A long over due update

I am so sorry for being away for so long but oh my gosh I have been having the most frustrating technical problems with the internet and with my laptop, which is no longer a laptop since it now has a regular keyboard attached to it and 6 things plugged into it, I had to get a USB port to handle it all. which means it's not portable anymore and boy, I miss that. Now my writing schedule is all wonky. I used to get up early (with the sun) and have coffee in bed with my laptop, this is when I did my blogging and reading up on the news and catching up on other people's blogs that I follow. Now I have to develop a new morning habit and for some reason sitting on a chair first thing in the morning just isn't comfortable......how spoiled do I sound?
So, lets do a little catch up with some photos;

This is my little fruit garden that I am very excited about, the tree on the right is an Apple tree and the 2 smaller ones on the left are cherry trees. 

a neighbor found a little red wagon at a yard sale and bought it for me.....very handy

this is my vineyard, I have 3 little grape vines that you can't really see growing here that are supposed to cover the wall of my house within time

Strawberries look a lot better this year, I am hoping for a few bowls of berries this year

Out of the 20 garlic that I planted last fall 12 are growing.....better than nothing I guess

This spinach has already been eaten and new stuff has been planted

Radishes are almost ready.....much later than last year

This is my shady garden that has plaged me for many years, I finally have hostas and monkshood growing in there and I transplanted some rhubarb (they say you can't kill rhubarb....but how does it do in the shade?) 

All these little cucumbers have since been frozen and new ones have been seeded which are just popping out of the
ground...grrr!

you can't really see but the peas are up and so are the 100 onions I planted along this fence( yes I planted 100 onions, I am expecting an onion famine in the land) )  

Here is the "before" photo for 2011, the goal is to create a green wall along that back fence

My new arbor that is to be covered in green by July, it is where the squash and pumpkins will fight for space (I always plant everything too close together)

If you came to tea in the evening this is where we would sit, among the herbs and Geraniums 

Up close at my vineyard, I am waiting for the gas company to complain because I have planted so close to their meter, I;m thinking since I pay dearly for that meter it shouldn't be their business but sometimes it's easier to ask for  forgiveness instead of permission 

If you came for tea in the afternoon this is where we would sit.....but then, who has time for tea in the afternoon?

The potato patch on the right and a few stray perrenials that have survived over the years

This area has been so ugly in the past so last fall I redid it, it is to be my fruit garden and hopefully all the space will be filled with bushy rhubarb soon 

Now lets see what has been happening in the kitchen;

Here is my version of homemade ice-cream, I did not invent this I got it from  Jamie Oliver's website. First you freeze some fruit, cut it up in small pieces and put in a freezer bags. Don't pack it in there tightly or you will end up with one big round frozen chunk. I lay the fruit on a coolie sheet and freeze for a few hours and then take put them in  bag. I have lots of Saskatoons in the freezer so I use lots of them. When you want ice-cream put some frozen fruit in your food processor or blender (my Canadian blender does not do frozen stuff, m y Mexican blender could make pulp out of a spruce tree) blend it until it is a frozen slush and then put in some yogurt and blend a wee bit more. I use my homemade plain yogurt, the whole point of making my own ice-cream is to avoid all the sugar in store ice-cream and most store yogurt is  full of sugar too. I also add some vanilla and a wee bit of honey and blend. Yummm yummm 

Frozen fruit

With yogurt and vanilla

Creamy smooth ice-cream

You could add any flavoring, like chocolate syrup or coco, maple syrup, whatever you have a hankering for.

So I am back to packing lunches and I know it sounds weird but I really enjoy packing a lunch, I usually cook for the whole week on the weekend and plan a weeks worth of lunch. Right now I still have to buy vegetables from the store so I am not eating as much veggies as I would like.

A great way to sneak in an extra serving of vegetables is to serve everything on a bed of greens....these days I only have spinach in my garden

Always a baggie of fruit laying on the seat of my golf cart (my office)

This week I happy to see my local grocery store had some more organic vegetables, I was so excited.

I chopped it all  up and put it all in a big bowl and will just add some oil, vinegar, and Cayenne pepper and fill little baggies for work....really excited about this (I know I sound like a geek) 

Finally we are getting some heat, it's been a cold spring and still is very cool at night.

When it gets warm like that I make an extra batch of yogurt and let it incubate in my greenhouse, see the towel covered bowl on the left

Then I made cream cheese with it;

All you do is take your yogurt and put it in a cheese cloth and hang it up to drip, I save the dripping, it is the whey which is high in protein I put it in whatever I am baking at the time, bread, muffins or granola bars. Yesterday I had beans in the crock pot so I poured it in there. After about 5 hours you have a nice lump of cream cheese. Once I have fresh herbs I plan on seasoning it with herbs,  it's a great dip for crackers or chips. If you like a bit of a tart flavor drip it out in the fridge instead of on the counter.

Now, on to something real serious, I got old, real old. When my birthdays come they just come and go and sometimes I even forget, my birthdays have never bothered me or excited me in any way. I have never enjoyed birthday parties either, it's just another day. But....when my daughter has a birthday it is always a really emotional day for me, I always reflect back on the day she was born (May 28) it was a  beautiful sunny spring day, so full of joy, new hope, new life, new plans, new promises, new commitments, it was a life changing day for me. This year she turned 22, which makes me feel really old.  There is an ornamental apple tree in my yard, now I would never plant an ornamental anything tree, whats the point of having an apple tree if you never get apples but it was here before I and has survived over the years, it always blooms on my child's birthday.....glorious, stunning pink flowers, I call it her birthday tree. This year spring it was later than usual so it bloomed a week later.

Happy Birthday to my beautiful little one

So from there we go on to mayonnaise, over the last few years I have tried many recipes for homemade mayonnaise as the store stuff has too many things on the ingredients list that doesn't sound much like edible food and the fact that it can be in your fridge until the sides of the jar and inside of the lid look like you catch a new disease and .... it is still not rotten is also very scary (that also goes for catsup and cheese whiz) These recipes have all been good and defiantly edible but have really never been very wowing to me until I tried this one. I found it here;  Thank-you so much Brenda for posting this. This stuff by the way will keep for a few months in the fridge but not as long as store mayo.

http://myfavoritefoodsyesterdayandtoday.blogspot.com/

So I won't bother retyping it, I did not put in any white sugar  but just added about a tbsp of brown sugar and next time I won't put so much vinegar, I don't like things to be really tart and this was just a wee bit too tart for me, it was more like tarter sauce, which was great because I just happened to be cooking  fish that day and it was so great with it. 

My so good mayonnaise, love it, no story about the noodles in the background they just happened to be
 there

Fish with a nice lump of mayo

Then I had a visit from Flat Stanley for those of you that don't know him you can read up on him here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley  Flat Stanley came to me all the way from Oregon, it is his first visit to Canada. When a Flat Stanley comes to your house you are to treat him like a guest and send him home with pictures and stories of his visit so I tried to be as good of a hostess as I could.

I took him to work with me

He rode around with me in my gold cart (my office) while I watered the grrens

Check it out, it'a only 7 am and the sun is bright and high

He went on a rode trip to La Crete, we crossed the Mighty Peace River

Standing on the banks of the Peace River at my mom's house

"Look  at me" he says, I am in Canada

Just after 10 pm and the sun is just setting ( this was on May 28th, sun sets later now)

This is shortly before 6 am, sun has been up for about 2 hours already, "this Canada sure is a sunny place" he says. 

He opted to not ride on the bobcat with me, I don't blame him, I am not exactly smoothie poothie on the bobcat and the noise would have curled his ears

Due to me not being on the ball and sending him home right away he is now stuck it Canada due to the Canadian mail strike, I might have to send him on the Grey Hound Bus. 

Mary Mary quiet contrary how does your garden grow.....

If I had a toonie every time someone has said that to me in my life I would be rich....oh wait, I am rich.....or at least I was this past summer, rich in vegetables anyway.

Last fall I was inspired to have a greenhouse built, inspired by a lady in California who blogged about her small raised garden bed in her backyard. I couldn’t believe the amount of vegetables she got out of her tiny space and I started imagining what I could do with my backyard, which is a lot bigger than hers. I knew I could not compete with her long growing season in California unless maybe I had a greenhouse. So I hired a dud to build me a 10x12 greenhouse with 4 12ft x 2ft beds in it. 

I started plants indoors in March and in May I moved them out to the greenhouse; I had to heat it up with a space heater until the weather warmed up in June.  I also built 5 4x8 and 2 2x8 raised beds and had them filled with a ½ and ½ mixture of old cow manure and topsoil. I did not like the topsoil and will not use it again, when it got wet it got very hard and lumpy, from now on I will use compost which I found out later that I can get free at my local landfill. In April I transplanted everything except the tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelon, cantaloupe and peppers out into my bed and planted the seed vegetables. There was still frost in the mornings at this time so I covered my beds with my leftover plastic from my greenhouse for a few weeks just to be safe. This is so easy to do with raised beds; I found my raised bed so much easier to manage than a large garden plot in the ground. At the top of each raised bed I had built a trellis to train my plants to grow up to save some space and this worked great, I ended up with a green wall across my backyard made up of, beans, peas, sweet peas, pumpkin and squash. 

It looked like the green lush California garden that had inspired me to begin with; it was the look I was looking for. I discovered that I love to grow creeping and climbing plants like cucumbers, watermelon, cantaloupe, beans, peas and my favourite of all...squash. I only had spaghetti squash this year but want to experiment with a few different kids this year, and I also want to try eggplant.....I hear it likes to climb as well. I had a great beet crop and fell in love with beets. Beets had never been my favourite, I would eat them if I were served them somewhere else but have never bought a beet and cooked it myself, I have been missing out, they were so good. I loved them just boiled and then lightly tossed with butter and salt...so easy. I peed purple all summer. I have since learned that they are great raw, shredded into salad, and add a nice flavour to vegetable juice. Beets are on the list again for next year. My carrots were great, there just was not enough of them, same with onions, didn’t have enough. I didn’t get a lot of cucumbers, I think that was due to it being too hot in my greenhouse for them, next year I will start them in greenhouse and them transplant them out, the tomatoes however loved it in the greenhouse, they became a huge jungle in there, I had planted them too close together I think, it was a tangled mess but it produced a lot of tomatoes. I ate tomatoes from June until September when I finally just stopped tending to everything.

 I had a little bag of baby tomatoes in my lunch every day. Not sure what happened to my peppers, did not get a lot of green peppers, my chilli peppers however did quite well. I had great corn but again just not enough of it. 

This is a 2x8 bed that is completely overgrown with corn, squash and beans

I had even planted some popcorn which was awesome but...not enough again, it popped up so white, it was beautiful. Another vegetable that I feel in love with again is Rutabaga, I hadn’t had them since I was a kid, it brought back memories of raiding grandma’s garden. I would cube it raw and munched on it at work on my tractor, never cooked it, ate it all raw. It is defiantly on the list for next year.  Of course it wasn’t all a success, my cantaloupe got smothered by heat in the greenhouse, I ended up with 2 cantaloupes the size of a big apple that were good but I had hoped for a bigger crop. The watermelon got smothered by the pumpkin, the pumpkin went crazy, it was the garden bully, and you could almost watch it grow. I ended up harvesting 5 small pumpkins, which was the perfect amount for me. 

I lost my whole cabbage crop to bugs (worms) I battled it for a while and then finally gave up. The bugs also attacked my broccoli and cauliflower, but I did manage to harvest a bit off them before I gave them up as well. Since these are known as the buggy plants, I will grow them in a separate area next year and cover them with row covers as I do not want to use pesticide. I had nice onions and garlic as well but again...not enough. I think I smothered my strawberries last fall, I covered them with grass clippings in the fall I think that was not the answer, I used dried leaves this year, so I hope to have strawberries this year...more than a handful. I also planted some raspberries bushes and they died too....I forgot to water them during the hot time, so I need to replant.

I really really enjoyed by garden, the whole process from seed to tending it, and the harvesting, I loved it all, I couldn’t wait to get home at the end of my work day to check on my garden. It was the first thing I did in the morning....wander around  my garden with my coffee and it was the last thing I did before I went to bed...wander around the garden with my cup of tea. The absolute most thrilling part (yes I said thrilling) was go out with a bowl at supper time and gather my supper and my lunch for the next day. I had either stir fried, steamed or boiled vegetables for supper....my favourite is lightly steamed and then tossed with different flavouring, and my favourite is steaming them in my homemade chicken broth. 

I have a new plan for next year, I plan to freeze chicken broth in ice cube trays and then put in bags in the freezer, and then when I want to steam my vegetables I can just put one cube in the pan. I also plan on making my own tomato bouillon as well the same way, in ice cube trays.

I discovered that having a meatless meal was much more satisfying then coming home from work famished and gorging on a meat heavy meal, it always left me feeling so bloated and lazy. I still got my protein from either a boiled egg, or cottage cheese or beans. I did eat meat as well, just not as often and not as much at a time. I found this way I still had energy after supper instead of just wanting to veg out for the rest of the evening. Making lunches for work as also thrilling, it was so much fun to go to work with a Ziploc baggie of tomatoes and a bread bag of cut up vegetables to munch on while on my tractor. This was not my lunch, it was my snack. It was not hard to get my 5-10 servings of fruit and vegetables in a day; this was usually done well before supper...which is why I felt I could treat myself to having a bag of chips and a Pepsi for supper sometimes. Makes sense to me.

Here is a summary of what I learned this summer in my garden

-         A greenhouse needs vents, not just a window (even in the north)

-         You cannot grow buggy plants without row covers (unless you want to poison yourself)

-         Pumpkins are garden bullies, give them space

-         Corn and beans love each other

-         Squash is beautiful....it can build a green wall

-         Popping your own home grown popcorn is very thrilling

-         Starting your garden indoors in March is too early

-         Peas, when growing upward are fun to pick

-         Eating a raw Rutabaga makes you feel like you are 6 again

-         Gathering your own supper makes you feel rich....like you won something

-         Squash and pumpkin soup is amazing, and can  be cooked in so many different ways

-         You can freeze spinach

-         Freezing tomatoes is not complicated, wash them, put them in container of your choice, stick your hand in there and smooch them, put a lid on it and stick in freezer....leave 1 inch head room.

-         You can never have too much compost or cow manure on hand

-         You never get tired of eating raw vegetables when on a tractor for 12 hours s day

-         Eating beets makes you pee purple

-         If you want lots of onions you have to plant lots of onions...it’s a one for one vegetable.

-         Vegetables are very tasty if you don’t over cook them

-         You can never have enough tomatoes....so many things you can do with them

-         Collared greens are goooood

-         Loved eating the peas raw in the pod...never shelled or cooked a single pea

Plans for next year;

-         Already expanded my growing space last fall, built new raised beds

-         Don’t put slow growing plants beside fast growing plans....they get smothered.

-         Plant more stuff that can be stored over winter, beans, cabbage, squash, potatoes, broccoli, onion, garlic, corn, tomatoes, peppers etc...

-         Freeze my spinach instead of letting it bolt if I can’t eat it all

-         Plant my buggy plants at the community garden (with row covers)

-         Not start so early in doors....maybe not start indoors at all, just start heating the greenhouse earlier

-         Plant a variety of squash and eggplant

-         Try planting sweet potatoes

-         Want to grow some fruit, maybe a few apple trees, and replace the raspberries that died

-         Encourage and help someone else start a garden

-         Green is beautiful

The green green grass of home......my second home, the golf course. Sharp crisp cut lines in the grass thrills.

 I planted squash in a raised bed by the 11th tee box at work, can you believe there are only 2 squash plants in here. I am going to use some more empty space at the gold course next year to plant vegetables......eatable landscaping they call it. The dirt in here is 100% old horse manure.