Onion Grass!

We have wild onions growing in our yard! 

 

It looks like a weed, but it tastes and smells like green onions!  Not one to let free food go to waste, we went outside with scissors yesterday and cut the tops off…

  

We chopped it up:

 

Put it in the dehydrator for a few hours:

And now we have dried onions to use this winter!  They add wonderful flavor to soups and taste delicious sprinkled over baked potatoes!  And in the winter, there’s nothing quite like the smell of opening a jar of “fresh” summertime onion grass!

 

Pears, Pears, Pears!

Well, I think I’ve come to the last of the canning for this year.  My friend Carol (from the farm "Moss Gathers" in Celina, Texas) and I struck a deal.  She has a couple of big pear trees.  She picked the pears, gave them to me and I canned them and then give her half the pears back.  We did this a couple of times throughout the summer.  Last week I think I canned the last for this year.  I just peeled them, diced them and then put them in jars with white grape juice.  Mmmm, yummy!

It was a lot of work (and there’s a possibility that she got the better end of this deal!) but I am so looking forward to trying these this winter!
Oh, and then, because I am cheap and I don’t like anything to go to waste, I did one last jar of blended pear peels.  Honestly, they don’t taste that great, but maybe I can use them in a recipe instead of apple sauce.

During our garage sale last week we met one of our neighbors who we had never met before.  (That’s because for most of the time we have lived here I have been home alone, pregnant or with a newborn plus other young children and no car.  So I haven’t gone out much and I haven’t met many people!)  Anyway, this neighbor saw that we had children and asked if we would like some pears from their pear tree.  They have so many pears they don’t know what to do with them all! 

Talk about melting in your mouth!  I don’t know what’s so special about these pears, but they are delicious!  I’m allergic to apples and so over the years I’ve eaten a lot of pears… These are hands-down the tastiest pears I’ve ever tried!  We really enjoyed them!  Thank you, neighbor!  We plan to invite him to participate in our fruit  CSA next spring!

(CSA is short for Community Supported Agriculture.  Members of The Good Old Days Farm will receive a weekly box of home grown fruit or vegetables throughout the season)

It Never Rains but it Pours!

Perhaps that’s not the best metaphor for a farm…  Ok… I will call this post “Feast or Famine…”  No, that’s not a good title for a farm blog either.  =)

Whatever you want to call this post, I am finding that there is either nothing going on, or everything is happening at once!  Papa the Farmer wouldn’t say that.  There is always something going on for him to do…  But I’m not the farmer, I’m the farmer’s wife.  So really, I only spring in to action when there is food that needs to be prepared or preserved…

We had a reasonably good peach harvest this year, considering that it was the first year our peach trees bore fruit.  We moved to this house in 2006 and I remember that the two peach trees that were already here had a bumper crop that year.  I picked the peaches, chopped them and made peach sauce with them.  Then Papa the Farmer (in his pre-farmer life) came home from work and he and the only little Farmhand that had been born yet ate our entire winter’s supply of peaches in one weekend!  I scolded them for it but then decided, “If you can’t beat them, join them” and they were tasty!  But we haven’t gotten any peaches since.  We planted all the other fruit trees the following January and have been waiting and waiting for some peachy-goodness. 
And this year our patience was rewarded.  I wish I had taken a picture of the peaches, but I didn’t.  But I will let you in on my top secret peach-canning recipe: 

First, remove peach pits (very important step!  Trust me, I forgot once!) and place peaches in the blender:


Then, blend.  =)  (You can add a teaspoon or so of citric acid if you care about color retention.)


Doesn’t that look yummy-delicious?     Now honestly, I probably should have cooked the sauce at this point, but in my infinite wisdom I decided it would cook enough in the canner and it would be healthier (“more raw” somehow) if I didn’t cook it so I just poured it into canning jars and put them in the canner. 

Big mess.  I had some oozing and it just seemed like there was peach ooze everywhere.  It didn’t help that I had a baby farmhand helping in the kitchen!  (The official taste tester!)  But for every 7 jars that went into the canner, 6 of them sealed!  (Of course, some had to be run through the canner twice.  Hmmm… I will get better at this!)  We had just enough to enjoy some now and have a little bit all winter long!