Karen's Garden Delights Journal
1st week of July 2011

Garden Entrance July has arrived and it feels like the planting frenzy has slowed down and we've tackled a good chunk of weeds now we just need to stay diligent on maintenance. This is when the garden is green and blooming enough to be beautiful but not overrun by the forgotten weeds of August. Here is the entrance to the garden this week and I am happy to take visitors through to taste, smell and enjoy the beauty. The big task needing attention right now is staking the tomatoes. I like to use steel posts every three tomatoes or so with smaller fiberglass posts in between and we run several tiers of twine around these to keep things in place. I think every year I wish I had worked on it sooner and it feels like we are being rough on plants that are plenty big to be twisting around. We are eating a couple tomatoes every day the kids regularly scout the plants for anything with enough pink to warrant picking.

Veggie Basket The veggie harvest is increasing in variety and here is one of the CSA baskets that went home with a happy customer this week. She commented on how colorful everything looked and that it would please those dieticians who tell you to "eat the rainbow." So we decided it was worth a picture. The colors are so bright that sometimes they look almost artificial. I am frequently asked if my display plate of veggies during my Thursday Lehmans demos are artificial and I quickly assure people that our family doesn't eat plastic and all the veggies are fresh picked and very real. This weekend during Lehmans Summer Celebration I am letting folks taste some of these homegrown goodies and offering samples of sugar snap peas plus edible flowers - what fun!

Red Currants There have been several fruit crop disappointments this year. There were barely a handful of cherries on each tree, probably due to the wet weather during pollination. Our wild raspberries aren't very prolific either. One crop that is doing well though are the currants. I started 4 bushes about five years ago and they are producing wonderfully (except for the white currant bush the goats ate from this spring...) Here is a handful of the red jewels. Currants have a tart/sweet flavor and we like eating them raw plus putting them in muffins, coffee cake, pancakes and etc. We are trying to freeze as many as possible to make up for the lack of cherries this season.

Butchering Chickens We celebrated the Fourth of July by butchering half of our first batch of pastured chickens. With just our family working, we were pleased to get 75 birds done in three hours including a good portion of the clean-up. The new addition to our butchering facility this year was a cement pad. With the cement, a roof and a few tweaks to the other equipment, it really feels like we are butchering in luxury! This first batch included 125 white cornish cross birds and 50 of the black meat birds. Our Hispanic and Nepali customers really like the dark feathered birds and buy them live to take home to butcher on their own. We butchered a couple blacks for ourselves to try and see how we like them in comparison to the whites. They grow more slowly but reports are that the meat is more tasty.