What the Gourd?

Our compost pile is the home of most of our most amazing plants. The things growing out of it are gigantic and when we saw the vines we were excited to find out what they were and how much bounty we would get from the surprise. Were they Pumpkins? Cantaloupes? Squash? Watermelons? Alas we were wrong. They are all gourds. Gourds?? What is a gourd good for? You can't even eat the blasted things!! Ugh.

There are at least 20 little gourds growing rampant in our garden. What a waste of space. Well, at least I didn't have to water them and I won't have to spend $5 on new gourds this year for my Autumn display. I don't even remember throwing gourds away in there and how 'come no squash grew? There must be hundreds of seeds down there. We did get some cantaloupe but the vines died early since I think they were too crowded and I heard they're particular about their space. I guess the gourds needed it all.

More Garden Delicacies

I've been busy canning, traveling, cooking, planning Birthday parties, and I have no time to write about all the yummy things we have been eating. Most have been fresh from the garden. Here are some photos of the foods we have grown this year in our garden. Nothing I grow is of the ordinary variety. Check these out...

This is a box of tomatoes I picked to bring to our family reunion. So beautiful.

This is the chocolate stripes tomato. Are your taste buds going wild with jealousy?


Bea examining the colored carrots we picked from the garden. They are yellow, white, pink and red. So wild!



Blanched peaches
The jam, if you're wondering, is all peach jam but I've made raspberry, blueberry and cherry as well this year. I have a new recipe that it working great so far that is as follows...

Buy a box of Ball no sugar pectin and follow the instructions for your desired fruit
Add ONE cup of sugar and one teaspoon of stevia as the sweeteners.

That's it. I did absolutely no sugar jam last year and the jam started to brown and it just was not appetizing so I decided to use a fraction of the sugar in regular jam (which was up to 7 cups for the sour cherry in some recipes) and just used one cup plus the stevia. It preserves the fruit longer, makes it look better and gives it just that tinge of sweetness so it doesn't taste like you're just eating cooked berries or fruit. I'm quite happy with this recipe and I feel fine eating it and feeding it to my family. We treat it like a dessert so I think it's worthy.

First Tomatoes

Henry and I picked the first ripe yellow pear tomato yesterday and a couple of tiny spoon tomatoes that were also ripe. I can only tell you that they were DIVINE! The one sad thing is that our pineapple heirloom tomatoes are all suffering from bottom end rot. I really dislike the weather here that causes this sickness. It's like rain for three weeks and then dry for three weeks, on and off, all summer. That is NOT good for tomato plants.
This plant has probably a few thousand flowers on it. I don't know how it will support all the tomatoes but I hope they all survive.
Here are the tomatoes at the bottom ready to ripen. We should get an excellent crop from just this one plant. I believe this is the Isis Candy Cherry plant. We'll see:)

These are from the spoon tomato plant. You can't really tell but these tomatoes are about as big as peas and that's as big as they get. We ate some that were almost ripe courtesy of Henry and they were pretty acidic. I hope they get sweeter when they're fully ripe. There are also tons of tomatoes on this plant, which is my largest one of all.


These are the green pineapple heirloom tomatoes. I LOVE how gnarly the bottoms of these tomatoes are and check out the coloring! When ripe they will be yellow with green stripes. I wonder why my other pineapple heirlooms got rot and these didn't. I might have to order new seeds next year instead of propagate my own to get rid of any disease.

Crepe Mountain

I had a few dozen left over eggs that might have gone bad so I decided to make a giant stack of crepes and freeze them since I read they freeze really well. It took me the better part of the day but we've been enjoying them so much. I ground my own whole wheat pastry flower for the crepes which makes them just as light and fluffy as the white flour ones and we fill them with fresh berries, whipping cream and real maple syrup. We also make cheese crepes and pizza crepes. Any of you have any other good savory crepe filling recipes?

End of Berry Season

I have been picking berries for the past month and now my 9 cubic foot freezer is almost completely filled with nothing but berries. We're about half way done with our winter stocking. I still need to go pepper picking, get peaches to can and freeze, and buy a bushel of basil. I'm really worried though because it's been raining every day and has been cool this whole month and that's not good for most fruit, especially my tomatoes! Most of mine are late season crop plants so I might not get many at all. We'll have to see!

What we do with our berries. We get about a pint every day from our own bushes.

REAL strawberries from the pick-you-own farm. These are delicious and organic too!

I think we bought about 30 lbs total.

This gives you an idea of how big our white raspberries are. They fit on my thumb and my thumb aint small, people.

A mixture of berries. They black are from the farm and the white and red are mine.

Did I really beat Justin?

Yes, it's true. I beat Justin for once in my life in the Yellow Creek Triathlon. And it was by 5 minutes. I also won third place in my division. Woo hoo! I'm not sure how well I did overall though. Justin and I are planning on doing a couple more of these this summer and maybe some other races. It's hard to find races that aren't on Sundays but we have a couple more in mind. My hair tie broke after the bike portion so that's why my hair looks like a lion's main. haha. So the swim is a half mile, the bike is 9.5 miles and the run is 3.5 miles and I finished it in one hour and 23 minutes and Justin in an hour and 28 minutes. There were Amish children out on their porches watching us go by on our bikes, beautiful farms everywhere, and it wasn't even very hot. The lake was pretty warm, but there was seaweed or lakeweed? tickling our bodies the entire way. Justin was pretty freaked out by it, but I didn't mind so much. Overall it was really fun and I love doing things together! I love you baby, and Happy Birthday!

Gourmet Rice Cakes

I have a fabulous new friend who is from South Korea and has been here only 3 years now and she made me the most delicious and beautiful rice cakes! I told her they were yummy, but she told me that someday she hoped I would tell her the truth about how I liked them. I'm here to say that I genuinely liked them and wouldn't mind eating more of them someday. I could tell that they had a little sweet soy sauce, chestnuts, a mini date roll and a tiny pine nut flower on each one. One thing I love to eat is beautiful food. In fact, I heard that you can fool people into thinking something is delicious just because it is so beautiful. Not that these were the case, but just something to consider next time you pay $100 per plate at a French restaurant. I love Asian food and those darling little cakes were right up my alley. Thanks Jihye! You made my day:)