Healthy food, and desire for additional independence got me into this gardening hobby. When the garden slows down, the homesteading/cooking "heats" up. LOL
Garden produce is winding down. Still have a few apples to dehydrate. All the peppers and squash are on the rack today. Celery stumps/stalks are nice and green - don't know if they will ever have big stalks, but there's a lot of nice leaves and short, small stalks. The leaves I plan to use for soups/seasoning, and the small stalks can go in tuna salad or anything that needs a little crunch.
Tumeric root and ginger root are doing pretty good too. Will soon need to bring them indoors. Will be shopping for green house/sunroom this month to see what we can afford.
I need to get the rye bed ready and plant it, then start on the wheat and triticale. I still haven't found anything definite about planting triticale. For winter wheat, I'm supposed to wait until the first frost before planting, but triticale is a cross between wheat and rye, so I'm not sure about it.
I'm trying a new wheat this year - white winter wheat. I have some potatoes that are blooming and another patch that need digging.
Additional adventure in homesteading activities this week - they had a great sale on whole pork hind end this week at 88 cents per lb. limit one. So since I always just chop up the meat and pressure can it, I thought how hard can it be?
Well, I have a good set of knives, but unfortunately the butcher knife disappeared, and the others need sharpening but I couldn't find the sharpener thingy that came with the set.
So it was a little tougher than I anticipated. I was wishing for a meat cleaver and saw before I was done. Hubby surprised me this afternoon with a gift of a new bigger cutting board and a beautiful chef knife with a red handle - he couldn't find a butcher knife anywhere in town. Said if I was going to be wrestling with big blocks of 20 lb. meat, I needed bigger and better equipment. LOL
So there were some bones that I couldn't quite get the meat off, and decided to just throw them in the crockpot-that always get meat off the bone. There was about 4 lbs. of fat, and I didn't want to waste it, so I just threw it in the crockpot too.
I pressure canned half the meat and intended to use the "broth/fat" instead of water to can the next batch. I figured I'd just skim that fat off and have a nice batch of broth. LOL
I'd say the jar was 98% lard (of course I did fish out the meat for bbq already). So now I have about a quart of lard to use to fry chicken or something. This also led me to do some research on rendering fat in the crock pot. Next time I should put the meat bone in a separate pot. I kinda thought that, but was too tired to really dig out another crockpot and just did what was easy.
I remember that my granny used to fry potatoes in fat to clarify it, so I may just try that with some of it to see what it does-maybe I can make some biscuits with it when it's clarified.
Some people have enquired about Marcella. I managed to find a post on another site - she's ok and even though the city where her condo is located was hit, the condo was not damaged and there was no flooding-which she thought sure it would flood. So that's a relief.
Prayers up for all especially those in these turbulent natural disasters. Have a great weekend. God Bless.
Pinging the list.
Glad things are going your way, greeneyes!
Terrific report, greeneyes! All is well here. my sprouted turmeric root is doing well, as are my herbs.
Parsley is deeply chewed up by the baby butterflies. A few days ago, we had only two or three that we could count who were visible among the stalks. I was concerned that there was not enough there for them to be adequately fed, so I purchased 3 new little parsley plants.
When I planted them there was only one visible in the pot on the stalks. I joked to Darlin that that was my $8.00 worm! LOL!
I cut back the tomato plants which had fallen over during a recent storm. Harvested the two ripening fruits. Cleaned up debris from the planter and sowed seeds of radish, arugula, lettuce, mustard and carrots.