In Case You Were Wondering
I thought I’d write a post about Miss Mama and Little Softie to update you on how they’re doing. Miss Mama has been spayed and she’s all healed up and back her normal self. She’s decided that lounging around on the two chairs we have outside is her new favorite pastime.
We took Miss Mama in to get her fixed the week before we went to Monticello. She was remarkably easy to catch, I simply put food in the doorway of a cat carrier. When she stuck her head in to eat it, I slowly moved the bowl towards the back and she walked in, then I closed the door. We kept her overnight in the carrier (we didn’t want to try to catch her the morning we needed to take her in, and she wasn’t supposed to eat for 8 hrs) so she’d be ready to go at 7:30 the next morning. We dropped her off a the vet and picked her up the next evening. We kept her in a larger dog kennel in the garage for a few days and she seemed happy. We were wondering if she would run away and never come back when we released her. When we opened up the kennel door to let her out, she came out, stretched, purred and went right back in and laid down. I guess she wasn’t too mad at us.
They LOVE the pet door and think that the back of the garage is now their front porch. They spend a lot of time back there playing in the grass and lounging on the bales of peat moss we have stored under the rain barrels. They seem very comfortable in the garage and I think they’ll be there for quite a while. I need to start thinking about getting them a heated water bowl for the winter, and I need to make them up a warm box or bed for the winter. Our garage is an unattached pole building and it’s very cold in winter. I think an enclosed box with some straw will keep them nice and warm.
Little Softie is growing as well, she’s getting much taller and is starting to venture a little ways away from the garage. Soon enough she’ll be out hunting as well, although after her adventure she hasn’t been as brave as she used to be. It’s been fun watching her and mama play and run around. They seem like they’re having a great time here at Chiot’s Run.
Anything fun going on in your house?
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OK, I’m a HUGE Nature Nerd
So, I’m driving home from the farm after picking up milk yesterday afternoon and I spotted what looked like some trash in the road. When I got closer, I noticed it was crawling – not trash. I slammed on the brakes, pulled off the road, put on my flashers. When I got close I noticed it was a HUGE caterpillar with HUGE horns, I had never seen anything like it.
I ran back to the car, grabbed a container, and scooped it up to save him from getting smashed in the road. I knew it would be right at home in the woods by our house. When I got home and showed Mr Chiots, who was as impressed with this caterpillar as I was.
Earlier this spring I spotted a huge chrysalis in my front garden and I couldn’t find what kind of caterpillar it had come from and what kind of moth it would become. After searching and finding out that this was a Hickory Horned Devil Caterpillar, I realized that this was what became the chrysalis I spotted earlier in the spring. I think I spotted the moth that comes from it a few weeks ago as well, although I didn’t take photos of it or the chrysalis.
The Hickory Horned Devil is the largest caterpillar in North America, this one was 5 inches long. They look ferocious with the huge spikes on them, but they’re harmless. After being in the caterpillar stage for 35 days during which it eats a ton, it then burrows into the soil and pupates and overwinters and a pupa. They come out as Regal moths the next year and live just long enough to mate and lay eggs and are nocturnal. Too bad I forgot to take a photo of that moth and chrysalis, I may never see one again. (If you’d like to see what they look here’s what the moth looks like, and here’s what the chrysalis looks like, thanks to some Flickr members).
I’ve stopped many times to save turtles from being smashed the road, and once we saved some baby bunnies, but I’ve never stopped for a caterpillar before (although I do swerve to miss woolly bears all the time). I released this one in the woods behind the house, hopefully it keeps away from the road.
Every stopped the car to rescue something from the road?
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Preserving Lemon Verbena
Last year I bought a lemon verbena plant and overwintered it in the basement. This summer it’s really taken off so I have an abundance of it. I’ve been looking for ways to use this lovely lemony herb so that none of it goes to waste. It’s a wonderful way to bring some summer flavor into the long cold winter months here in Ohio. One of the best ways I’ve found is by add diced fresh leaves to recipes, like scones, cakes or cookies, but you can’t do that in winter. Lemon verbena dries beautifully and retains it’s flavor, so you can easily add some to your winter teas if you have a stash of dried leaves in the pantry.
Lemon verbena cooler is especially refreshing after a hot afternoon or gardening. To make: pick a handful of lemon verbena leaves, tear or chop and add to a pitcher full of water, steep overnight and enjoy the next day. If you like a little sweetness, add sugar before drinking. You can also make lemon verbena syrup to use in mixed drinks, as flavoring for ice cream, desserts and just about anywhere a lemony flavor would be welcome. I find that lemon verbena is quite delicious when added to jams and jellies. Simply add a few leaves when cooking down the berries, strain out and process as desired.
Lemon verbena can also be used to infuse sugar with a lemony flavor. I can think of many places a lemony sugar would be welcome, particularly in ice cream, iced tea, or other sweet treats like cookies and cakes. Of course you can also add a few vanilla beans to make a vanilla lemon sugar.
Lemon verbena leaves retain their scent when dried, so you can dry the leaves to use for flavoring and for potpourri to scent your home. You can also make a lemon verbena hair rinse by steeping a few lemon verbena leaves in a cup of hot water, then using to rinse hair after washing and conditioning. This leaves your hair with a wonderful lemony fresh scent.
I’m also experimenting with make lemon verbena liqueur. I’m steeping 1 1/2 cups of chopped lemon verbena in 4 cups of organic vodka. After 2 weeks I’ll be adding 2 cups of organic evaporated cane juice. I’m thinking this will be a great Christmas gift for friends that enjoy mixed beverages, being a rather dry person myself I won’t be consuming any.
I also made some lemon verbena syrup. Heat one cup of water until hot, then add 3/4 cup of evaporated cane juice and dissolve. Then added 1/2 cup of chopped lemon verbena leaves. Steep for an 30 minutes or so, then strain and refrigerate or can. Enjoy as a sweetener for teas, sauces, sweets or wherever you want a hint of lemon flavor.
What’s your favorite herb to save up for winter use?
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Putting up Tomatoes for Winter Sauces
My tomatoes are finally starting to ripen up en masse as are the ones in my mom’s garden. I’ve been picking big bucketfuls of all colors shapes and sizes. When I see these sitting in the kitchen, I know exactly why I grow a variety of heirlooms, how beautiful!
On Sunday evening I worked well into the night canning up some tomatoes for enjoying this winter. I’m trying to focus more on eating seasonally and growing foods that don’t need to be preserved by canning, but tomatoes are an exception. I’ll always can tomatoes for making sauces and soups. I also dry a lot of tomatoes, but sometimes a rich hearty meat sauce is the perfect dinner, and I need canned tomatoes for that.
I can all of my tomatoes as crushed tomatoes, and I never remove the seeds. Some people say the seeds can make your tomatoes bitter, but I’ve never noticed that it does. I’ve read so many different directions for canning crushed tomatoes, some of them say to process them for an hour and half in a water bath canner. I follow the directions from this great brochure from the University of Georgia – Tomato Canning. I also use the directions from Well-Preserved.
What do I do? I simply peel the tomatoes and cut them up, add them to a large pan, heat them to boiling and continue to cook them for 5 minutes. Then I fill hot jars allowing a 1/2 to 3/4 inch head space (I find that with tomatoes you want your head space to be slightly more, never less than 1/2 inch). I add a basil leaf to each jar and add the lid and ring. Then I process in a water bath canner for 35 minutes for pints, 45 min for quarts. When processing time is finished, leave jars in canner with heat turned off for 5 minutes, then remove. I find that this step helps with sealing on tomatoes, they have a tendency to expand when you take them out the canner and kind of boil up.
Do you grow enough tomatoes to can? What’s your favorite way to preserve them for the winter?
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Harvesting Potatoes
I harvested my ‘Red Gold’ potatoes from the front garden a few weeks ago. It always amazes me when I dig potatoes, you plant one small potato and dig up a bucketful. The yields in my garden are slightly smaller than the ones we harvested from my mom’s garden, but I wasn’t disappointed.
Red Gold: Bred by Ag-Canada at the University of Guelph in 1970. Beautiful reddish orange skin with creamy, golden-yellow, semi-moist flesh. Excellent variety for baking, frying, mashing, steaming or roasting. Good disease resistance, best used fresh, not recommended for extended storage. 90-100 days.
My mom and I also harvested the ‘Carola’, ‘All Red’, ‘All Blue’, and ‘Purple Viking’ that we planted in her garden. We were quite impressed with the yields, I think the total weighed in around 40 pounds for these varieties. It was quite fun to harvest such a colorful variety of potatoes. I got this collection from potato sampler from Seed Savers in the spring.
All Red: (a.k.a. Cranberry Red) Red skin with delicate pale pink flesh. Low starch content makes this variety a good boiling potato for salads or any dish that requires potatoes to retain their shape. Considered the best producing red-fleshed, red-skinned variety. Introduced to SSE members by Robert Lobitz in 1984. Consistently a good producer at Heritage Farm, regardless of the weather conditions. 90-110 days.
Carola: Our most popular variety. Heavy yields of medium-sized, rounded oval potatoes with straw-beige skin. Excellent when harvested as young new potatoes. Creamy yellow flesh, relatively low starch, great for soups, boiling or fried. Maintains new potato qualities for months in root cellar. 95 days.
All Blue: Deep blue skin, blue flesh with a thin white line just under the skin. A good choice for baking and frying, nice for making colorful chips. When boiled the color turns to a light blue. High mineral content, good keeper. 90-110 days.
Purple Viking: Quickly gaining the reputation of a great tasting, slightly sweet, general purpose potato. A choice variety for any preparation , snow-white flesh is excellent for mashing. Average tubers are 3½ – 4″ in diameter, but in a good year it can produce even larger tubers. Excellent storage qualities. 80-100 days.
So far I’ve tasted them all and they’re all quite good, I’ll try to post more in depth about this later. I especially like the All Reds, they’re very good and they had a great yield. We still need to harvest the ‘Kennebec’ and we harvested the fingerlings yesterday, more on those later. This winter I’ll be trying to decide what varieties I’ll be growing next year, perhaps all of these again, perhaps some new ones, once I get to eat a few more of them and see how they store I’ll make my decision.
Do you grow or eat a colorful variety of potatoes? How many varieties do you grow each year?
