripened at a sustainable rate - I didn't feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of tomatoes I was getting. I did dehydrate a small batch just to see how it would go (it worked beautifully), and I'll use those in cooking later this season. But my plants are slowing down. I have several Jalapeno peppers trying their best to ripen before the frost, and they might make it. But they probably won't be quite as red as those I got earlier in the year. I have a bunch of Tabasco peppers on that plant waiting to ripen a bit more, so I'll have a lot of peppers to dehydrate from that plant. My banana peppers are pretty much done for the season. 

At this point of the year, most of my Tabasco peppers 
are yellow or orange. Still, these peppers can be 
harvested at any point, so I'll leave them to ripen 
as much as possible, then harvest them and dry them. 
They'll grind up beautifully for my winter chili and 
soup recipes. 

The hummingbirds have almost all left for the season. There are a few still hanging around, and of course I keep the feeder full for them. But, I'm not getting the crowds. The males left almost a month ago, and the females and young ones are leaving now. They have a LONG flight down to Costa Rica, and I'm looking forward to seeing them again in the Spring. I'll keep the feeder stocked for them until after we get a few hard frosts, of course. But that won't be much longer. 

I'm up in the yellow portion, shading into the green. We 
start seeing our hummingbirds start their migration a 
month ago when the males leave. Now the females and 
this year's crop of yearlings are also leaving for their 
long flight through the USA and down to Costa Rica. 
Not all of them will go that far South, but not all of 
them come this far North either - LOL. 

So Autumn is creeping in. Autumn is one of our most spectacular visual seasons here in the Frozen Northlands. The exceptional range of colors we get from our trees and other greenery as they move into their winter naps is always spectacular. I expect that next weekend's drive to and from the final weekend of Fest will be a gorgeous visual treat to end our Festival year with. 

So, I'm off to the pool. Have a lovely Wednesday and Slava Ukraini. I'll be back tomorrow. 

Fruits and Vegetables - I Guess I'm Hungry This Morning

Yesterday was crazy-busy, and since I forgot to bring my grocery shopping list with me (I usually take a phone photo of the list before heading out to the store), I ended up taking two separate trips to the grocery store. Fortunately, it's only a mile away from my house, so it wasn't a huge problem. We are set with fruit and ice cream for a while, though, with more strawberries and some organic grapes that are absolutely YUMMY joining the cherries and watermelon we already had. 

I took a chance on some organic grapes yesterday, and I'm
really happy I did. They're awesome. Small, but totally
packed on the branches and so sweet! I'm really going
to enjoy eating these for my breakfast and lunch. 

Our raspberry crop is almost finished for the year and it was outstanding this year - I'm so happy. It's hard for me to estimate how much we harvested, since we were out there every one or two days, but I was very pleased with the crop this year. It might be a stay-at-home year, but our plants decided to try to make us happy. 

My container tomato isn't this fancy and the
tomatoes aren't red yet, but it's bearing really
well and I expect to get a lot of lovely tomatoes
from it. The leaves screamed "I need fertilizer"
to me, so I added calcium to the normal
fertilizer DH gives it. Calcium is important
 for a container tomato. 

My container tomato is filled with green fruits and those should start coming ripe very soon. It was looking calcium deprived, so I washed, dried and crushed the eggshells from Sunday morning's breakfast and added them to the container's soil yesterday, then gave it a good water. My friends on my FB Organic Gardening group recommended that to another poster and it seemed like a good idea for my plant as well. My cherry tomatoes are slowly starting to ripen also. I can hardly wait until I'm getting bunches of ripe, off-the-plant tomatoes. 

My cherry tomatoes aren't doing as well as these, but they'll
get there. August is usually my high month for my tomato
plants. DH planted me three cherry tomato plants and the one
container tomato plant this year, so I should have a LOT of
lovely tomatoes to eat and maybe even to roast. 

Today is starting out a bit slowly and comfortably cool (very nice for a change), but I'm sure it will shift into high gear quite soon. We'll be comfortable today before swinging back into heat for Friday and then back down a bit for the weekend. It won't be as hot as last week when we sent all of that lovely heat to the East coast to melt friends of mine there. We're supposed to be a bit more seasonable for this weekend. 

On that note, please try to have a positive day with fun activities, and careful personal interactions. Be safe, be well, and please, wear a mask. I'll be back tomorrow. 

Lammas Blessings - Harvest Is Beginning

Today is Lammas, the first day of August and the beginning of the harvest celebrations. These days we seem to be able to get food of any kind at all times of the year, but it wasn't always that way. Food has a distinct cycle of seed, to plant, to mature fruit, to death, and finally to rebirth once again through saved seed which would be sown in the spring. Now we begin the days of plenty - those days when the table groaned with good food from the kitchens and the manors and homes were busy putting aside reserves for the upcoming winter and lean months. Lammas celebrates bounty. It totally works for me as a joyous time of the year.

Here is a Medieval rendering of the Lord and his serfs at harvest time.
It's pretty obvious that it was far better to be the Lord than the serfs and
that harvesting was some backbreaking labor. 

As I mentioned above, our 24/7/365 day availability of food wasn't always that way. In my own lifetime I remember clearly those wonderful days when the peaches and apricots were ripe, when grapes were available, and plums - oh those meaty and juicy plums from the Santa Rosa area. In the winter we had apples and oranges, but the fruits of summer were my love and they were only available for a short time every year.

Van Gogh painted this famous picture of a harvest in Provence. The
painting dates from 1888 and is in a museum in Jerusalem, Israel. 

I purchased my first few Colorado Peaches over the weekend. They weren't quite ripe enough, so they're sitting out until later this week when they'll be absolutely perfect. I have black cherries in the refrigerator, alongside my lettuce and carrots. I have tomatoes for my salad and eggs for my Sunday breakfast. There's nothing much better than fresh food on the table. Although the variety to choose from decreases in the off-seasons, these days many of these fruits and vegetables are available throughout the year. When they are truly in season though, they just seem to taste better because they are harvested at peak.

It wasn't just wheat that was harvested. Here, Jules Adolph Aime
Louis Breton painted "Harvesting Rapeseed" in 1860. It appears the
seed was winnowed, similar to other grains, by using a large basket
and the natural breezes. 

So celebrate Lammas in your own home today by eating something fresh - something that comes to your table directly from the earth. Think about how amazing it is that we can have these wonderful foods for so much of the year and not have to worry about starvation in the dark days of winter looming ahead. We're very fortunate.

This panel from a documentary shows a young woman harvesting rice
in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. 

Have a great Tuesday. Chickie should have returned to her devastated apartment last night. The cats did a number on the apartment and it looks like a hurricane went through the interior. I'm sure the furballs were happy to see Chickie return, but it's amazing how two active cats can wreak havoc with anything that's not nailed down. I'm off to the pool. Good Lammas to all!