Friday Favorite: Purging
No not that kind of purging – I mean getting rid of STUFF. There’s nothing more liberating than finding things to get rid of around the house. Every two years I have a garage sale with a friend that live in town. Over the course of two years we collect things that we no longer want or need.
I have found that saving them all of two years and then having a garage is a great deterrent and helps me not buy things I don’t need. There’s just something about seeing all your junk that you spent money on sitting on tables being sold for pennies.
We also have a good time. Rarely do I have a day where I just sit around and do nothing and get to chat with my friend. Having a garage sale allows us to meet neighbors, chat, and relax a little bit! Tomorrow is garage sale day for Chiot’s Run. This year it’s especially nice because everything I purged from the house doesn’t have to be packed up and taken to Maine.
Have you ever had a garage sale? Do you like to go to garage sales?
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So We Bought This House….In Liberty, Maine
If you’ve been reading here for a while you know Mr Chiots and I have been searching for a home in Maine. We put an offer on a house with 20 acres back in February but things didn’t work out. At the beginning of May, a blog reader (now a friend) who works at a land trust sent me the link to a nice property that was going to be coming on the market. Mr Chiots and I drove up to see if it might be the future Chiot’s Run. We spent the entire day there, looking at the house, the gardens, walking the miles and miles of trails that wind through the 147 acres of woods and wetlands. (correction, after closing we found out it’s 152 acres – BONUS)
There’s a house, a garage/workshop, a sauna, a couple nice edible gardening areas, the headwaters to a river, a huge wetland area and lots and lots of trees.
We had lunch and dinner with the current owners and got in our car that evening with a gentleman’s agreement to purchase the property. It’s been a long road trying to get all the paperwork finished up, but finally, this past Tuesday, as in the day before yesterday, we signed the papers, handed over a HUGE check and it’s ours. We’re not moving until late September, we have work scheduled in Ohio and they are building a house and won’t be able to move out until then. It ended up working out perfectly for all parties involved. More details about the gardens & property in the coming weeks.
How big is your garden in acres?
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I Have Chickens
After wanting chickens for years, I finally have some. Yesterday, I bought some chickens; a whole flock of them, ten hens and a lovely rooster.
They’re a cross between Rhode Island Red and Rhode Island White. According to their current owners, they’re great layers.
Oh Yeah,
they also came with a lovely coop,
a house, a sauna,
and 150 acres
in MAINE.
More about that tomorrow…
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Another Reason for Alliums
As if you need another reason to grow a wide variety of alliums in the garden beside the deliciousness that they bring to your plate. I plant extra leeks and onions so I can leave some in place to produce blooms. Leeks are the best for this because they’re overwintered. I never harvest all of my leeks because otherwise I’d miss these beautiful flowers and so would the bees.
Onions are biennial so they will bloom the second year. These are leeks that I planted last summer, harvested in fall/winter/spring and left a few for the honeybees.
They’re not quite as showy, as big, or as colorful as globe alliums that you buy as flowering bulbs, but they do offer food for our tables and beauty for our gardens. I certainly appreciate plants that do double duty like this!
Do you ever leave any of your leeks or onions to bloom for beauty and for the bees?
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Harvesting the Garlic
Over the weekend I harvested my garlic. I usually wait until there are 5 or 6 green leaves left on the plants. Here’s my post on How to Tell if Garlic is Ready to Harvest.
My garlic crop is a mix of varieties that I’ve been growing for a few years now. There are white and purple varities, some that produce HUGE bulbs and some that produce small ones. All of the type I grow are hardneck, though next year I’ll be adding some softneck garlic because I hear it stores longer.
Overall it was a great year for garlic. The final tally is 160 bulbs harvested. Looks like we’ll be having a savory year! You might wonder what we do with so much garlic? We eat it in just about every day in something. Garlic is so healthy we make sure to include as much of it as we can. It’s a good thing I grow my own because purchasing this much garlic throughout the year for cooking would cost a fortune. I’ll also save 15-25 bulbs for planting this fall saving myself a bundle on seed garlic too!
Have you harvested your garlic yet? What’s your favorite dish that contains garlic?
