Canning Is Easy

Aug24

So we were up at dawn again today. Aaron’s new work schedule has really changed our internal clocks. He has to be at work at 6 am and that gets us all up around 4:30. Even on the weekend it feels like a luxury to wake up at 6! I went out to the garden around 7 and pulled up a couple of bushels of carrots and sprayed them off. Took them inside and began the task of canning them. There is nothing particularly difficult about canning except that you have to make sure to keep things clean, know what you are dealing with in terms of type of produce (acidity determines whether you can water bath them or have to use a pressure canner), and have a full day of uninterrupted time. The last batch of 20 pints of carrots began depressurizing around 2 o’clock this afternoon. For those of you who have been following along and want to know how to do this all you need is this book:

It is kind of the canner’s bible. It has recipes and instructions, and cooking times. Up here at 5300 feet we have to add time to both types of canning because water boils at a lower temperature than at sea level. If you don’t boil them for long enough you can get very sick.

Here is the pressure canner set up out on the deck:

This was today’s end result:

Here is a freak carrot that I pulled up today along with the rest of them. It looks almost like it has tentacles.

I am going to be experimenting with canning soups this year, as well as potatoes. I understand that one can can stock as well to preserve for things like crockpot recipes. The extension of this will also be building a root cellar. Canning takes a lot of time and energy (including propane). Root cellars can let one put up produce for months without having to do a thing to it. But of course, since this farm has been built from scratch…. I have to back hoe it out and build the thing. Just another chapter I guess! In the meantime, our pantry is getting very full. Zina has been hand cutting, threshing and winnowing wheat as well. Now we need to find a way to grind it and see what kind of bread it makes!

Potatoes Squash and Such

Aug23

The harvest continues. The potatoes are going to be epic. The carrots are out of this world. The beets just keep on doing their thing and we are SO excited to have peppers when we thought they had been completely destroyed. The Acorn Squash are amazingly tasty. Zina weeded most of the day and I processed food. We froze peppers, dehydrated Chillies, put carrots in the fridge, cellared squash, and made more refrigerator dills. Oh ya, I also saved a whole bunch of seeds for next year from all of this. What a rebel!

Tomorrow we can carrots.

The Herbs Are Taking Over!

Aug23

It’s official. Oregano has been declared a terrorist herb. It is threatening to take over the JAZ Urban Farm!

The penalty has been pronounced…. drying by hanging!

Oh it is ABOUT Thyme!!

Anyone need a little SAGE advice?

After all its just a shuck and CHIVE.

Bean there!

We Got This Stuff Wired!

Aug17

I am sooooo happy to see that there have been far more successes than failures on the farm. Our first gardening attempt in unknown soil, unknown conditions, flying by the seat of our pants after over a year of blood sweat and tears has come in with a significant amount of satisfaction!

I was noticing the other day that one of the rows of potatoes was starting to die back. At first, considering how many setbacks we have had, I thought they were getting blight. Not uncommon, it was a large contributor to the Irish famines. But then it dawned on me that this is August and these are 85 day potatoes and this is day 85 ish. So, to test my theory, I pulled up the plant on the end of one of the rows and VOILA!! Taters!! While we are headed back to the shitty today and going out to dinner for Zina’s birthday, next week will begin potato harvest! If this one plant is any indication of what is happening all along the rows, we are going to have taters out the wazoo! We planted 180 row feet (3 different kinds) and they look to be doing what potatoes are supposed to do!

I’m thinking, yup, we got this homesteading thing wired.

Massive Quantities of Pickled Beets.

Aug16

This recipe made the farm house smell like my grandmother’s place when we would visit in Iowa! The Cinammon , clove and vinegar plus the earthy aroma of the beets took me WAY back!

We made over 21 lbs of pickled beets today. 25 pints. There are at least that many in the garden right now but most of those will likely be juiced.

We luv the farm!

A View From Above

Aug10

After the weeding session yesterday morning I drove the pickup over to the west fence of the garden, hopped up and took a picture. The garden slopes away from where I am standing so the very end beds have kind of disappeared; but you can get a sense of the size of the lot and the green that has finally taken hold. It is 18 beds roughly all 45 feet long.

Next weekend, pickling and canning beets and freezing more corn!

Such a weird summer. Got Facebook messages from my fellow homesteaders down in Colorado Springs and they had hail yesterday…. August… Hail! Whoda thunk it?

Gardening Update

Aug3

The garden is starting to feel like, resemble and produce like a garden! I am noticing some soil deficiencies and perhaps a high saline content as some things are a bit yellower than they should be. Something to work on for next season. BUT, we have canned tomatoes, picked beans, cucumbers, squash, and garlic. At the farm proper, the Black Beans are getting beans! The potatoes look amazing, the Amaranth is getting seed heads, corn is getting ears and we ate our first carrots and beets today! Wow the sugar content is so much higher than the store. The onions are starting to bulb and the eggplant seems to be liking it here a bunch. The Asparagus is getting lots of feathers but it too is showing some yellowing. The star of the hour are the pepper plants. As I posted several posts before, the pepper plants were decimated in the hail storm. They have since re-flowered and are starting to get peppers! The Tomatillos are loaded with flowers but any of the fruit they have produced have been on the small side. I am going to go out with the backpack sprayer next week and continue with the fertilizer routine. That may help clear up some of these problems. After all, except for the composted horse manure, the soil is practically all sand. Between winning the battle against bind weed, the plants showing life and health, the grass being cut back, and a taste of the first carrots, the place is feeling very farm like. Next weekend Aaron and I stake out the pig pen and start digging the post holes. Onward and upward!

Beets

First Carrots! YUM!!

Feed corn

One of four Black Bean beds

Black Beans, Potatoes, Amaranth and Green Beans

Onions

Sweet corn

Carrots and Beets

Multitudes of Acorn Squash

Recovered Peppers of many sorts!

Progress At The Farm Garden

Jun21

Now that the weather has settled, things at the farm are growing. Most of the Strawberries are leafing, we have Asparagus shoots, the Eggplant, despite the drubbing they took, have a couple of eggplants on them. The original and now replacement peppers are leafing back up and even a couple of the tomatoes, that look like children from a refuge camp, have a couple of tomatoes. Things are growing. Things will continue to grow. We are determined and relentless. And if that wasn’t enough work, we got the posts for the new pig pen yesterday. All in all a good day. Mom did chicken chores, dad weeded and hoed, and even Aaron came out and pulled the alfalfa that has been growing all over the beet, carrot and onion patches.

Egg Plant (you can see how badly the leaves got torn from the hail (that isn’t from bugs)

Peppers re-leafing and showing some serious determination

The first shoots of the new Asparagus patch (its blurry because it wouldn’t stop blowing around)

The sad tomatoes and tomatillos. They are having a rough time recovering.

Acorn squash with flower

About 200 row feet of Peaches N Cream Sweet corn. It took two seedings to get them going because the first planting got washed away in the storms.

We have 400 row feet of onions. They are a combination of Cabernet Red, Ailsa, and Copra with a couple of sets of Whites. All seem very healthy.

We planted somewhere on the order of 800 row feet of Black Beans. Despite getting hammered when they were just emerging from the ground it looks like they are well on their way. You can see in the picture that the ground got pretty crusted over from the storms. We have been out breaking it up pretty diligently.

Three different kinds of potatoes: Reds, Kennebecs, and Yukon Golds. All have come up very nicely. We are going to do our first hilling tomorrow.

This lower patch is about 4800 square feet. It has organic dent corn for the chickens and for corn meal (the left 2/3ds) and the right side is about 1800 square feet of kidney beans.

This is harder to see as it is very early yet – Beets and two types of Carrots.

The hardest part of this right now is simply keeping the soil broken up. We are still devising ways of keeping something this big erosion protected but also covered in order to build the soil. We have some ideas but that doesn’t help this year. I imagine that next season, the lessons learned here, will prove invaluable.

Happy Summer Solstice To All Of My Heretic Friends!!!

Farmer Jon

The Farmer Gots Some Smarts, Skeels and Should Quit Whining

Jun19

After having to get a tremendous amount of “real” work and doctors appointments out of the way we are back at the JAZ Farm. When I arrived (we were in the city for 2.5 days) we discovered that the automatic door to the layer coop hadn’t opened. Evidently the battery was dead. The birds had been sequestered in the coop and were more than happy to come out and partake of the scratch grains we provided them. Now before anyone freaks, they have water in the coop so they were just a tad hungry. Aaron and I will be off to the Home Depot tomorrow to acquire some lantern batteries that the door requires.

So it was pretty smart of us to make sure the city garden got planted out. It is doing incredibly well as usual. We have harvested 2 bushels of spinach, a bushel of Kale (that we use for juicing), and the garlic is on its way to being a bumper crop that I can use to both eat and plant for next year’s supply. Everything is doing very well. We are awaiting the small window when the peas will be ready and the strawberries, so far, are our best crop yet. So the smarts comes from knowing that the country farm garden might be met with some unknowns…. what a understatement.

HOWEVER: Quit whining Farmer Jon!! Sure we have to write off the eggplants and most of the tomatoes at the JAZ Farm because of the hail, but everything else is doing great!! We are going to build a greenhouse this fall which will cover all of those more sensitive plants; it is an unexpected evolution but it will solve the hail problem. The root vegetables and the beans and all of the corn, onions, asparagus, beets and carrots are on their way to being very successful. Perspective is everything. When you are sitting in your home listening to the gates of hell unleash upon your property during a hail storm, one thinks all is lost. The truth is that mother nature is resilient. We are going to have quite a harvest should this growth continue. So between the city garden that has been used as a back up and the experiment of the JAZ Farm, we will have a great deal of food to put by for the coming winter. When we get the greenhouse put up, all the more.

I had my engineer wannabe, Aaron, figure out how to lay out a rectangle on the ground to put in a fence to house the pigs we will be getting next fall. Tomorrow we will be getting batteries for the chickens, fence and fence posts for the pig pen and yet another project will have begun.

The only deterrent right now is the plague of mosquitoes that have hatched from all of the standing water left over from the storms. The outdoor clothes will be quite thoroughly doused in bug juice so we can continue the farm development during the non-snowy month!

Our wheat field, evidently has been considered a loss. The farmer we leased the land to is going to have someone come out and cut it down and bale it. I am not too upset as I will be receiving about 100 straw bales that can be used to bed the chickens and mulch the garden beds. On top of that, as it has been declared a loss, I may head out with my weed whip and knock a bunch of it down and try to salvage some wheat. We will have hard corn for corn meal this year and will need a grinder. Might as well gather as much wheat as we can since it isn’t going to be sold, and save it to make our own bread.

Farm Jon….. da man got smarts, skeels, and should just quit the freakin’ whining over the hail that didn’t get everything. I love the JAZ Farms!

Video of the storm

Jun16

Here is a 30 second video taken at the Home Depot where I shop for the farm. This is what took out the garden. It sounded like this as well…. but louder.

This one is in Byers. It is the aftermath of the storm. Boy Howdy. I guess I should quit feeling like I failed. Nothing could stand up to this.

JAZ Farm Blog

The life of self-sufficiency and sanity in a world that is not

Category Archives: The JAZ Farm Garden