I feel like I need to apologize for my tardiness on these blogs.  For you, I’ll try hard to at least write one once a week, in the very least.  Thanks for tuning in, lets get those viewing numbers up.  Help make the month of August all that it can be.

It was steamy hot mania today in our kitchen.  For today Paul and I canned some tomatoes, tomato juice and I made blueberry jam to round out the morning.  Pictures to follow on another day.  I took them and they are resting conveniently on my camera.  The pictures are nice.  All of those jars of prepared food.  I would like to thank Diane, Paul’s mother for teaching us how to can and preserve food.  I feel it is a really useful skill to have in these times of rising costs.  Thank you.

Grow basil!  For real.  Basil is the cash crops of cash crops.  I think next year we’re just going to grow rows of lettuce, basil and whatever else we want for our own consumption.  It seems like this year we planted a lot of things with the intention to sell them.  That’s fine, because we have to pay the bills somehow, we almost have too, so far so good.  Getting back to the basil though, we’re getting $7.50/lb right now from the local organic grocery distributor.  Plus basil thrives the more you cut it, it just gets leafier and leafier.  Batta bing.

Here’s something.  I made a pizza the other day and I used our tomatoes for the sauce, with basil, bell peppers, onions, garlic, rosemary and oregano from our garden.  It was awesome.  I have this really “easy” pizza crust recipe that I’ve used for the last year now.  Every time I’ve made it, it’s come out completely different.  Every time.  BUT! It’s still good.  Each pizza I make, I declare to Paul “I think this is the best pizza I’ve ever made!”  So I think you should give it a shot.  Don’t be afraid of the yeast, because you’ll probably never figure out its mysteries, it will be okay.  

Don’t farm if you’re looking to make some money.  Do it to fulfill some sort of civic duty like Paul and I…I jest.  Sometimes I feel like we’re getting jerked off over prices of veggies.  We’re not though, we are just competing with the super awesome, sunshine all year, factory farming paradise known as California.  So businesses don’t want to pay more than a dollar a pound for tomatoes.  To each his own.  Apparently, I’ve heard this enough, tomatoes are the most widely grown crop, with the highest rate of failure or problems.  Believe it!  Now, I don’t recall if I had mentioned this previously, but the proprietor of the mexican food establishment in which we frequent used to farm as a kid in Mexico and he told us to pick our tomatoes early, to avoid blight, birds and whatever other “thing” could ruin the fruit.  They’ll ripen in the house.  And you know what, his trick totally works.  Put that one in your pocket, it’s a freebie from Chuy of El Camino Real in Fayetteville Arkansas, South School street!  We have all of these tomato plants and we’re growing some nice tomatoes, but it’s really not worth selling them we’re learning.  So we’ve canned some, sold some and probably going to can the rest.  That’s where the economy comes into play and makes growing tomatoes worth it.  That’s why farmers grow fields and fields of tomatoes, because they need three million tons of them to make a thousand bucks.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist.  That’s what is so great about this first year for us!  Lessons learned.  Tomatoes for preserving not for profit!

It is so hard to sit here and write posts every couple of weeks let alone ten to twenty posts a day as some do.  So there you go professionals, sitting in the Starbuck’s sipping your caramel macchiato, typing away.  It takes a lot and you have what it takes.  That being said, I would like to thank those of you for checking in on me even though I don’t write anything for a month at a time.  If it wasn’t for you, I probably would have quit doing this a long time ago.  That being said, I want to address some issues on the farm.  I’ve been reluctant to do so because I don’t want to flaunt our issues, I want to flaunt our successes.  But, it’s fodder and it’s something for you to chew on.  So our bell peppers, all varieties, are getting these thin white spots across their flesh.  What are they?  Sunburn.  Did you know that bell peppers could get sunburned?  Well they can.  Not all of them are effected.  Just the one’s that are on the top and get western exposure.  The remedy is to throw straw on the top of the plants to help shade the fruit.  Has it been working?  I couldn’t tell you.  I haven’t noticed any improvement.  Paul said that they even have a mold on the inside of some of the peppers.  Now I really don’t have a clue about that, so if there are any experts out there on bell pepper mold let me know.

After befriending Johnny, Paul asked him if we could go and pick some blueberries, because we want to freeze them.  He swatted the air with an “Aaahhhh”.  He said how the season is waning and all that’s left are the small ones.  He said we could pick them though so Paul took Oliver two nights ago and picked ten pounds of blueberries while I stayed home with Ike.  Last night was my turn.  I took Oliver around seven o’clock at night so that it would be doable.  It was still in the 90’s and the humidity was in the 50% range.  Let me just tell you, I poured buckets and buckets of sweat.  I even brought a hankie for my pocket to wipe my face.  The only time relief came was when the sun was completely down, it cooled off a few degrees.  I didn’t stop picking.  I became a machine.  Oliver gave up on me as soon as we got there, so I couldn’t stop.  When all was said and done after day two of picking I was able to walk away with eight pounds.  Last night Paul and I washed them and vacuum sealed them up and put them in the freezer.  Thank you to Rocco for randomly sending me this Reynolds Handy-Vac.  I honestly thought I’d never use it.  But I did, and it works great.  Thank you.  Also a thank you to Craig, for getting some Handy-Vacs for free so Rocco could mail it.  Tonight is another night for berry picking and vacuum sealing, should be exciting!

I dug up the onions and garlic the other day and Paul dug up our potatoes today.  Root vegetables are tripping me out.  I have this fear of them with good reason.  Our soil here has a lot of clay in it, even the topsoil we had brought in, so the root vegetables have a hard time finding room to grow.  Last year, our soil was not as nice as it is now and our onions suffered.  They were the same size when I dug them up as when I planted them.  We didn’t even try potatoes or garlic last year.  It’s interesting, because you have to follow the signals above ground in order to judge what’s happening underground.  Surprisingly, to me, the garlic did alright.  I think I might have waited a bit long to dig it up, but in general for a first timer I think I did alright, it’s learning.  As we pulled onions up, I thought it was going to be a repeat of last year.  A lot of them, at least half, were small.  But as I hoed the patch to get out the weeds, I would turn up all of these monsters.  The majority of the bigger ones were white onions.  I had a few yellow bombers, but no red ones worth writing about.  Now the potatoes were something else.  Digging those out today was a trip because this just like the garlic, this is completely foreign to me.  I felt like I was watching a baby being born as Paul pulled the plants up.  There they were.  All of our little red potato babies.  We also had Yukon golds and Russets.  There was a 15 pound take on the potatoes so far.  We still have sweet potatoes growing and another variety of Irish potato, but I cannot recall what kind.