Calm Before the Storm

I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer. Honestly, I wish summer would slow down, it’s going way too fast. I’m that crazy mom who is not looking forward to school starting this fall. I love having the kids home every day. They grow up so fast, and with this being Lillian’s senior year, I need summer to last a little longer.

While summer is flying by, the homestead is in a phase of maintaining. I titled this post “Calm Before the Storm”, because while we are starting to get some produce from the garden, soon we will be overwhelmed with produce as the season comes to an end, and then the long days/nights of canning will begin.

This reminds me of the Bible verse, Matthew 6:26 “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” If God feeds the birds, He will also feed those who are worth more to Him than the birds, you and me. We are not supposed to live in fear or worry over our basic needs, for God will provide, and this is evident in growth of the garden.

After all the work to get the garden planted this spring, what a tasty reward we have in store. Here’s what we’ve been up to. There’s an old wives tale that says “not to let onions see the August sun”, so in following the “old wives”, we pulled our onions. I think this year is one of the best years we’ve had for onions! We had some pretty good sized ones. They are currently hanging to dry so we can store them for using through the winter.

Our Roma tomatoes are slowly but surely starting to turn red, and we’ve picked enough to start putting in freezer bags to freeze. Last year, we didn’t have time to can the tomatoes as they came off the vine, so we put them in freezer bags and put them in the freezer. In February, we needed to make room in the freezer, so I thawed the tomatoes out and made some tomato sauce. It was some of the best sauce we’ve made! Freezing the tomatoes and then thawing them drew out a lot of the water in them. We didn’t have to boil the tomatoes as long, and the sauce was the thickest we’ve made.

We are getting some zucchini, so if anyone wants some, let me know! We did have vine boar get to one of my plants, which is killing it…but I have others that are still going strong.

Our cabbage plants have given us several heads already, and more are already starting to come back on where I harvested these from. There were a few cabbages that didn’t fare well with the drastic fluctuation of too much rain and then a lack of rain. Several of the heads split down the middle and were not salvageable, but they did not go to waste. We try to use all we can on the homestead, so the chickens had a nutritious snack of cabbage and turned them into eggs!

The green bean plants are thriving! We got our first picking, and what a jackpot! The whole family helped in the snapping of the beans, and we ended up with 3 freezer bags stuffed full! Not bad for the first round of picking! One of those bags we ate that night (the recipe for my roasted green beans has been added into the recipe tab on the website. More recipes will be coming soon), and the other two bags are in the freezer. Now, full disclosure, freezing is NOT our preferred choice for green beans, but we did not feel like dragging out the canner for such a small picking.

Lastly, for today, my herb garden is doing amazing! Full disclosure, this is my first time doing an herb garden, and I’m not sure I gave all of them enough space…..but I’m thrilled at how well they are doing, and they are delicious!!!

I hope everyone has a blessed week! If you are interested in any produce, let me know, as I will not be attending any farmer’s markets this year, and just selling from the homestead.
This weeks reader question: What is your favorite fresh herb? This is a hard question for me, because I really like so many, but if I had to pick one, it would be basil.