This site is an archive of ChiotsRun.com. For the latest information about Susy and her adventrures, visit the Cultivate Simple site.
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Happy Camper

August 31st, 2015

Mr Chiots is a happy camper, yesterday we got a sailboat from a friend. He’s been wanting one for a while, he did a lot of sailing on this type of catamaran in high school. It’s a Hobiecat 16.
Sailboat3
We went to our friend Joan’s house and got the boat in the water. Then we loaded up all the sails and the mast on it and our neighbor came to pull the sailboat to the boat launch.
Sailboat2
Sailboat1
We loaded it onto the trailer, but of course it wasn’t quite that simple. Mr Chiots and I went down to Joan’s house a few weeks ago to check out the trailer and pump up the tires. When we arrived yesterday one of the tires was flat. Thankfully, Joan had a compressor and we pumped it back up. We crossed our fingers when we loaded the boat on it and headed home. Taking back roads and watching the trailer.
Sailboat
Luckily we made it home without issue. Mr Chiots spent the afternoon putting it all together, checking to see which parts are missing and what needs fixing. There probably isn’t enough summer yet to get it out on the water this fall, but by next summer it should be ready.

Have you ever been sailing?

Friday Favorite: Vegetable Soup

August 28th, 2015

Since the garden is bursting with fresh vegetables, I’ve been making pots of vegetable soup. The soup gets ladled into wide mouth pint mason jars and tucked away in the freezer, ready for quick meals come cold weather. We eat some in the summer too, last night I made a pot of minestrone and we will be enjoying that this weekend. It was filled with: potatoes, cabbage, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, garlic, celery, green beans, and herbs from the garden.
curried broccoli soup
I make soup with whatever vegetables are ready to harvest, curried broccoli, tomato, vegetable, etc. It’s nice to know that there are instant meals ready for fall days when I’d rather spend every drop of sunlight working in the garden. I also love using up all those bits of vegetable peels to make vegetable stock for all these soups. I feel like I’m making the most of the bounty of summer.

What’s your favorite kind of soup?

Give Me a B!

August 27th, 2015

I love beets, especially pickled. Even as a wee little lassie I had an affinity for the pickled purple roots. My mom made them often and I gobbled them up. I don’t do a lot of canning, but I always make two half gallon jars of pickled beets for the fridge. When we eat up the beets, I love throwing boiled eggs in the juice so I can have lovely pink eggs for my salads.
harvesting beets 2
For this reason, I’ve always grown beets in the garden. Not a ton, just a 15 foot row or so. Enough to eat throughout the summer and enough to pickle. I never thin my beets because I like have a wide range of sizes. I love the huge ones for slicing into big rounds and I love the tiny ones for roasting whole.
harvesting beets 1
This year I grew ‘Early Wonder’ and ‘Detroit’. They were both fantastic, very long holding in the garden. In fact these beets were seeded very early and have been growing all summer.
harvesting beets 3
We like eating the beet greens as well, but when it comes time to pickle a load of beets, the chickens end up with the tasty leaves. I’m happy to hand them over as they’re a welcome treat for them. It seems like beets are one of those vegetables that people either love or hate, I’m so happy to be on the love side!

Do you like beets? What’s your favorite way to eat them?

After being asked in the comment, I figured I’d add it here too. I love The Joy of Pickling: 250 Flavor-Packed Recipes for Vegetables and More from Garden or Market (Revised Edition) and most of my pickling recipes come from it.

The Search is Over

August 26th, 2015

For the past year, I’ve been searching for bricks for a walkway in the potager. I wanted old bricks, not the shiny new pavers from the home improvement store. I wanted bricks with a history, ones that had been a chimney, a house, or something else. A few weeks ago, I found an ad on Craigslist for bricks, old ones, lots of them. Just what I was looking for!
vintage bricks 1
We picked up one load in our little car 2 weeks ago, and quickly realized we needed bigger guns. Enter Brian’s work truck.
vintage bricks 4
On Saturday, we made our way back down to Biddeford to get the remaining bricks from the bottom of the Cleaves Castle in Biddeford. This basement was a mansion at one time, then eventually became a city building with a jail in the bottom. These bricks may have been the walls between the cells.
vintage bricks 2
vintage bricks 3
Regardless of what these bricks have seen in their lifetime, they will now be perfectly at home in my garden. This fall I hope to start the preparation for the walkways. That will be a lot of work, but well worth the effort.

What’s your favorite pathway material in the garden?

Sweet Delight

August 25th, 2015

Last night we harvested the first sweet corn from the garden. And I mean the first sweet corn I’ve every grown (by myself anyways, we always grew it when I was a kid).
first sweet corn 1
first sweet corn 2
It’s really surprising that it’s ready this early, it wasn’t supposed to be ripe until the end of August, next week at the earliest.
first sweet corn 3
I checked last week and it was still not ready, then we checked last night a few ears were.
first sweet corn
What a great treat indeed. ‘Fisher’s Earliest’ was the variety, I got the seed from High Mowing Seeds. This is an old fashioned variety, not a super sweet hybrid. It’s lightly sweet with a good corn flavor. in fact, it reminds me a lot of the corn I grew as a kid. Personally, I’m not a fan of the sugar enhanced newer varieties, give me a variety like this please!
first sweet corn 4
We’re certainly looking forward to having sweet corn for dinner every night this week. I didn’t plant a lot, only about 30 plants. That should do us for eating and I should get a few pints to freeze as well.

Do you grow sweet corn?

About

This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.

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