Berry Delicious
In the future, we hope to plant blueberry bushes and raspberry canes, until then we have to find them elsewhere. Lucky for us, Sweet Season Farm is located just a few miles down the road and has pick-your-own raspberry and blueberries.
Yesterday morning we loaded up and headed down there to pick. Our neighbor and her mother-in-law were also in our party.
Mr Chiots and I didn’t end up getting any blueberries, we plan on heading back for those later this week. I might freeze just a few, or we might eat them all fresh. Last night I was thinking about making a batch of Nourishing Custard with fresh raspberries. Or I might pull out a few of my cookbooks for inspiration. I love fresh berries in season!
Do you grow any berries in your garden? If you had a glut of red and black raspberries what would you make with them?
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Cultivate Simple 39: Keep It Seasonal
Today we’re talking about living seasonally, particularly when it comes to the food on your plate.
Even in the dead of winter, the products of our labor were good. From the freezer we could choose broccoli or cauliflower, peas or beans or corn, anytime we pleased. In spring, we often had them all together in orgies of vegetable soups meant to clear the freezer for the next round. Though certainly we were well-fed, and spiritually content at living from our own labors, the broccoli, peas, beans, cauliflower, and corn came to have a certain sameness about them, a predictable ready-on-demand sort of quality that robbed us of much of the joy of them. The seasons were all flattened out, and one sitting to the table came to seem just like another.
Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd from Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill
What is your favorite season of eating and why?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:43 — 64.4MB)
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Quote of the Day: Jessica Prentice
Visiting a farmer’s market gives me a sense of the season and a direct connection with the people who spend their days growing food. Eating seasonally reconnects me to the natural pulse of life, the Earth’s annual cycle of cold and heat, wet and dry, long night and then long days as it makes it’s journey around the sun. These annual cycles make me more mindful of the eternal realities of birth growth, death, decay and rebirth. They keep me aware of my humanness and my mortality as well as my kinship and interdependence with all other life on earth.
Jessica Prentice – Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection
I used up my onions from last year’s garden long ago. Even though we’ve been eating scallions and chives, nothing is quite as good as sautéed onions. The smell alone make me happy. Since we moved late in the fall, I didn’t have any leeks planted in the garden to fill the gap between bulb onions and new onions. Thus, we’ve been onionless as I refuse to buy them if I can’t find them locally.
One of the reasons I refuse to buy them is because it makes it all the more exciting when they start to show up at the farmers market and when they can be harvest from the garden. It has been said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, that is certainly true for the humble onion. I was giddy with excitement when I spotted onions at the farmers market on Friday morning. I purchased 4 large white onions and a bunch of beautiful small red torpedo shaped onions. There’s nothing like scarcity to make us fully appreciate abundance!
My onions in the garden are doing quite well, they are finally starting to bulb, it will be interesting to see how many I harvest and how long they last in the cellar. I have a good number of leeks planted already, with more to go in the ground when I have a clear spot. My potato onions and shallots will also be harvest soon as well. I’m also harvesting ‘Mini Purplette’ onions I planted a few months ago.
This fall I’ll be ordering and planting more shallots as well to increase my allium collection. My goal is to be able to have some sort of allium from my garden on my plate every month of the year without having to grow massive quantities of bulbing onions. I want my diet to reflect the seasonal changes, leeks and overwintered bunching onions in spring and early summer, fresh bulb onions in throughout summer, fall and winter. Big fat leeks harvested from the icy soil in early winter and early spring. Learning to eat seasonally not only increases the variety in our diet, it also helps us stay in tune with the natural cycles.
What food do you miss most when it’s not in season?
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So Long Peas…Hello Beets
The winter garden seeding is in full swing. I’ve been tearing out peas, broccoli and other spring crops and replacing them with turnips, beets, carrots and spinach.
Of course the pigs are getting the exhausted pea vines, they have a great time searching for any pods remaining. The string from the trellis was saved and I’m using it to tie up my tomatoes.
Hopefully the fall crops will do well, I’m hoping for a good harvest of root vegetables not only for us, but for all of our feathers, hooved and pawed creatures.
Are you replacing any spring crops with fall crops?
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Friday Favorite: The Meadow
We have a large grassy area that might be considered a lawn. Since we just have a small push mower, we left most of it to grow up into a meadow. It’s been beautiful, filled with wildflowers of all colors, shapes and sizes and a wide variety of grasses as well.
We’re not the only ones enjoying this, we have a doe that’s been grazing regularly down below the house. She’s been coming out and grazing every week. We noticed her first a few weeks ago while she was still very pregnant. She’s since had her fawn, which we’ve heard bleating down in the woods.
What’s your favorite wildflower?
