The Weekly Digs #176
It’s been another week of whirlwind harvesting and preserving. It’s easy for me to get burned out this time of year, and I’m definitely feeling close to that point.
But the days are cooling off slightly, 85ºF rather than 95ºF haha, and it has been in the back of my mind that gardening time is coming to a close soon. Kind of like a marathon and I’m in the last 5 miles before the finish line. It’s all about keeping the right mindset from here on out.
Preserving
This week’s big preservation project was chili! I made a gigantic pot of chili. I believe it’s a 30 quart pot and it was filled to the brim.
My intention was to freeze dry it. And so far one batch is just finishing up in the freeze dryer as I write this and we have another batch ready in the freezer for when that one is finished.
I’m pretty excited about it because I got to use my own recipe rather than sticking to a pre developed and tested canning recipe.
I set aside 7 quarts of chili for the next couple days and nights of dinner.
An interesting phenomenon happens when you are preserving food. I find that often (and I assume this happens to others as well) I will get so caught up in preserving the food for winter that I forget about preparing food for today.
But over the years I’ve become better at doing both preserving and whipping up a quick lunch and dinner for the day. Luckily the chili is more of a make ahead meal so I knew I could preserve some and set aside some for dinner too.
I also have been testing cucumber kimchi recipes and finally landed on a pretty good one that I shared HERE.
I can’t believe we are still harvesting cucumbers. This has to be the longest we’ve ever had a harvest! We are going on three months now and even though there are a lot fewer we are still getting plenty for fresh eating and enough for me to make some more cucumber kimchi.
I take no credit for the excellent cucumber year, it all goes to Cruz and Dax for growing it in their gardens!
In the Garden
It’s time to pull out some of our summer crops and switch to fall crops. Today I had the boys cut down the corn stalks. I will plant a pea/oat cover crop along with a succession planting of green beans in that area.
My tomatoes are at the high point now of production. I picked for several hours in the midday heat and I didn’t even finish before I started feeling sick from the heat (and probably not drinking enough water) and came inside to rejuvenate and write this blog post. I will head back out again in a few hours when it cools down a bit.
The jalapenos are finally big enough that I can get some salsa made. Home canned salsa is one of our essential preserving foods and we need 50 pints for a year. Once I get that done we can move on to less essential things like BBQ sauce, more spaghetti sauce and diced tomatoes.
I’ll be glad when they wrap up, tomatoes are definitely one of the most time consuming parts of preserving.
I’ve moved most of the soil blocks out to my caterpillar tunnel and covered them with netting. It’s actually tulle from the fabric store. But it works well, especially for this time of late summer when the bugs are at their peak.
