Call me a bad blogger. I pretty much have been lately! This month has seen lots of things happening…some good, some not so good.
The garden is humming along. Unfortunately it seems to be humming at odd paces. The cucumbers are just about done with. Somehow we didn’t seem to get enough of them. The potatoes are all dug and are very tasty. The green beans are just weird. We have yet to really get enough picked for a meal let alone to freeze. The tomatoes are just starting to turn and here it is almost September! The winter squash all looks amazing and we will be up to our eyeballs in them. The melons are not ready yet. There are lots of them but so far we have picked on musk melon and no watermelons. The pumpkins are like the squash. There are a ton of them! Some are already a deep orange color. It seems a little soon considering when we finally got them planted! I have managed to can our supply of pickles but nothing else. We have some beets that are ready and can be canned up. I am really anxious to get the salsa stash put up. We can easily go through a quart a week. Oh, we were given enough sweet corn that I was able to freeze enough for a year’s supply.
Our chickens continue to thrive. Tom, Clint and Jasmine finished a run for our south coop this weekend. The chickens are enjoying getting out of the coop and digging in the dirt! We have plans to make that coop larger to accommodate the extra pullets we put in there. I am picking up a few new egg customers so that is good. There have been times this summer that our fridge was so full of eggs we hardly had room for our other food! The turkeys are enormous! No diet pills for those birds! I picked one up the other day and could hardly get it off the ground. They should be some good eating this fall and winter. We have a lot of roosters to butcher, too. I would like to get back down to 4 roosters as soon as possible. There are a lot of buff orpington roosters from that really cheap batch of chicks I bought from the farm store. I am going to guess that there are at least 2 dozen roosters in that group. Probably more. We certainly will not go without meat this winter….even if it is chicken every night!
I think that despite our plans we will not end up with as much farm bounty put up as we had hoped. I had grand plans for a lot of green beans in the freezer, homemade pasta sauce and oodles of beets and strawberries and peaches and blackberries and raspberries. The fruits just did not work out for us this year. We need a better system of keeping the weeds in check. The chickens did work out well this year. For that we are thankful! In fact, we are actually able to sell some of our frozen chickens because we have so many. However, the vegetables are lacking. I am still hoping that we get in on some apples this year. I need to pack the freezer with applesauce and can a lot of apple butter. Those are 2 things that we can never have enough of. We are already making plans for next year which include increasing the size of our garden.
