I'll Show You Mine

Here is our spaghetti squash off just a few plants. They are very prolific. These squash store well after washing them in water with a couple of drops of chlorine to keep them from spoiling. We will be eating them for weeks. We cut them in half, remove the seeds, and then bake them in the oven or microwave cut side down against the cooking dish to preserve the moisture. We then spoon the pulp out of the shell and serve with butter, salt, and pepper. They have a tender yellow pulp that is stringy like spaghetti. Sometimes we put pasta sauce on it. When we start eating spaghetti squash we know autumn is close at hand in our backyard farm. We love it!

~Dale

Nature Inspired Wallpapers

Check out this site, you can download free garden and nature inspired wall papers from Yoshihiro Moritake's online sketchbook. It is so hard to choose one, they are all so beautiful!If you don't have enough weeds in your garden, try this wallpaper:

~marisa

Steve Is Showing His

Love your blog! Here's a few pics of our produce so far this year, and some of our chickens and rabbits. We made both the coop and Hutch ourselves, too!

The kids are my nieces and nephew, who come over frequently to chase/harass/love the bunnies and chickens!
~Steve





Thanks for sharing Steve. Great coop, I'm always impressed with peoples handy work, it looks beautiful. Cute bunny, chickens, nieces, and nephew as well!

~marisa

Post Apocalyptic Zucchini and Corn Fritters-Eat the Seasons Friday

If the end of the world ever comes, the first seed I will plant in my post apocalyptic vegetable garden is going to be a Zucchini. It’s not my favorite vegetable but I have never had problems growing this magical squash. Not only do the Zucchini plants I plant live they thrive and I always end up with too much of it. I ask you, what better plant to try to sustain myself with when the superbug has been unleashed, or the nuclear bombs have been launched, or the asteroid has hit the planet.

I found a great recipe for Zucchini Fritters on this link. http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2009/08/what-to-do-with-zucchini-and-corn-fritters-recipe.html

Here is the recipe from the article.

Zucchini and Corn Fritters

- serves 4 -

Ingredients

4 cups shredded zucchini
1 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
2 ears corn
1 small onion, diced small
3 scallions, white and green parts, thinly sliced
1/4 cup cilantro, minced
3/4 cup flour
A few good grinds of black pepper
Canola, grapeseed or other neutral oil, for pan-frying
Sour cream or Greek yogurt, for serving

Procedure

1. Shred the zucchini on the large holes of a box grater or with the shredding disc of a food processor. Place the shredded zucchini in a colander in the sink or over a bowl and sprinkle with the salt. Toss to combine. Let drain while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

2. Crack the eggs into a large bowl and scramble lightly. Cut the kernels from the corn cobs and add the kernels to the bowl along with the diced onion, sliced scallions, chopped cilantro, flour and pepper.

3. Pick up the shredded zucchini in small handfuls and squeeze out and discard as much liquid as you can. Add the zucchini to the bowl. Mix well to combine.

4. Pour the oil into a large frying pan to a depth of about 1/4-inch. Heat the oil over medium-high heat until hot but not smoking. Drop large, heaping spoonfuls of the zucchini mixture into the pan to form disc-shaped fritters. Cook in batches without crowding (about 3 or 4 at a time, depending on the size of your pan) until golden brown on the underside (about 2 minutes) and then flip and cook until golden brown on the second side. Remove to paper towels to drain. Add a bit more oil between batches if necessary.

5. Serve with a dollop of sour cream or Greek yogurt. The fritters should be crisp on the outside and slightly custardy on the inside.

I added some oregano and cut out the scallions. The result was amazing. I made two versions. The first was a smaller appetizer fritter that we served with some ranch (I hate ranch but I used it so the kids would eat it). It was wonderful. The outside was crisp and the inside was almost creamy. If I would have made more we would have ate more.

The second version was more of a dinner. I made larger fritters and covered them with some fresh overeasy eggs from our chickens. The yolk from the eggs and the fritters combined very well together. As you can see in the picture I added some hot sauce as well for some kick.

I know it’s not the healthiest recipe because of the oil but it didn’t seem like the fritters absorbed much oil so they weren’t too heavy. Besides, I won’t be worried about frying food when the world has ended. Sorry about the dark view of the future but I just finished reading The Canticle for Leibowitz which is a wonderful post apocolyptical book written in 1959 about what happens to the world after nuclear war. There weren’t any zucchini in the book but there should have been. They would have flourished.

--
Mike Johnson

It's National Honey Month

To celebrate we will be posting different honey recipes throughout the month.

But, for today here are some interesting facts I found from a website about honey:


Intersting Facts About Honey
1. Honey never spoils. No need to refrigerate it. It can be stored unopened, indefinitely, at room temperature in a dry cupboard.
2. Honey is one of the oldest foods in existence. It was found in the tomb of King Tut and was still edible since honey never spoils.
3. Due to the high level of fructose, honey is 25% sweeter than table sugar.
4. Honey is created when bees mix plant nectar, a sweet substance secreted by flowers, with their own bee enzymes.
5. To make honey, bees drop the collected nectar into the honeycomb and then evaporate it by fanning their wings.
6. Honey has different flavors and colors, depending on the location and kinds of flowers the bees visit. Climatic conditions of the area also influence its flavor and color.
7. To keep their hives strong, beekeepers must place them in locations that will provide abundant nectar sources as well as water.
8. In the days before biology and botany were understood, people thought it was a special kind of magic that turned flower nectar into honey.

Paul Is Showing His

OK, I'll bite.

Here's one of our weekend harvests from a couple of weeks back. We've had a Great summer around our place.

I think we're at 550 lbs of veggies so far!

~Paul

Click here to check out his blog.

Thanks for sharing Paul. The bounty looks beautiful, I'm jealous, 550 lbs???? Wow!

~marisa

Crack is wack...

My tomatoes have been a little late this year and so I have been waiting in earnest to harvest. Yesterday I was eying a particularly large tomato and was so excited to see it was ripe enough bring it in for lunch, but MUCH to my dismay I discovered CRACKS!
I had no idea what caused this so I had to do a little research. And it turns out, it's all my fault. Actually, it's all my husband's fault. Here's what I found:

Growth cracks occur as a result of the rapid growth stimulated by wet weather following a dry period. Two types of growth cracks affect the stem end of tomatoes: concentric and radial. Concentric cracking produces circular cracks around the stem end of the fruit. Radial cracks spread outward from the stem scar.*

See, a couple weeks ago a part of our yard was a mess. It was wet and soggy with tons of standing water. So my husband, without consulting me, decided to just turn off the sprinklers completely. Now, over watering tomatoes can cause lush foilage and and only a few tomatoes BUT cutting it off completely can push your fruit just a little too much and give it what is essentially stretch marks. Luckily, a few days ago I discovered that the water had been turned off and so it's back on. I hope that puts an end to the cracks because as the great Whitney Houston once said, "Crack is wack!"