My Indiana Garden

I bought two pie pumpkins for $1 each. One white, one orange. Today was the day I tried to cup them open and bake them. And then make them look more like puree than vermicelli! You decide if I failed or not... #pumpkin #pumpkinseeds #whitepumpkin

Did you catch the Ecclesiastes 3 reference? Where the song "Turn, turn, turn" got its lyrics, you know! Anyway, it is cleanup time for the garden. I'm afraid the beautiful pepper plants will freeze this weekend--they are the "last man standing" in the garden as of today. The garden looks like rival teams had a tomato fight...but with green tomatoes instead of rotten ones. Not as smelly, but, ouch! :) Notice how the corn shock grew again...but this time built up with tomato and pepper plants. Check out the enormous yellow pepper! I gave away a grocery bag of sweet peppers to my cousin, but I still have some that I suppose I'll need to freeze. #sweetpeppers #gardencleanup #tortoiseshellcat

We went to Menards yesterday to buy some lumber and I noticed they were selling bundles of corn shocks for over $10 apiece! But honestly, ours were not in very good shape anymore. And now...they are ashes. Mostly ashes. It is going to rain this weekend and once those corn stalks get soaking wet, they don't dry out again. They are too tough to simply till under, so, they need to be burned. The wind was from the right direction to not blow towards the house. I wonder if the lettuce will taste smoky now? Or maybe the jalapeños will be chipotles? Nah. Whenever one of us heads into the garden, a menagerie of cats and kittens follow us. Take a look at the newest tortoise shells. Very pretty, but so far, untamable. #fallgarden #tortoiseshellcat #gardenupdate

We have barely had any rain all month--I don't know if I've ever seen such brown lawns in late September! Stan watered the apple trees earlier in the month so they look good--check out the beautiful, large golden delicious apples! My flowers and herbs were wilting from neglect so I watered those along with a few favorite pepper plants and a surprise, volunteer grape tomato plant. We haven't planted grape tomatoes for at least 2 years, so I'm not sure where these came from. I'll have to save some seed this year, because they are sweet and meaty! The giant corn shock has added some bean plants and tomato vines...so it is still growing!

Apple butter project turned into apple butter + Swiss bread project. A standard Swiss meal for us growing up was potato soup--thick and pureed with celery salt on top and real swiss cheese on the bottom. My mom was born in the US but was 100% Swiss and didn't speak English until she went to that one room "Hocker School" house in 1st grade I found this old recipe in my recipe file--really just a list of ingredients and a few words of instruction. Pretty sure mom forgot to put "1 egg" on the list of ingredients--that would make sense why there was 3/4 cup too much flour! A few oddities: you make a sponge first of the milk, yeast, and flour and let it raise before adding the sugar, butter, and more flour. The reason I normally bake bread in my bread machine and shy away from baking bread in the oven will be apparent at the end of this video! sigh. Bake and learn. Bake and learn. No "Instagram" cheating photos here--I'll show you the truth, and the whole truth. And next time, I'll use my thermometer and check that the bread is 185F before removing it from the oven! **So one brother says that it IS mom's handwriting "Why would mom have a recipe in Bonnie's handwriting." My other brother doesn't check my channel so we're good here! :)

Well, we finally have a few jars of apple butter! 13# pounds of apples for about 5 pints of preserves. What a process! I learned a few things about how I would do things more efficiently next time. If there is a next time... But if I'm going to be making applesauce anyway next week, I will squeeze in another batch. Cooking it down on the stove has its challenges...watch out for the burping mud volcanoes. ;)

We have plenty of apples this year, as you've noticed. My brother Dave asked if I'd thought about making apple butter. I hadn't. I was maybe not even in my 50's the last time I made apple butter, so I didn't at all remember how to make it. My memory is coming back now...which is why this will be a two-part, two-day video! Watch part one today--and the bonus short clip "Alpha kitten won't share." :) The ingredients are as follows: 12-13# cooking apples ( I used mainly Jonagold) 1 cup sweet cider (opt.) 2 cups white sugar 2 cups brown sugar 4 tsp. cinnamon 1/2 tsp. salt 1/8 tsp. cloves or 1/4 tsp. pie spice

I am so thankful for my newest kitchen gadget--the hand-crank food chopper. I am buzzing through dishpans-full of sweet peppers! Stan said I need to remember which freezer I've put things in. So I'll actually find them. When I need them next winter. Yes, still laughing about that one (but not in front of him!)

I'm still not sure about the answer to this--I dried poblano peppers to make ancho peppers but now I'm thinking only the red ones taste like anchos. The red ones had a great, raisiny flavor. The green ones? Meh. Wish I had let more of them ripen...I'll have to wait a bit for the next batch.

Do as I say, not as I do. I was canning salsa and had my jars nicely sanitized and hot in my 225 degree oven. But then, I needed one more jar and took a shortcut. One cold jar + 7 hot jars of salsa = 1 broken jar. Check it out. On a positive note, purchasing and using a small hand-crank food chopper was a real game changer (thanks, Nancy!) in making salsa--saved me a good hour of chopping peppers and onions. I also used it for making pear jam instead of the blender and it worked great!

We live in Amish country, so we do see corn shocks in the fall. But this is a sweetcorn shock. Take a look! The garden is rapidly thinning out, thanks to Stan's hard work in cleaning it up. More sunshine for the beautiful pepper plants (70 of them...) A lovely Labor Day weekend to you and yours!

About these pears...we didn't spray them and it shows. I don't think they will be nice enough to can, but I can make pear jam out of them. The table of tomatoes will be for a last batch of salsa...I bought a little hand-crank food chopper so that should cut way down on my prep time. Oh, and check out my unorthodox method for stomping out Japanese beetles...

How do you fit 20 large poblanos into 7 small jelly jars? It's not a riddle. You roast them! I uses the air fryer (outside!) I could fit 4 peppers in a one time (do the math...) I roasted them at 390F (worked better than the first batch at 380F) for about 11 minutes. Then I put them in a heavy stainless steel pot with a tight-fitting lid and let them rest until I could deal with them. :) Four hours later, I peeled them (gloves were necessary for raw, but not for the roasted ones) and packed them into jars. I topped them off with a bit of olive oil and then labeled and froze them. I had a couple of bright red poblanos that I added to a jar of my pickled banana peppers--just the right amount of heat! I'll pickle more like that. Now I have to remember to use them next winter for some tasty white chicken chili. *Stan started watering the peppers again today--took 3+ hours for the sweet pepper rows! Peppers can bear until frost so they are worth keeping healthy.

Quick video on some ways to use peaches besides canning them! Although the pectin package stated "lo-sugar", that is not exactly true. I'd call it half-sugar, because that is more accurate!

Feeling chunky this year--as in salsa and peach jam! It saves a lot of time and effort to blend peppers, onions, and tomatoes in the blender instead of chopping them, but I wanted something more appealing to eat with chips and queso. And this salsa is very pretty with sweet yellow, orange, and red peppers and diced jalapeños. Next time, I'll do the chopping the night before--or maybe use a manual food chopper? Not sure that would do as fine a job...

The garden is getting emptier by the week, but then, it's August, after all. The garden gets emptier and the cupboards and freezers get fuller! This was the most intensive canning and freezing week I've had all summer. Certainly thankful that I am retired! The only thing that really flourishes in September are the peppers. Well, and maybe the cantaloupes...although I don't think most of them will ever have a chance to ripen. But who needs 15 melons of 5-7 pounds each? ...although I may try to freeze chunks of them like I did with peach slices. If I can make room in one of the freezers...

We've had a spell of rain-when-you-need-it weather the past couple of weeks. As late as the season is, I'm guessing Stan won't have to water any more this summer--well, except maybe fruit trees. The Contender peaches are ripening--I think that other tree must have been July Elberta, not Contender, because these peaches are so much nicer: redder, larger, tastier. I'll have to can them early next week. The paste tomatoes are hanging out on the white tables under the maple tree...I will also deal with them next week. Stan chopped down the first few rows of sweet corn--now we can actually see the tomatoes. (After I took this video, he got out the rear-tine tiller and worked up the ground where the potatoes were dug up.) The plants are dying on the health kick but they are done producing new fruit anyway. I would say that things are winding down, but I might can another 17 quarts of vegetable soup, plus I need to can spaghetti sauce and salsa. Maybe by this time next week, things will be winding down for real! ...still waiting for those Athena melons to ripen. They are melons, not pumpkins! What is taking so long?

Here's the interesting thing about a garden...for weeks and months it goes along, growing and growing until one day, lots of things ripen at once and you spend a lot of time in the kitchen preserving what you've grown! This time of year is like that! Thankful that the corn that went down in last week's storm looks about normal again! Stan planted the sweet corn at staggered times, so we don't have one huge day of "putting it up." I had one day last week of sweet corn and peaches and elderberry jelly. That's a bit too much of a day for me. But that's a welcome price to pay for a bountiful harvest. My pickled peppers were a hit at a golf-outing fundraiser yesterday so I went home and made a couple more quarts. I found out that these banana peppers really do need to be picked before they turn from yellow to orange or the insides turn brown. I had to throw out a few yesterday that I'd missed.

After many years (decades? when you are old, time slip slides away...) we planted banana peppers again. They are beautiful and bountiful! After one super sour batch, I found a refrigerator pickled pepper recipe that tastes like deli pickles. Also trying a new refrigerator dill chip recipe...it won't be ready to eat for about a week so I'll report good, bad, or ugly on those results. I meant to freeze more peaches today but other garden stuff got in the way (like picking, snipping, and pressure canning green beans and dealing with a split head of cabbage). I was very happy to give away a sinkful of cucumbers to a neighbor! But now it's 8 pm and although I've sorted the peaches, I haven't peeled one. Not one. And tomorrow...tomorrow is sweet corn morning. Too much abundance? No, I'm not complaining, Lord!

We had a very welcome 1.75 inches of rain overnight last night along with a bit of non-welcome wind. The tall sweet corn did not go down, so that's good. The shortest corn was watered and the soil was softer so...well, you'll see what it looked like and what Stan did to remedy the situation! We are swimming in a room of mostly unattractive peaches; I've frozen about 12 pints so far and made 4 pints of peach pie filling (taking a page from the cherry filling/blueberry filling book--we will have very nice yogurt and waffle toppings come winter!) These peaches will be tedious to work up...and daily I sort out the rotten ones. But still, after that hailstorm in June, I didn't think we'd get any fruit at all! Oh, and the Teddy Bear sunflowers are finally blooming--they are adorably fluffy! Recipe for Peach or Blueberry Pie Filling/ice cream topping whisk together: 2 1/2 T. cornstarch 3/4 c. sugar 4 cups fresh blueberries or peeled, sliced peaches 1/2 c. water (for blueberries only; peaches make their own juice) 1 tsp. fresh lemon juice or 1/4 tsp. citric acid powder pinch of slat cook over medium heat, stirring until thick and sauce is translucent. After removing from heat, you may add 1/2 tsp. vanilla and 1 T. butter. Pour into mason pint jars, leaving 1/2"+ head space, cover with lids and let cool before refrigerating overnight. Once thoroughly chilled, I freeze them.

I canned 5 quarts of bread and butter pickles this week--all from one day's picking! I gave away the next day's picking. :) We got a brief rain shower--total of 0.3" The town north of here got 10 times that much! We didn't really want 3 inches, though. The sweet corn has ears now and that much rain plus wind would make it fall over.

This past week I pressure- canned 6 qt. of green (and some yellow) beans; I picked enough beans yesterday to can another 4 quarts but I'll wait to get a full 7 qt. canner full. I also canned 5 quarts of bread and butter pickles, and gave away cucumbers and zucchini to my neighbors so that I wouldn't have to deal with them today! Peaches are starting to ripen, onions are very nice, potatoes are, well, small! Until next time! Lori

Quick helpful tip for picking cucumbers. You probably knew this already; I certainly should not have been silly enough to pick cucumbers in the cucumber jungle in a sleeveless shirt! Itchy, scratchy cucumber plants...If your cucumbers are on a fence or in cages and you don't have to reach in, go for the cool sleeveless look. But as for me, long sleeves next time would be wise. ;)

This time of year, the garden really changes from one week to the next. We had a smattering of rain this morning; we still need more, but I'm thankful for the 2-3 tenths. The potatoes are pretty much done. The red chieftain still have some green, but the others are just waiting to be dug up. Stan dug a few plants up yesterday; the red chieftain yielded well, but the others not so much. Still, we planted enough that we will have plenty. The corn has silks (that need to be sprayed for earworm this week--no, not that song that is stuck in your head, actual worms!) and ears are starting to form. Cucumbers and zucchini are starting to hit their stride and the cabbage that I was going to rip out has made huge heads. I will need to pick them before they split. I forgot to show you the basil and cherry tomatoes--the basil is doing great! I pinched off a few stems and put them in a jar of tepid (not warm, not cold) water on the counter. They will keep several days like that and I won't have to traipse outside for a measly leaf or two to throw in my zucchini omelet or sausage stromboli!