4th week of June 2008
This has been a week full of delicious fruit. Our bellies are full of cherries and mulberries and the kids look a bit purple - on the face, hands and feet! Now we're attempting to fill our freezer with these delicious treats for winter. The cherry crop has been extra abundant and I'm thankful for the nifty cherry pitter I've been demonstrating at Lehmans store the last two times. It has made fast work of removing pits and getting them ready for the freezer. Today our son is putting a cherry pie into the oven for supper - yum! Pictured are our attempts at picking mulberries with the shaken branch and sheet trick. They also are going into the freezer for winter coffee cakes, fruit smoothies and more. The blueberries and black raspberries are just beginning also. This is a wonderful time of year when you can just go "graze" whenever hunger strikes.
This week has brought multiple thunderstorms including some hail. Everything has benefitted from the rain but the hail left some things shredded. The Buttercrunch lettuce didn't fare well and the Swiss chard looks like Swiss cheese. I'm thankful it didn't come several weeks ago when the lettuce beds were all full. Where the lettuce beds have been picked, compost is going on and then the fall cabbage, broccoli and celery plants are going in. Buckets of peas are still coming and my family is cheering the arrival of shelling peas. They often just go on the supper table in a bowl and everyone shells their own.
Even though it is very labor intensive, we always put a few gallon bags of shelled peas into the freezer for winter eating. This week we also enjoyed our first meals of red beets, a handful of green beans and more grappled red potatoes.
The kids continue to enjoy working (and playing) in their little garden plots and give daily updates as to what is blooming or coming ripe. They claim it is much more fun to work in their parts than it is to help me in mine! Here our 6 year old gives a new meaning to the word "truck patch" as he drives his vehicles around the tomato plants and sunflowers in his section. He has great plans for selling the tomatoes someday but until then he'll make good use of the loose dirt.
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