Garden Goodies

"Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it." 

Genesis 2:15

 Gorgeous, right!?  This beautiful broccoli head is from our garden! :)

 Eden picked the four of them this afternoon and we are going to have some for dinner tonight- 

in my special sauce! ;)

 Do you like broccoli?  How do you like it?  If you have a favorite recipe please share! =)

 Our largest (I think) broccoli head came in at the above weight! That seems pretty good to me! :)

Cleaning it up for dinner! :P

I will leave you all to salivate over these marsh-mallows....until next time.

Joyfully His,

Alexis

Last Week's Activities

"For he will not dwell unduly on the days of his life, because God keeps [him] busy with the joy of his heart."

Ecclesiastes 5:20

Well, like normal, we've been busy!  We didn't really do one "big" thing last week that was worthy of its own blog post, so this is a recap of many of the little things we've been doing! :)

Two Saturday's ago we went and picked a huge wheelbarrow full of corn from our neighbor's field.  Mr. Townsend (our neighbor) had come by a few days before and said we could go pick from his corn (we have the greatest neighbors...ever).  We brought back lots and lots of ears! :)  We shucked, de-haired, boiled and cut the corn off the cob.  Finally we put them in many Ziploc baggies and froze them!  We had 2 paper bags full of corn after putting up around 25 quart bags.  Since we couldn't eat that much corn we then canned another 7 quarts of corn!  We just finished our last corn dinner last night! :)  [We'll be harvesting more corn soon, but this time it will be from our own garden. :)]

 

 Yummy corn!

 

So, because we had so much corn, Judah chewed on his first corn cob last week! :)

Since I documented Lydia's first corn cob taste, I thought I should document Judah's as well! :)

 

He seemed to enjoy the corn cob...Judah is never one to reject food! ;)

Because I already had the camera out, I took a quick photo of Hannah's wonderful Chinese dinner:

 If you haven't had homemade Chinese, you are missing out!  In my opinion, it's SO much better than the stuff you get from the restaurants (it's also MUCH healthier!!).

---

Grandpa and Grandma gave us their old pool and we have really been  enjoying it!  The pool required a bunch of intense thought as to how it should be constructed, but Daddy's hard work paid off!  It's been really nice to hop in our pool instead of driving over to our neighbor's...it's a quick and wonderful way of cooling off in this heat! :)

Lydia and Weedels in the pool!

Alexis, Caleb, Seth, Eden, Josiah, and Lydia swim in the pool most.  The rest of us just get in every now and then! :)

 

Eden, Lydia, and Josiah...they are almost inseparable.  They have the most fights together, but they're also the ones who play together the most! :)

The swimming bunch!

---

Our greenbeans have been producing abundantly this year!  We picked our second round of greenbeans this past Thursday and it took about 3 hours with 5 of us picking.  That should give you an idea of how many plants we have! :)  Lots of plants mean lots more yield (normally) but it also means more work.  We normally go for lots of plants because we've got enough workers to make it a little bit less "work." :-D

Nevertheless, picking greenbeans isn't the most fun job anyone could ask for...but we get it done!  After we pick them, we snap the ends off and then snap the greenbean in half (if it's big enough).

Here's a photo of the all the greenbeans from one picking:

We picked all these greenbeans last Thursday and snapped them all Friday morning.

It takes about 2 hours to snap them all, so we normally listen to a Jonathan Park or music C.D.

Hannah getting ready to "snap"! :)

Lexi working it!

Seth rocked Judah for a little bit and then he came and joined the snappin' party! :)

The Yellow Snapper Team!

After a hour or two of snapping greenbeans, this was our yield:

 One basket full and one box full! :)

Friday afternoon, Lexi's friend, Jaime, came over and we then canned 14 quarts of greenbeans.  Later Mama (with varied help) canned another 3 batches making a total of 35 quarts from one crop of greenbeans!!  

Counting both times we have picked green beans, we have canned a total of 56 jars full of greenbeans! :)  And more is yet to come. :)

---

While we are on the topic of gardening, we'll talk about our potatoes!  Daddy, Lexi, and her friend, Jaime, unearthed the majority of our potatoes last Saturday.

Here's our bounty!

We still have one little garden of potatoes left...we'll get to those sometime. :)  Since we have so many potatoes we've been eating them at least once a day (or so it seems!).  We've had mashed potatoes, mashed potato casserole, potato "pancakes", fried potatoes, etc.  Yesterday we washed and chopped up some of the little potatoes.  This morning Mama canned 14 quarts of potatoes for this winter!  Meanwhile our laundry room has baskets of potatoes all over the floor! :)  [I can't end without a declaration of praise to Jesus for keeping the voles away from our potatoes...this year's crop is so much better than last year's!]

---

Judah is getting so big! 

I love his deep, blue eyes...especially when he's drinking tea (or coconut milk) from his bottle.  He lays back in your arms and just stares at you, flapping his long eyelashes.  It's the sweetest thing ever!

 

He's such a happy baby (most of the time!)  He loves saying "Da da" and I know it warms Daddy's heart when he comes home; Judah will be in our arms, reaching out for Daddy while saying "Da da" and looking into Daddy's face. 

He's starting to figure out the stairs (right photo) but we've been teaching him no so we've haven't had much trouble with that! :)

On the crawl!

Judah is getting good at crawling and is quite a mobile little guy.  He loves to climb over anything and it's hard to find something that he can't crawl over! :)

---

We did something we have never done before:  made butter!  It took about an hour of rolling a half-gallon jar of cream on the floor to get butter.  I personally thought the butter would never come but it did! 

Once the butter globules were nice and big we poured off the buttermilk and then washed the butter (weird, I know).

Butter in progress!

This was the end result:

A butter ball!

The picture doesn't do justice to just how yellow our butter was.  It almost looked like the inside of an egg yolk!

Speaking of milk and butter, we're getting real close to getting a cow!  We found a great one on Craigslist and are going to see it tonight.  If we like it, and everything works out, we will most likely have a cow within 2 months!!!!!!!!!!  (I'm more excited about what could come after the cow...a HORSE!!! :)

Daddy's going to build a shed for our prospective animals soon and then all we need are the animals!  It's so exciting!

---

I'm not sure if I made it public on this blog, but I got a rose plant from a friend at church a few months ago.  It is a Climbing America rose and I love it so much!  Currently there are about 8 flowers on it and many more blooms!

Aren't they gorgeous?!  I love roses...maybe one day I'll have a HUGE rose garden.  I'd like to have some hydrangeas too, but we'll see. :)

So there's the update on the little stuff we've been doing.  People always ask what I've been doing and I always say "not much."  Everything we do doesn't enter my mind as "out of the norm" so I just think it's part of everyday life.  Thus it may sound like we have an extremely boring life, but that is far from true!  Life here is always interesting and always changing!  

Hopefully the next time I update it'll be on the cow?!!

We'll see!

Til then, have a great day!

Kimber :)

Spring 2011 Garden Update! :)

"...plant gardens and eat their fruit."

Jeremiah 29:5

Our *many* gardens are looking absolutely beautiful this year!  So, I decided to show you some pictures of our gardens before the summer heat wilts them and before all the lovely pests eat holes in their leaves. :)

I'll start with the gardens located in the front of our house! :)

The three rows pictured are all strawberry plants (with some garlic here and there).  We've had this garden for about 2-3 years and it's doing okay.  The berries aren't big like they're supposed to be, but we make it! :)  

Strawberry season is in full blast! 

Seth, Eden, and Josiah picked lots of ripe, red berries yesterday!  They were amazing!  Normally the strawberries you buy from the store are a little sour and under ripe...well, our strawberries were warm (from sitting in the sun), deep red and they taste like they've been drenched in powdered sugar.  SO yummy!!!

But back to the gardens!

We have another garden to the left of the strawberries and there we are growing some Yukon potatoes.

Across the driveway we have some blueberry plants growing!

The plants are a little hard to see in this photo but there are about 6-8 lining the driveway.

Some already have berries coming!!

This year we planted more blueberries on a hill surrounding the front strawberry garden and in the backyard.  (Mom loves fresh blueberries. ;)

By the way, I'm sorry if this gets confusing!  We have so many plants in so many different places it's a bit hard to give you the full picture.  Come to visit and you'll see where everything is! :)

To the right of the strawberry garden (if you're standing in our front door) we have our raspberry row:

We also have some little, green berries coming and soon they'll turn into yummy, pink raspberries!

Right next to the raspberries we have our big potato garden.  (You can tell we like a lot of one plant if we have more than one garden dedicated to it! ;)

The two outside rows are potatoes and the one little row down the middle contains newly-planted greenbeans (to the far right are the raspberries I just mentioned)!

This garden is really long, so it's hard to portray the many potato plants growing!

The biggest potato plants have flowers coming on them!

We're really praying (and hoping) that no voles find our potatoes.  After lots of hard work goes into planting, watering, covering, and hilling the potatoes it's really devastating when some unseen creature eats your plants!!! 

Some of our little greenbean plants growing!

We planted greenbean plants between the potato rows because they deter potato bugs/beetles.  (This is called "companion planting" and it works wonderfully!)

The other potato row.

This row isn't doing the greatest but they should get bigger soon!!

Another view of our big potato garden! :)

 Our front yard. 

Potatoes on the left, then the raspberries, across the driveway is the big strawberry garden (and blueberry plants) and then the Yukon potatoes on the far right. :)  Have I confused you yet?

Near the big tater garden we have a smaller garden (a.k.a. "Seth's Garden") dedicated to more strawberry plants:

These plants produce the biggest strawberries.  We actually transplanted these from the runners our first strawberry plants produced. 

Across from that garden we have a garden currently dormant but ready for plants whenever we decide we need more! :)

When we need to plant we'll cut a hole in the paper, dig a small hole, insert the plant and then we won't have to worry about weeding!  Yippee! :) :) [This is how it's supposed to work...]

This garden is behind our house and contains even more blueberry plants and some transplanted garlic. 

A blueberry plant surrounded by garlic!

Another garden behind our house with kale, spinach, and pea pods.

The kale (pictured above) and spinach are going to seed so we picked our last leaves of the season yesterday. :) :)

Some of our pea plants climbing up the trellis.

A little pea pod!

The back of our yard. 

I'd try and detail where everything is but I would only succeed in confusing you, so I won't try! :)

Well, that was the update on our gardens!

Hopefully the next thing I'll have to say is that "the gardens are still beautiful and producing lots of yummy food."  We'll see what the voles and pests think about that! ;)

Kimber :)