Peach Harvest

Due to a mild winter, our peach tree bloomed a couple of weeks early this year, so we have been harvesting peaches a few weeks earlier than usual.

One of our favorite ways to use our peach harvest is to can our own fruit cocktail.  I had hoped to make significantly more fruit cocktail this year than last year, but my kids and husband ate some of the organic fruit I bought before canning day, so I made nearly the same amount: three pint and a half jars plus 4 pint jars (17 cups) versus the eight pint jars I made last year (16 cups).

I used exactly the same fruits as last year: peaches from our tree, apples, and pears.  However, this year I forgot to add the lime juice, so we won’t try to save a jar to see how long it keeps (acidic environments are less likely to spoil).  We opened the final jar from last year a couple of weeks ago, and it was just as good as the day we made it.  I doubt this year’s jars will make it to fall.  My girls love our homemade fruit cocktail; maybe we’ll make some in winter with other fruits.

You can find the link to the fruit cocktail recipe, as well as the Peach Salsa and Peach Popsicles we made both this year and last year at this post.  I opted to puree all of the peaches for the popsicles, because the diced pieces were really hard to chew from last year’s batch.  That post also discusses the nutrients found in peaches.

I repeated a recipe from last year that I did not include in that post: Spiced Peaches by Dorothy from her blog Shockingly Delicious.  I like to call these sweet and sour peaches; however, they do not taste like the red stuff you will find in a Chinese restaurant.

I also made a great Peach Barbecue Sauce by Katie from So Tasty So Yummy that I served with her Chick-fil-a Chicken Nuggets.  Although I haven’t tried making variations of this sauce yet, I bet it would taste great even without the peach.  We have been eating this sauce with grilled meats and even with baked potatoes.

And, I made a version of Katie’s Peach Oat Muffins that I found highlighted on another blog through the Secret Recipe Club Dorothy and Katie both participate in.  Here is the other version.  I actually merged the two versions, but I'm sure these muffins will turn out great whichever recipe you use.  We definitely liked them.

Finally, I made a Peach Custard Pie using this Good Housekeeping recipe for Nectarines.  The custard part is really good, but we used the last of our crop and the peaches tasted sour.  I think this is because we harvested most of those peaches before they were ripe in order to keep the birds from getting them all!

If you have a favorite peach recipe, I hope you will share it; I am always looking for something new to try.

In 2013 I am linking with: Backyard Barbecue Bloghop, Motivational Monday, Better Mom Monday, Healthy2Day Wednesday, Shoe Lace 

In 2012 I linked with:  Welcome Home, Farm Fresh Friday, Making it Count, Tea with Saint Anne, My Favorite Things, Show Me What You Got, Open House with Four Moms, Food on Fridays, and Try a New Recipe Tuesday.

7 Quick Takes Friday

As part of my effort to participate in more link ups, I’m connecting with Jennifer at Conversion Diary, for her very popular weekly link up known as 7 Quick Takes.  Welcome to those who have hopped over for a visit.  I hope you will explore a little, and I hope you like what you find here.

Jennifer encourages her readers not to worry about having a theme for their takes, so here goes my effort.

--- 1 ---

We are very happy with our new sprinkler hose watering system for the garden.  We have tried soaker hoses before, but the last one did not distribute the water everywhere it needed to go.  This new one does the job, and it is so easy to turn on and then forget to turn off that our plants may be in danger of drowning!  Also, the newspaper weed control worked well enough that I am trying it again on the open areas of the garden, using rocks and sticks to keep it from blowing away this time.  Here is a picture of the sprinkler hose and newspapers surrounding one of our blueberry bushes.

 

--- 2 ---

We are harvesting!  So far, we have picked a few blueberries, some cherry tomatoes, green onions, and peaches.  

I will be busy for a week or more “putting up” our peach harvest, so look for a future post with the new recipes I’m planning to try.  You can read about the nutritional benefits of peaches and the recipes I made last year here.  Also, we are cutting herbs regularly: oregano, rosemary, parsley, and cilantro.

--- 3 ---

My almost-eight-year-old learned how to ride her bike this week!  She has been trying to do it off and on for a while now and two days ago she wanted to try again immediately after school, since there was no homework this week.  After a few minutes, she was gliding along.  She is still rather wobbly and stops often, but she is so excited that she can pedal and balance at the same time.  I think our summer is going to be full of bike rides.

--- 4 ---

In between watering, harvesting, and bike riding, we are making a large 550 piece puzzle together, bit by bit.  My daughters have always liked puzzles, and when my in-laws gave us a puzzle they no longer wanted, my girls decided to tackle it.  Even my three year old contributes; we give her all the pieces of a fish, animal, or flower and she puts them together.  The image is of the prehistoric Amazon, so there are plenty of colors and lines to try to match up.  Now I’m wondering if the easy kid puzzles we have will continue to entertain them.  However, I now know how to keep us all busy when it becomes too hot to go outside or it rains.

--- 5 ---

Summer has not yet officially started at our house.  Our school district may be the only one in the country to finish next week instead of last week or this week.  We are looking forward to a busy summer schedule of swimming lessons, nature camp, gymnastics, library programs, and activities with our Catholic Moms group.  While we are very busy Monday – Wednesday, especially in June while dance classes are still in session, I have kept most Thursdays and Fridays unscheduled so we can relax, clean house, and use our imaginations.  Check back to see the art projects and other activities we come up with.

--- 6 ---

Our back porch is getting a facelift with a new coat of paint.  My father-in-law and nephew (he finished school yesterday) cleaned and primed the ceiling, trim, and poles today.  Tomorrow, my husband will join them to repair a few boards, seal some cracks, and paint everything Antique Cream.  Then we will sort and purge the toys, gardening implements, and empty pots that have accumulated back there so we can reorganize.  Our porch can feel comfortably cool even on hot days, so we are looking forward to enjoying some family time together in that space.

--- 7 ---

I’m hosting my first linkup, for The Most Holy Trinity!  

There are fifteen links so far; please visit them.  Also, can you add your posts about the Trinity to help me get to twenty or twenty five links?  The link up will be open through Wednesday.  I look forward to your contributions.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

This post is also linked to the Catholic Bloggers Network Round up.  Remember to go visit the other links there and vote with your mouse for this month’s Big Clicks Award.

Grow Green Onions on Your Windowsill

Yes, you can grow green onions on your windowsill in a jar!  No dirt or special pot needed.  Use a mason jar or jelly jar, or even a drinking glass.  Check out what is on our windowsill right now.

This is the easiest growing project ever, even if you can’t grow or take care of plants.  Kids love it, and they even like to perform the minimal care required.  Just change out the water every four or five days, and your green onion roots will grow new stems in a couple of weeks.

My children enjoy checking the windowsill each morning to see how much the onions have grown, especially when we start a new batch; they grow quickly at the beginning.

I learned how to do this from foodie blogger Dorothy at Shockingly Delicious.  As soon as I saw her pictures, I knew I had to try it myself.  Go see her post for the simple directions and you can get started on your own windowsill garden.  By the way, according to some of Dorothy’s readers who wrote in the post comments, you can do this with lemongrass too.

Here are the photos of our windowsill garden.  In the photo above, the glass on the far right is growing a second crop from the same onion cuttings.  In the photo below, you see the first stems growing.

Next, you will see the first crop right before harvest with another group started in a smaller jar.  You know they are ready for harvest when some of the tips are pointy instead of the blunt cut leftover from the beginning.

Below are the two sets a little further along in growth.  Keep in mind that the set on the right is growing a second crop from the same roots.  It has been slower the second time around, so I may put these roots in the ground after this harvest.

If you need ideas for what to do with your new crop, try making Grilled Wild Alaskan Salmon Burgers.  And, look for future posts of recipes featuring green onions, so you will have plenty of dishes to make with your new crop!  I’ll be posting soon about South Texas Savory Bread Pudding (Capirotada), and Fire and Ice Watermelon Salad (part of the MyPlate recipe reviews).  

In the meantime, enjoy your green onions on baked potatoes, salads, soups, and anywhere a milder onion is needed.

In 2013 I am linking with: Backyard Barbecue Bloghop, The Better Mom, Motivational Monday, After School Party, Welcome Home, Healthy 2day Wednesday, We Made That, Shoe Lace, Weekly Kids Co-op, Food on Fridays, For the Kids Friday, Hobbies and Handicrafts

In 2012 I linked with:  Fantastic Ideas for Summer Fun

The Garden is Planted

Last week, the girls and I started clearing out the weeds from our garden plot so we could plant for the season.  In the process, we discovered that some of our crops from last year had sprouted from seed, including two romaine lettuces, a lot of parsley, and some mint.  

romaine lettuce

mint crowded by parsley

Our oregano and rosemary survived the winter, as they usually do, and we even found a tiny bell pepper on one of last year’s plants!  Also, the eggplant is still green; I actually harvested an eggplant from it last month!  Even our grape vine has come back unexpectedly (it looked quite sad over the winter).

eggplant

In fact, most of our produce trees are fruiting, including the peach, fig, and lemon trees.  

peaches

fig

lemons

One of the blueberry bushes is flowering, as is the orange tree and the citronella (just in time for mosquito season).

blueberry

citronella

Saturday, we spent the entire day prepping our garden plot and planting.  We began with a trip to the farmer’s market, where I conversed with the tomato farmer and bought two of his heirloom seedlings: a cherry tomato and a stripe variety.  I was pleasantly surprised to meet someone who farms tomatoes exclusively, and enjoyed hearing his methods for nurturing tomato plants.  

We then headed over to our local home improvement store where we picked up more heirloom and cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, and hot peppers, all as seedlings.  After a final stop at my in-laws for a lemongrass seedling, we headed home to complete the clean up and plant our seedlings as well as the seeds we saved from last year and some we have bought the last few weeks.

In addition to the seedlings, we planted the following seeds: basil and more romaine (from seeds harvested last fall), salad bowl lettuce, kale, broccoli and carrots.  Some of these are cold weather crops, but we wanted to try them anyway.  Our weekend weather was crispy cool in the mornings and warm in the afternoons; perfect spring weather for planting.

We garden organically, so we usually spend time throughout the season weeding the plot.  This year, we are trying some preventative measures.  After planting the seedlings, we laid down newspaper and topped it with dried leaves.  You can barely see some of the tomato seedlings poking out above all that in the picture below. 

 

Here’s hoping for a bountiful season!  What are you planting this year?

Neighbors, if you want to start an herb garden, I have parsley, oregano, and rosemary seedlings.  If the basil comes up, I should have plenty of that, too.  Come on by to get some!

Gardening During a Drought

A few days ago, I took advantage of the cool morning weather to weed the garden.  We haven’t watered in several weeks because the tomatoes are finished and the squash dried up.  Now that the heat has let up a little, I’m trying to decide if I should plant a fall garden.  I usually don’t plant one because the yields are uncertain.  Tomatoes may or may not get enough sun and an early cold season could stunt everything else.

Our winters are mild, so the herbs and peppers thrive and produce year round.  We have several types of chili peppers, oregano, mint, and rosemary.  The eggplant is flowering again.  Basil seedlings are popping up and if I water, I’m sure the parsley seeds will sprout too.  I’m wondering, though, is it ethical to plant a garden for my own exclusive use when I already know the drought will persist through November?  Our area of Houston is not on water restrictions, but the rest of the city is.  Should I use up water with a garden that may not yield?  The peppers and some of the herbs will survive with minimal watering, but anything else will require weekly water, at the least.

Barbara Kingsolver lists this dilemma as one of the reasons her family moved from Tucson to the Midwest.  In her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she outlines her concerns about gardening using water that her desert community has to transport long distances.  As she increased the size of her garden each year, and finally made the decision to subsist only on what she and her neighbors could grow locally, she saw the use of water for growing food impractical in a desert climate, especially given zoning laws calling for natural landscaping.

I garden for several reasons: to provide healthy organic food for my family, to teach my children about food production, to eat more local food, and to show my children how to care for the planet.  As food prices continue to increase, I hope to grow more of what we need for budgetary reasons.  While cost is not the only factor, I’m sure our water bills will increase significantly if this drought continues. 

What do you think?  Should I nurture the basil seedlings, plant cilantro and romaine lettuce seeds, and look for other seedlings at the home improvement store?  Or, should I save my gardening efforts for the spring, when the rain will hopefully return?

Local Food in School Cafeterias

The Houston Independent School District has just announced plans to buy more local produce for use in school cafeterias.  According to their press release, reprinted in The West University Examiner, they hope to buy up to 25% of the produce they use locally (up from 11%).  Their intention is “to promote healthful eating.”

Buying locally means the produce will be very fresh.  Lettuce could find itself in the new HISD salad bars within 1 day of being picked.  Fresh picked produce tastes better and has more nutrients than produce that has to travel from other parts of the state or country.  Better taste could encourage students to make healthier choices in the lunch line more often.

Using fresh produce gives HISD the option to offer more raw food choices.  Salad bars are a great start, but what about offering fresh fruit in season?  This would be a better nutritional option than the standard processed fruits that contain added sugar and often artificial color.  Fresh fruit can be blended into smoothies with yogurt for breakfast.  Fruit salad can be eaten as is or mixed with yogurt for a luncheon side.  Whole fruits make a great side dish or dessert, such as locally grown peaches, pears, and bananas.

Other raw food options: chopped onions and tomatoes, sliced or cubed avocado, and chopped fresh herbs.  These make great toppings for soups, stews, meat dishes, baked potatoes, tacos, burritos, enchiladas, etc.  Offering these to students would increase the nutritional content of their meals.  Using fresh herbs in cold pasta dishes would add both flavor and nutrition.

I would like to see the figures for fresh produce offered as a percentage of the overall menu.  I’m guessing most of the foods in the cafeteria are cooked, processed, or both.  While this may be no different than what most children eat in their homes or bring for lunch, I think we can all agree that school lunches could use a taste and nutritional overhaul.  HISD’s interest in local produce is a step in that direction.

I also like the idea that the relationships with local farmers could lead to farm field trips and farmer guest speakers.  Children should learn more about how food is grown, where it is grown, and the people who grow it.  Urban children especially need to see food production as something tangible and important.  Too often, children have little understanding of where their food comes from and what role they can play as adults in providing for their own food needs.  As the conflict between conventional and organic farming becomes more prominent, and the role of nutrition in disease is better understood, all of us will need to be more active in protecting, promoting, and preserving our food supply and the farmers who grow it.  There is a potential need for many types of activism on this front, and children who understand how food grows will influence our future food supply, through their food choices, their gardening efforts, and their activism around food.  It is also possible that the fossil fuels we currently use to fertilize crops, to move food around, and to process foods may no longer be as practical or available for these uses in the future.  Children need food knowledge to resolve these issues and to provide for their own futures.

We live out in the suburbs, so I contacted our school district to ask how much local produce they buy.  I’m waiting for a response.  I urge you to make a call yourself.  I have read about a school vegetable garden in our district, and I have seen what looks like a possible vegetable garden at another school, so I also plan to ask about these efforts.  Maybe I’ll convince my daughter’s school to plant a garden this year.

Children can learn quite a bit from gardening, including how much work goes into food production.  I briefly list the benefits of this particular type of active learning in my post Growing Your Own.  Another benefit is an appreciation for plant foods that may change many children from vegetable dislikers to vegetable eaters.  A great book that shows children how to plant, grow, and cook food is Grow It, Cook It by Jill Bloomfield.  We made the Lemonade ice-pops yesterday.  Two other children’s books that show the process of growing food from seed to preparing what you’ve grown and eating it are: The Tortilla Factory by Gary Paulsen and by Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert.  My children love these books, but of course, we read them in Spanish: La Tortillería y A sembrar sopa de verduras.  We actually have the first edition of Erlert’s book, Cultivamos sopa de verduras, with a slightly different translation.  However, the new edition includes a soup recipe on the back cover!

For adult reading about local food, growing your own, and preserving your harvest, I recommend Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  She writes about how her family lived for an entire year on food grown only by themselves or their neighbors.  Their story is informative, inspiring, and admirable.

Source:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver