Hello!

Wow! Has it been that long since my last post? Well, I can say it has been for good reason as we have been busy busy busy finishing a number of long drawn out, procrastinated on projects. The two most important: Replacement of the siding on the back of our house where it was taken down to replace old aluminum sliding doors and add new windows and doors and then also the job of finishing our kitchen cabinets. Now the back of our house does not look as if we live in a tar paper shack any longer and the kitchen lacks only a few pieces of floor molding and some toe kicks under the cabinets. Yeah!
These weren't the only things done during this time but the others are all small projects in comparison. I have to say that our home is almost finished. Almost.

The garden is giving up it's produce for canning----but oops, I burned some of the paste the other day and our house still smells a bit of it. There will be more to come and I have a very good reason why I shouldn't walk outside to talk to my neighbor while reducing tomatoes now. It was really very smelly.
I hate the green beans I chose to try this year so I will allow them to dry and then sprout them for stir fry. Big bummer since I really only eat home grown/canned green beans. It wasn't the taste so much as the fact that even picked small they are somewhat tough and stringy----even cooked.

My son has a rabbit in the fridge he shot and skinned himself----the rascally rabbit ate EVERY last one of my soybean plants and then a sampled a 1/3 of the peanut plants before meeting it's end. Sad to shoot an animal doing it's natural thing but.....it was eating my garden down to nothing. Literally.
We have tons of slicing tomatoes and loads of basil to go with it. We have been enjoying the basil in sandwiches, stir fry and Italian dishes.
We also harvested some oats and wheat and we will save the seed to plant again this next season. The packages I purchased were small but I now have more than my original purchase...especially of the oat which is a hulless form known as avena nuda . A perfect form for home growers who don't have access to a hulling machine/mill.
Soon we will have many sweet potatoes and we have also had a bumper crop of jalapeños and pablano peppers. Very welcome additions to our household.

I will be back more frequently to write again and I have immensely enjoyed all of the comments and emails that have come while I have been "sitting on my be hind" :-D Glad to know I was not forgotten. Please forgive me for not answering some of them but I went long periods of time without getting on.


Also...thanks to Stuart and Gabrielle for a fabulous quote that I have added to my side bar by Martin Luther King Jr. to replace my previous quote. My previous to live by was this:

"Totalitarian governments have recognized that the one enemy to their system is the prosperous, independent, yeoman farmer spread out over the whole country thinking independently who doesn't need anything from his government. That's a big challenge to totalitarian governments - how to get rid of all these people. In Russia they starved them, in Ethiopia and Cambodia they shot them and in the U.S. and Europe they just pass health laws." -Sally Fallon, Weston A. Price Foundation President in a speech delivered to the OEFFA Conference, March 3, 2007

However with the way the world economy, food system (food for fuel instead of people, GMO's, Animal identification, squandering of farm land for McMansions, the absolute lack of concern about REAL food safety from our government, and the lack of concern for small farmers by our government) the coming elections, and the "wars" I have to switch now to this new quote since it fits just so DARN well. Good day everyone---talk to you soon ;-)


P.S---that is a picture of one of our tomatoes at the top. They are a heirloom variety known as Pink Accordian. They did well for us last year during the drought and they are doing well this year with completely different weather. Very tasty and super neat looking!

Feeding the World

For those of you that grow your own produce, buy local or just realize that small is beautiful even in the agricultural sector, this link sent to me by SimplyTim is for you.
Reading this article from Monbiot.com makes you realize that we (American small farmers) are not the only ones slowly being put to death by big business---small farmers around the world suffer with us.

Keeping on this theme: we continually have local people ask us to do a CSA (community supported agriculture) or raise a cow or two for cow share programs. We would love to do this....however some problems (especially with the cow share which would be more to our liking than the CSA) are VERY problematic and scare us off.

So I wonder.....why is it that more people don't write their local representatives and tell them to make laws (or repeal some of them) that would help small farmers? Why don't they write their not so local reps? Like Senators and Congress people? If as many people that approach us would do it regularly, all across the country, there would be reform. Of this I am sure.

And a few quotes:

"So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy." Roger Nash Baldwin

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Louis Dembitz Brandeis