OLD-TIME HARVESTING

I just wanted to get up a few photos of my family's "old-time harvest days". My Dad has kept a 100 year old threshing machine in running condition, and this summer, with all his grandchildren home at the same time, he showed us all how harvesting was done in the good ole days! I'll have a full post later, but here are just a few photos to show what I mean. Just like in the old days, we harvested when the grain was ready, and that just happened to be on the hottest days of the summer. I don't know what was worse, stacking up all the tied sheaves on the field, or throwing those sheaves into the threshing machine, that threw dust and chaff everywhere! A shower has never felt so good!

GRAINS AND BREAD

So, it's been nearly 8 weeks since we bought our grain mill, and I can honestly say that I have only bought one loaf of store bread, and one package of hamburger buns. I have been making all our own breads and buns, alternating my recipes, looking for that one great recipe that we all love. I've made 100% whole wheat, 100% whole mixed grains, 50/50 whole wheat, 40% whole rye, white bread, mashed potato buns, a wheat/oat mix, and more. We absolutely LOVE the grain we bought from Deruyck's Top of the Hill Farm!  So far, the winner has been the 50/50 whole wheat bread recipe. We use it for sandwich bread, buns, and pizza crust. The rye bread was a close second.  I have even been testing out a 2-day version that uses a pre-soaker to let enzymes develop.

 Here are a couple of photos of my bread-making trials. The last photo is of our grain-mill being used with oats. I've been asked if milling our own grain is hard, or messy, and I can honestly say that it is not. It' is actually very easy, just turn the machine on, pour in the grain, and wait for it to finish milling. The mill we chose is not messy at all either. I process enough flour to last us for 2-3 weeks at a time. I find that baking the bread is getting to be easier too. The actual mixing/kneading is only a 15 minute job, while the remaining time is "resting/rising" time. I bake bread in the evening, after dinner. (enough to last for 5-7 days at a time too)

Beans, Beets, Herbs,Pickles and Relish

The last 2 weeks have been full of harvesting green beans, beets, making pickles, drying herbs and preserving relish! It's alot of work, but oh so very worth it when you can eat home grown vegetables in the middle of our Manitoba winter. Here are some photos of what we've been up to. The beans and cucumbers are needing attention every 3 days right now. The herbs have been harvested 3 times so far. Our pantry and deep-freezer are looking more and more full every passing week. I love harvest time. (watch here for our old-time harvest story, with a 100 year old threshing machine and very itchy grain...coming soon)

WEEKLY VEGETABLE DELIVERY

We have really been enjoying receiving our weekly vegetable delivery from our local Organic Farm. Here is a recent selection that we received: new red potatoes, radishes, two types of peas, red lettuce, kale, green onions, cabbage and strawberries. We ate most of it over 7 days. Everything was so good. This is the first time we have ordered a vegetable delivery, and it is definately something we will do again next year.

JUNE HAS BEEN BUSY

We've harvested all sorts of goodness from our garden over the past month. Spinach, lettuce, mixed greens, herbs, radishes, beets, green onions, celery, carrots and strawberries have all made their way into our family dinners all month long. The recent hot weather has made our spinach bolt to seed very quickly, so I guess we will wait for the swiss chard to get a bit bigger. We have also been getting a farm basket from our local organic farm every week too. (that will be another post later this month)

We've also been making good use of all the grains we bought from Top of the Hill Farm earlier this summer. Below is a Cheddar and Whole Wheat bread that was so incredibly good. I've become a bit obsessed with finding the best whole grain recipes I can find.  We haven't bought a loaf of bread in nearly 6 weeks, and I think that the kids don't even miss it. In the past week, we ate 4 meals that consisted of ALL local fresh ingredients.

Our family attended the Food Label workshop at Vita Health this month too. Lots of great information was provided.  I've also found a great website called Fooducate, that has so much information about everything in industrialized/processed foods.

MAY HARVEST

May has been such a wonderful month. The garden is starting to produce. Today we ate fresh spinach (from thinning the rows) and green onions that we grew ourselves...local and organic. It doesn't get any better than this. The spinach made it's way into green smoothies and a little salad. The green onions were salad fixings, and in soup and on top of baked potatos.
We have just found a local organic farm very near our place that sells produce, chicken, and eggs. I'm looking forward to going there for a visit to see what they are all about. On my bookshelf for the past two weeks, I've read the Ominvore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Both great reads with lots of ideas and opinions about the industrial food system.

CHIVES

We picked and dehydrated all the chives that were ready this week. I tried to dry them two different ways. First, in whole sprigs...just put into the dehydrator, and let it do it's work. Then, I decided to try cutting the chives into small bits, and place them onto some parchment paper (with holes poked thru it) one one rack of the dehydrator. This is the way I will do all the remaining chives. They dried quicker, and more evenly than leaving them whole.  I started this process indoors, but the onion aroma quickly changed my mind, and I moved the dehydrator outside.

 

When everything was dried, I put the chives into my small food processor, with just a sprinkle of coarse sea salt, and pulsed it into coarse "powder".  I'll be using this in egg dishes, mixed into sour cream, mashed potatos, meats, or anywhere I want a light onion flavor. We ended up with the two small jars in the last photo. I plan on using the dehydrator a lot more this summer. Upcoming uses will be for dill, oregano, thyme, basil, strawberries, carrot slices, and more.

IN THE GARDEN

The seeds we planted right into the garden are all showing signs of growth. Prairie Boy has 3 rows of radish seedlings, and is eagerly waiting for his corn and peas to poke thru the soil. Prairie girl is faithfully watering her lettuce, garlic, green onions, carrot and cilantro (that comes up as a volunteer crop every year). She also has a variety of bean seeds that have been put in around the strawberry plants. We added 16 ever-bearing strawberry plants this week too. The early spring means that they are already in flower. I hope we get berries from them this year. Today we also dug in plants that came from my parent's farm; horseradish root, and rhubarb. I have never had any luck with rhubarb (we've tried growing it 2 other times), so here's hoping try #3 is the charm.

My part of the garden has the marjoram that survived the winter, spinach that will need to be thinned, beets, celery that I bought from a greenhouse and parsley. PrairieDad is still waiting to transplant peppers and tomatos in his garden spot.  While out purchasing the celery plants, I also picked up 4 thyme, one sage, and two oregano plants. They are now planted among our flowers. We still want to plant kale, rainbow chard, rosemary, multi-colour carrots and try growing leeks.

The garden, and the seed starting workshop have been great learning experiences for us. We've learned the parts of a seed, what a seed needs to germinate, that the first 2 leaves from a seed are not really leaves, but a cotyledon, garden planning, and all about tending the garden.

Spinach, sown April 16, 2012, photo taken May 12, 2012

Viola flowers picked from our lawn..eaten in a salad for Mother's Day. (we have never used any kind of chemical on our lawn, nor do any of our neighbors.)

Most of these things were familiar to us already, but to do this as a family has added a level of newness and excitement that is absolutely enjoyable. Both kids have taken a real ownership of their garden plots. I am really looking forward to seeing the garden produce for us to harvest and eat. Hopefully we can thin out the beets and spinach and add those little greens to a soup or salad later this week.
HARVEST NOTES: The chives have been split into 3 plants now. We have harvested the equivalent of 4 packages of grocery store chives. Tomorrow I will be cutting most of the plant to harvest and dehydrate a large quantity. It is trying to flower, and we want to delay that as much as possible to keep getting more of the fresh new leaves.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A FEW WEEKS MAKES

Plum

Sour Cherry

Pear

Saskatoon

Strawberry

Here are just a few photos of how far along plants have grown over the past few weeks. The plum, sour cherry, pear, saskatoon and apple trees are all in full bloom. I don't know any of the varieties...the saskatoon is in the bush along one side of our property. This, along with our prolific crop of dandelions are keeping our honey-bees extremely happy and busy. Our bee-hives (now 10 in total), are flourishing.

These are 4 of our hives.

WORKSHOPS

This week, we attended two Dig-In Manitoba workshops. The first one was a Seed Starting Workshop, where we learned all about beginning garden seeds indoors. We received a starter kit, with different seeds, soil, etc., and planted them all on Wednesday. We must have perfect conditions for seed germination, because by Saturday, the tomatoes, spaghetti squash and lettuce had all germinated. We've added this to our seeds previously started, and if everything keeps growing, we will most likely be combining peppers and tomatos into our flower gardens to find room for everything.

Here is a photos of our little seed starting area. The tomatoes we started 3 weeks ago in the little pots in the pink planter, are now the beautiful seedlings in the square pots below.  We now have the following started: roma tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, 3 kinds of basil, hot peppers, red peppers, chocolate peppers, lettuce, spaghetti squash, pie pumpkins, cucumbers, and a "surprise" squash that we had saved seeds from in a previous year, but forgot to label.

These seeds, from last month, are the same ones in the photo below:

These seedlings are the ones from the photo above:

 The second workshop was called "Making Manitoba Delicious", and now I can hardly wait for the garden to start producing, so we can enjoy all these great vegetables.

GARDEN PLANNING WITH KIDS

As this amazing spring weather continues, it's hard to not just get outside and plant ALL our seeds right now. But, Manitoba being what it is, we will definately wait a bit longer to put in the warm weather crops. (where the seedlings do not like cool temps). We now have spinach, beets, green onions, garlic, and radishes all up in the garden. We have been harvesting the chives every few days.

This year, each of us has taken control over one of our raised-bed garden sections. We have put no restrictions on what to plant, how to plant, or how to care for our gardens. The kids have complete free range in each of their 4x8 foot sections. We have all agreed that each of us will tend to, weed, water, and harvest their own garden plot. We are also making a garden map, and recording the plant date, germination time, bloom time, first harvest date and last harvest date. Our garden is organic...no pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers, (other that what comes from our compost pile)

Praire girl (age 8) has chosen to plant popcorn, garlic, carrots, and lettuce so far.
Prairie boy (age 13) has chosen radishes, peas, sweet corn, basil, parsley and cucumbers (growing up on a trellis).
Prairie Mom (that's me...I won't be posting my age hahha) has the spinach, tomatos, peppers and beans (growing up on a support).
Prairie Dad is being secretive...he won't share his plans quite yet.
We are eagerly awaiting the Dig Deeper workshop where we will also receive a grow kit for the garden too.

To really learn about the value of growing our own food we will also be tracking the harvest from each plot. We will be tracking both the pounds of food, plus the equal value of the same products in the grocery store if we would have had to purchase it. I'm working on a database that will graph our results as we go.

So far, we have harvested the equavalent of 3 packages of chives..(retail $2.49 each). I've just cleaned up and divided the chives into 3 separate plants...I'm sure the chive harvest will triple later this spring too. We have a small food dehydrator, and I'm looking into whether or not chives are a good candidate for drying, and using in the winter. Our seed cost so far has been $6.00,, so I guess that makes us 50 cents ahead so far.

SEEDS STARTED FOR MOM

My daughter made this cute little planter box for me at Brownies this spring. We planted some tomatos and peppers into the little pots a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, they needed re-planting to bigger pots, so we seeded more new ones again. This time it was more tomatos, and some basil too. I hope this will be a fun project to do together this spring/summer. It's a small start, but in gardening, every little bit at the beginning can flourish in many meals full of vegetables later! I think it's a good lesson.

We are anxiously anticipating getting our garden planted soon. This spring weather has been so wonderful. I know that here in Manitoba you take your chances when planting outside too early, so it will be a challenge to figure out a good outdoor planting date. Our cold-weather seeds have gone outside already, particularly spinach, radishes and peas. Let's hope they survive.

We signed up as a "dig-deeper" family with http://diginmanitoba.com/, and are really looking forward to our first workshop, which focuses on starting seeds.

IN THE GARDEN

We worked in our raised bed gardens today. A bit of fixing was necessary for the first time in 6 years. The multiplier onions and garlic we left in last fall are up. We’ve eaten fresh green onion spouts and bulbs, along with lots of fresh chives already, and it’s still April! It looks like a patch of marjoram over-wintered too. Let’s hope the weather holds, and doesn’t get too cold a night.

Our garden is a total of 6 raised beds that surround our kid's play house. the 4 largest beds are 4x8 feet in size, and the two smallest beds are 2x8 feet in size.  More on our planting ideas in another post.

BEE HIVE UPDATE
On the warmer days, the bees have been out foraging for pollen. They have been coming back to the hives with a bright yellow pollen. All looks well with the hives too. The hives still have their winter wrap on. The photo above is the 4 hives we have in our yard. The rest of the hives are at my parent's farm

The Dig-In Challenge

We have just signed up with Dig-In Manitoba for a 5 month challenge. Check out the details on their website here http://diginmanitoba.com/ 

Wish you had the time for healthy, local, and fair food in your busy life?

• Do you have more than a sneaking suspicion that eating food grown close to home is better for your community and for your family?

• Are you pretty sure that how we get our food actually matters?

• Have you been meaning to make some changes for a while but don’t know where to start?

What if you had a guide?

What if you could learn, share, and grow with people who have stood where you’re standing and are doing the kind of things YOU WANT TO DO? Connecting with great farmers, cooking from scratch, getting things growing, enjoying family meals with meaning, storing the harvest, getting more out of life with less… in short, living vibrant and healthy lives.
Step-by-step. Week-by-week. We’ll help you sort through the fact and the fiction. You’ll get the tools and support you need to kickstart your journey. We’re calling it the Dig In Challenge…

Are you up for it?

I pledge to…

• Shift at least $10 of my grocery money each week towards local food,
• Try at least two new Dig In activities each month,
• Attend Dig In workshops and log my activities to be entered to win great prizes (optional).