Summer Salads

One of my favorite summer foods is a summer tossed salad.  With a kitchen garden overflowing with choices, there is no end to the combinations you can create.  I made a great salad last night.  I started with some lettuce, australian spinach (left over from the farmer's market I sold at yesterday), cherry tomatoes, cucumbers (I love the pickling kind for salads, so crisp and even the skin tastes awesome), green peppers, nastertium leaves and flowers (kids get a kick out of eating flowers), tarragon (love that herb, use it on all sorts of things), and a little cranberry vinegrette dressing...yum!

Other days I add zucchini or summer squash, fresh peas, green beans, or just about anything you can think of.  I love fresh fruit in a salad.  Wether it be strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, peaches or apples....all add a nice touch of sweetness to this summer treat! Truly one of the great joys of summer...a fresh picked garden salad.

Fruits and Vegetables

Well, our garden is almost completely planted.  Our garden was inspired by ones we saw when visiting Old Sturbridge Village in Massachussetts.   We planted small beds of various plants with walkways between them, so we do not have to walk on plants to tend to them and we can focus on one bed at a time, so the large garden does not become overwhelming when time to weed.  We have planted two types of zucchini, yellow summer squash, dumpling squash, cucumbers, tomatoes (3 types), radishes, spinach, many types of lettuce, rhubarb, various herbs (medicinal, tea and cooking), asperagus, red potatoes, pumpkins (large and sugar), strawberries, green bush beans, yellow bush beans, green vine beans, peas, lots and lots of carrots (3 kinds)....that may be it. 

We also are  putting more attention to our fruit trees and bushes.  Our 6 blueberry bushes are abundant with baby fruit.  Our grape arbor is over loaded with grapes and has extended across the clothesline (I'll need to put up a new line somewhere else).  Our three apples trees are full of little apples (we have red delicious, macantosh and I think golden delicious) so we can be busy making applesauce this fall.  Our raspberry bushes (we have red, black and pricker-free red) are overtaking everything, but full of fruit.

It has been a lot of hard work, but we hope to have a plentiful harvest to enjoy this summer, share with family and friends, and freeze and can for winter enjoyment.

Homesteading....

Homesteading seems to be quite the trend lately. I suppose it fits in with all the "sustainable living" philosophies. I love the idea of homesteading. Maybe because of my fascination with life in the mid 1800s. Maybe because of a greater understanding of where food comes from and how it is grown/raised. Maybe its the "romance" of the idea. Or maybe Homesteading is just a word that describes how I had already decided I wanted to live, before I found that there was a term for it. Whatever the reason...our family is homesteading.

The dictionary (meriam-webster) defines homesteading as "To aquire or settle on land under a homestead law". That is what the definition is historically, but it doesn't describe how the term is used in modern days. Wikipedia defines homesteading as "a lifestyle of simple, agrarian self-suffiency." This is a much more appropriate definition to describe the modern idea of homesteading. It certainly fits into our idea of what our homestead is.

There are no more homesteading laws as there were when our country wanted to encourage movement to the uncharted west. Modern homesteaders are not exploring uncharted land looking for a new start to life, they are instead exploring new ways to live on the land they already have.

So, what does this simple, agrarian self-suffienct lifestyle entail? Well, we have dabbled in it the past few years, but his year are making a harkened effort to become significantly more self-suffient. We have long raised chickens for eggs, sheep for wool to make yarn, and goat's milk to make soap. We moved into this house with its old apple trees, blueberry bushes, grape vines, etc. and have used these, but not to their full potential. I grow herbs for cooking and I have attempted in the past to grow vegetables with varying degrees of success.

So, onto our "new" plan. We are almost finished rototilling (gosh, I wish I had my horses at the house...I'd surely have gotten an antique plow) a very large garden (with plans to double it the following year if we survive this garden). We will move our rhubarb and asperagus to the new garden, where we will attempt to grow a plethora of colorful veggies. We will expand the herb garden and grow some herbs specifically for making our own herbal tea (having made the decision to join the Mormon church, I have made the switch from coffee to herbal tea). We will work at better tending our grapes, blueberries, raspberries and apples so that we can make applesauce, jam, etc. to have in the winter. We will can or freeze much of our extra fruits and veggies to enjoy in the winter months. We are utilizing our alpaca/sheep/goat manure to fertilize our plants and gardens.

We will continue to raise layer hens for eggs, but we have added a small flock of cornish-cross chickens for meat. I don't know how we'll like this, but I have a couple friends who have expressed how easy it is to process your own chickens. And, after learning more about how the chickens in the grocery store are raised (ewww, is all I can say) it may be worth the emotional struggle to raise and slaughter chickens to feed my precious family a healthier meat (and happier meat from what I've heard) We will also make more use of our goat milk for drinking.

This is a start...we have a long way to go....but we are heading in the direction of a more physically and emotionally healthy lifestyle. I'll continue more on that topic at a later date. I'll let you know how this all goes.

~Kristen