On blueberries, blackberries, and being wrong....

Saturday afternoon, after the central air was installed, I got an itch to start canning.  Lately I have felt terribly behind in the preservation department.  This is largely due to the devastating weather we had several months ago that wiped out all of our gardens, causing my plants to be behind in production.  And normally where I would be raking in the produce by this point, my cupboards are bare.  (By nature we have a hard time supplying ourselves with fruit here because of space contraints, so every year we know where to go to get fresh grown berries that we can preserve for use later in the year.)  Sadly our favorite local farm didn't have any black raspberries that survived the flood, and their strawberry production was very limited this season.  

On a very last minute whim The Reluctant Farmer and I decided to drive 45 minutes south to pick blueberries.  We had never done this before, and I honestly had no clue what I was doing, but we figured it out.

Reluctant Farmer:  "Honey, have you ever picked blueberries before?"

Me:  "Nope.  But I want to pick 20 pounds in the 45 minutes prior to them closing, so let's move!"

RF:  "I don't mean to squelch your goal, but there is no way we can pick 20 pounds of berries in 45 minutes!"

Me:  "Yes there is!  This will be like taking candy from a baby!"

And in a typical Reluctant Farmer manner she said no more....

I tell you I was a woman on a mission.  I ran from bush to bush tossing berries in my bucket, looking like a bumble bee with ADHD!  (It was then I realized the real reason we would be washing these berries prior to use was not to remove toxins from them, but instead to rinse off my sweat.)

We did it though, we managed to pick 10 pounds of blueberries in 45 minutes. 

Did you catch that?!  

If not read the small print..

 (The Reluctant Farmer was right.  It is impossible to pick 20 pounds of blueberries in 45 minutes...)  

That's okay though, because I happily went home with my blueberries as well as several pints of blackberries and all are properly stored for the winter, or until next week if I keep looking at these pictures.... 

147 reasons not to call...

Today a family member hostilely accused me of not returning her phone calls for the last several weeks, and she's right.  I have been off the radar for awhile.  This isn't a direct attack against anybody, and I'm not angry. I have just been very pre-occupied with my garden, horses, and my home life.

I allowed this person to hurt my feelings, and tonight as I was reflecting in the garden I realized this had nothing to do with me, any every thing to do with her.  I have been busy living my life and I have no regrets about being virtually impossible to get a hold of for the last 6 weeks.

I was deep in thought tying my tomato plants up, when The Reluctant Farmer took my picture.  As the click of the camera lens brought me back to the present, I jokingly said to The Reluctant Farmer:  "I have 147 reasons not to call.  They keep me busy all on their own...."

Potatoes in Bins

Keeping with the theme, "The garden is a living class room for our mind.", we try to add something new here to the farm every year.  This year we decided we would try to grow potatoes, but instead of growing them in the ground, we wanted to try them in raised beds.  The reason for this was simply space.  Since all of our growing is done in town, we a lot of times run low on space so most of the gardening we do here is above ground.

To start this project we used:

(25) 1" x 6" x 24" boards

(4) 2" x 2" x 30" pieces of wood

(120) 1 x 5/8 screws

cordless drill 

To start out we laid 2 pieces of the 2" x 2" x 30" pieces of wood on the ground and then attached 5 pieces of 1" x 6" x 24" to the the 2" x 2" pieces with 3 evenly placed screws.

We did that twice, and then attached 5 more boards to the third side.  After you finish this you should have what looks like a 3 sided box.  

On the 4th side we added only one board to the bottom.  

We filled this with 1-2" of peat moss/compost/manure and then added our potatoes.  Because the box is 2' x 2' we were able to place 16 potato pieces in the box.  (You can plant 4 potato plants per square foot...) and we covered them with 1 inch of our soil mixture.  

When the plants sprout out of the soil about 2-3" you completely cover them again, just enough so you can't see any green.  You do this over and over again until your potatoes get to the top of the box and then wait for the tops to turn brown.  At that point it is harvest time!  

Please keep in mind that I have not harvested this way yet.  We are up to our fourth board, and our potatoes are growing like crazy!  I think this is going to be amazing, but if you want to make sure you can wait for The Reluctant Farmer and I to harvest these in the fall.....

Not our time

George the horse is no longer with us.

Katzya really loved him and where he will make the perfect horse for someone, that person is not her.  It was a tough decision for her to make, but a decision that I am proud of her for thinking through.  My heart is sad because I know how badly she wants this, but letting go speaks volumes in regards to the level of maturity starting to take pace inside her teenage mind.

At the end of the day, her riding ability combined with the fact he was so young, just was a bad combination.  Now we start over, and where it feels as if I have looked all over the entire state of Ohio for a horse this last week, I know the perfect one for our family is out there.  We just haven't shaken the right tree yet.

It will come.  It always does, but in God's time not mine.  This I must remember....

A Girl's Best Friend

My daughter tells me that a girl's best friend is her horse.  I don't personally know this to be true, because I can't quite get over my fear of these large animals to form that bond.  However if you hang out with our "barn family" for any length of time, an intense bond between the two is evident.  I don't have to understand the bond to support it or see that it's tangible....

Grateful....

Earlier this year I purchased a very large seed order from a seed company in Sharon Spring's, New York.  I had never used their seeds before, but decided I would take a gamble and see how their products performed.  I was impressed.  Every seed I planted came up and I venture to say we had 600-800 seedlings.  For weeks we planted and planted.  Our gardens looked amazing!  And that is when the flood hit last week.... 

We ended up with 4 feet of water standing in our garden, 5 feet of water in our house, and not a seedling (or furnace/central air unit!) survived.  My first call was to my insurance company, hoping to get some help with all that was lost in our basement.  My second call was to Landreth Seed Company to get our garden back in some sort of working order.  (A big deal if you depend on your garden for half the food you eat in a year...)

The seed company representative assured me she would get my order in the mail that day, and I had been watching my back account like a hawk all week waiting for the funds to come out so I could see when my seeds were shipped.  No money was ever taken out.

Last night though my seeds were in our mailbox, The Reluctant Farmer immediately replanted, and still I noticed no money had been deducted from our bank account.  I called Landreth this morning to make sure they got their money, and was shocked when I was told:  "Those were a gift from us to you.  Happy planting, happy summer, and may you have enough rain to water your garden, but not destroy your life." 

Thank you Landreth Seed Company!  Not only do your seeds perform brilliantly, but your customer service does too.  You will forever have a customer in us here On the Urban Farm, and your goodness was humbling. 

Pay It Forward...

All last week I worried about hail killing my tomato plants.  I spent all that time and effort nurturing those babies from seeds to plants, and BAM!  Mother Nature gets a wild burr up her butt and drops 15 minutes of hail and 6 inches of rain on us last night.  Quickly my tomato count went from 129 plants in the ground to 3 survivors.  (Bum, bum, bum...)  She gave us quite the gift of water, I tell yeah!  We had 5 feet of water in our basement, our furnace is a complete loss as it was completely submerged, we have no flood insurance and the house smells terrible!  If I sit around and think about it, it is down right depressing.  And anyone who knows me knows, when I get depressed I eat.

So tonight, I got called into work, and on my way home I decided to stop at Chipotle.  There was a guy behind me in line, and as I watched him I thought to myself:  "You know, I have had a crappy day.  I am going to turn that around and buy this guy's dinner." (Nothing makes me feel better than giving to someone else!)

As we got up to the cashier, I turned to the man, asked if he wanted something to drink and explained I was buying his meal.  What happened next was a God moment.

He looked at me, and said: "Are you serious?!"

I smiled and said: "Yes.  Absolutely!"

He quickly picked me up in a sort of bear hug and exclaimed:  "You have no idea how much this means to me!  My house flooded last night. we have no renter's insurance and my wife and I lost everything.  We were hungry so I decided to come here to eat, and I was just counting my money to see how much I would have left.  God bless you!"

I smiled, and told him I hoped things would start to look up for him.

He hugged me again, and thanked me once more.

I was reminded today the value of being kind to others, of just how important random acts of kindness are, because you never know what hell the other person might be walking through....