Happy 250th Birthday USA ; Springtime and Gardening Busyness
My favorite holiday is Christmas. But my second favorite is July 4th- Independence Day! That developed as an adult for me.
When I was homeschooling my children, I not only reviewed concepts I’d learned in school, I also learned many new things myself! A couple of great books read during that time were “The Light & the Glory” and “From Sea to Shining Sea” about the beginnings/settling of our country and how we decided to and accomplished gaining our independence. I think reading those 2 books were instrumental in making me more passionate about my country and my patriotism to it.
I don’t want to get into a deep discussion on our government. But I do want to say- I love the USA! The physical country itself and its vast expanse of natural beauty and resources. I love ❤️ the Declaration of our Independence, our Constitution & Bill of Rights, and the freedoms I grew up with. I intend to (& recommend to) read the Declaration to the family when we celebrate this coming weekend. I want to be more familiar with what our founding documents really say. A book recently recommended to me, that I have just begun reading is, “Revolution, The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World”, by Eric Metaxas. I’ve only read the first chapter, but I’m already learning more about why we broke away from England. Enough said on that topic. It looks to be a great read.
Multiple times since Easter, I have meant to write a new substack, but when I’m not busy, I’m falling asleep! We still have not finished helping our son with his home renovation! Between holidays & birthdays and family visits and family reunions, and a few other events, we just have not been able to complete the home & get him moved in!
And gardening, mowing & yard-work have been hard to keep up with- especially with all the rain we’ve had in our area!
As for my gardens, the vegetables that survived sprouting & planting out in the garden are doing well. I had about 10 out of 30 okra seedlings survive, so I resowed more seed directly into the garden and they are happily popping up due to all our rain & warm days. Zero beans worked out presprouting in the greenhouse, so I finally direct sowed the last of my seed (Royalty Purple beans) just last week, and I am now beginning to see a few popping through!
This year, for the first time, my beets are doing pretty well! I’ll have more than 4 beets! 😆 I don’t love beets, but someone had suggested I try them roasted. They remind me of cooked carrots. So I can eat them with lots of butter & gravy and not hate them. 🙂 Mr Bear doesn’t enjoy them roasted as much as pickled. He loves them pickled. So most will probably be pickled when they’re ready. I may also sauté some greens before they beets are harvested.
Turnips are doing even better than the beets. No one really enjoys the turnips, but I started eating a sweeter variety from a local farmers market, for their benefits, (which I can no longer remember). When I grow them, I sometimes sauté the greens with garlic, as well as feed some greens to the chickens- they LOVE them. The turnips themselves are like a spicy radish, sometimes with a bitter aftertaste, depending on the variety. The sweet Japanese variety is, unfortunately, a hybrid. So the seeds (if any) won’t grow true to the original plant. And I try to grow open pollinated (non-hybrid) crops so I can save seeds. So mostly, the turnips are to provide greens to my hens.
I have 3-4 cabbages that survived from the flat of seedlings I started, until planting in the garden. So we’ll probably enjoy a little fresh Cole slaw (chick fil A recipe) and I’ll ferment a head into sauerkraut. Oh, and 6-8 broccoli plants have survived.
The cucumbers are all doing very well this year! Cucumbers are a veggie that I’ll have a great year once in a while, and then all the years in between, I just can’t get them to grow! This must be the year! In fact many years, after all my own seedlings die, I’ll buy a couple from the store & they die or barely do anything. Maybe I’ll try fermenting some cukes if I have a bunch this year. And I can’t forget my favorite summertime cucumber recipe, a chilled cucumber soup! I got the recipe in a cookbook on a cruise years ago. It has peeled, deseeded cucumber, yogurt & sour cream, lemon juice & a tiny bit of mustard. You blend it all up and eat it chilled- DELICIOUS! If you’d like the recipe, send me a message or a comment below.
I had volunteer potatoes grow from some missed last year. I had them soaking to clean and forgot to drain them before we left for a couple days - they rotted 😢. There was a clump of volunteer something onion-related that I decided needed to be pulled, and they turned out to be garlic! Most were pretty small. But I’d recently seen a video showing how to make your own garlic powder, so I thought the tiny garlic bulbs would be perfect. Too small to Peel & use in recipes, would be perfect for garlic powder! They’re in the dehydrator now. (And yes, the whole house smells like garlic!)
My tomato seeds sprouted and did very well this year! I planted them in the strip outside the garden fence. I created this mulched strip to make weeding easier, so the grass can’t creep under the garden fence, where it’s hard to weed it all. Initially I’d planned to put all flowers there, but in discussing options with Mr Bear, he suggested planting veggies there so I can have more beans & okra inside the fence. (To protect them from ravenous rabbits!) So tomatoes, which are typically not an attraction to rabbits (who live under our shed) make a good choice for planting in this strip outside the garden fence. But in spite of “typical” and in spite of ALL the thriving clover in our lawn, the rabbits HAVE in fact been munching on my tomatoes! Only one died though. The rest seem to be very healthy, (in spite of some missing leaves & branches) due to the chicken compost and all the abundant rain!
Speaking of chicken composting, in spite of early spring mud conditions creating a delay in my first compost harvest, I’m now getting into the system for the summer. This week I harvested compost for the second time this year.
What I do is daily rake up the pile that has old coop bedding and the remains from the ring. The ring starts with old coop bedding, plus food scraps, grass clippings, old fall leaves (yes, the bags of those are a bit of an eyesore, but behind the shed), and old garden plants pulled up. All that starts out in a ring of chicken wire/hardware cloth. Any food scraps we have or get elsewhere, goes in there. When I mow the lawn, the clippings go in there (they LOVE grass!) as well as weeds I pull from the gardens. And every 3 weeks I harvest the pile of compost, then I fork the remains from that ring, creating a new pile and I rake up that pile daily and water it (if it’s not already wet). The hens love pecking and scratching through that pile and flatten it daily, to find little tiny insects and who knows what.
Then after forking out the ring, I clean out the coop of yucky bedding and put that as a base in the ring to start that over. Every 3 weeks the pile I rake daily is pretty much broken down. Aside from a few pine cones or lemon peels & some old stalks; there’s a few bedding chips and fluffy compost.
This last week, there were only a few spots that needed mulch in the veggie garden, so I looked for where I either needed compost in the flower gardens, or where I needed mulch. A neighbor we had years ago had taught me you can use compost or manure as mulch (instead of tilling it in). And then, of course Charles Dowding, in his No-Dig channel, reminded me of that. So- I mulched what I could of my front flower beds with the compost. And in a couple more weeks, I’ll be able to mulch some more.
Oh! This is my first year to plant peppers IN the greenhouse. I couldn’t get any to sprout, so I had to buy them. Since we all like salsa, I got jalapeños, but I also got a few cayenne peppers to try drying & grinding my own for seasoning. They are doing marvelously in the greenhouse! It’s warm-to-hot in there, and only as wet as I remember to water. (So not too wet) There are already a few teeny peppers starting.
My green-seedless grapevine bloomed (without me noticing) and I now have clusters of green grapes on the arbor! They’re getting bigger almost daily, with all the rain we’ve had. I know they’re not ready yet, but I went ahead and tried one the other day- SOUR, but delicious! Like a sour candy.
Well, that’s about all for now. I pray you and your family enjoy celebrating our 250 years of Freedom this coming weekend! And appreciate all God has provided through what this great country offers us!
Here’s to your health!
Jenny Bear