Tag: slow food

Five Things to Make from Scratch to Save Money and Eat Better

~ Crystal Sands ~ 2 Comments

I recently read an article about things we can make from scratch to help us save money at the grocery store in light of the high prices. I realize not everyone has the time or space to grow food, but I thought whoever wrote the list could surely do better. It made me think about the things we make from scratch that save us money that you don’t need a garden to make. I thought I might share my list because, not only does making these things save us money, it also gives us food that tastes so much better than what you get from the grocery store. It also helps us cut down on our plastic consumption. And, truly, the more we learn about the plastics, the more we can see that they are bad for both the planet and our bodies.

I hope you find my list helpful and delicious. If you do, please share it with others.

1. Vanilla

Vanilla was one of the first ingredients I use a lot to get really expensive due to climate change. The areas where vanilla beans are grown began to be impacted by climate change years ago, and I remember watching the price of vanilla just rise and rise. I bake a lot and love vanilla, so I was so thankful to learn how to make my own vanilla. The price of vanilla right now is $7-$10 for 2 ounces, and I am able to make it for $2-$3 for 2 ounces.

And that’s just on the original bottle. You can re-use vanilla beans several times. I keep two bottles going because the one down side of making vanilla is that it does take some time. But once you get some vanilla going, you will have vanilla for a long time. Plus, you can get really pretty bottles, which are a treasure.

To make homemade vanilla, purchase 5 good quality vanilla beans per bottle of vanilla. Slice the beans and scrape out the insides. The insides can be used to make vanilla sugar or other treats, but that’s another post. Anyway, just put in the scraped beans and fill your bottle with alcohol (I used vodka). From there, it will have to sit about six months at least before it is ready to use. Just keep it in a cool, dark space and give it a shake a couple of times a week while it is “making.” Don’t forget to give it those shakes!

2. Chocolate Syrup

Both my children were always big chocolate milk drinkers, and my teen son now makes peanut butter and banana smoothies quite often. He likes to add some chocolate to the mix, but bottles of low-ingredient chocolate syrup was costing us $5 for a small bottle–and it wasn’t even organic. Plus, the plastic bottles going into the trash were heartbreaking to me. When I learned that the plastic used for most chocolate syrup bottles was one of the worst for releasing chemicals, I knew I had to figure out how to make my own. I can’t believe it took me so long to make it because it’s so easy and so inexpensive–and I use organic cocoa powder, which does cost a bit more.

To make homemade chocolate syrup, just add 1 to 1 and 1/4 cups organic sugar to a saucepan, along with 3/4 cup of organic cocoa. Sift it together and add 1 cup of water. Mix it together well and bring to a low boil. Let it boil for three minutes and remove from heat. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla and let it sit to cool. Then, just add it to a lovely bottle, and you are all set–delicious chocolate syrup, which is great for milk, ice cream, or, apparently, a peanut butter and banana smoothie.

3. Tortillas

When I learned about the amount of glyphosate in American breads, I set out to make all of our bread goods from scratch. Organic wheat can still contain some glyphosate from contaminated water, but I’ll take less of that stuff for sure. I knew it would take me a bit to start making all of it from scratch, but I started with tortillas because we eat a lot of tortillas with snacks and meals. Plus, making our own tortillas meant we could use some whole wheat flour that Ron grinds. It’s so fresh and so good–and so much cheaper.

Making tortillas ourselves has been such a good deal, especially since we only want to eat organic breads. And, I have to tell you that there is almost nothing better than a fresh tortilla hot out of the pan.

Because we use olive oil, there is not as much of a cost savings, but there is still some. And you don’t have to use olive oil, though I highly recommend it for overall health.

To make homemade tortillas, combine 4 cups of organic flour (could be a little more or less depending upon the type of wheat flour you use or if you just use all-purpose flour), 6 to 8 Tablespoons of olive oil, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 and 1/2 cups of warm water in a large bowl. Combine with a spoon and then your hands until you have a solid dough that is not sticky. If it’s sticky, add a little more flour.

Roll into a bowl, and let the dough rest for about 15 minutes. Then, cut your dough into 8 to 10 equal pieces, depending upon how big you want your tortillas to be. We make burrito size, so we get 8 tortillas from this recipe.

Now comes the tricky part that will get easier with time and practice. Roll the dough out into thin, tortilla sized pieces. This means a lot of rolling, but it’s great exercise. You will need a good rolling pin! I am never able to make my tortillas perfectly round, but my husband, the Virgo, makes them just about perfect. Still, they taste great, even if they are sometimes shaped like the state of Texas.

My favorite little treat with our homemade tortillas is to fill one with about 1/3 cup of homemade applesauce and then top with some freshly-grated cheddar cheese. Melt in the microwave, wrap the tortilla, and enjoy a delicious and healthy snack!

4. All the Breads

I started with tortillas, but I kept going. We now make every single bread or bun we eat in our home, and it saves us so much money–even without the sourdough starter. We still use yeast. One of our staples is a French bread recipe I modified years ago that we can use for everything from a soup side to sub sandwiches (I just shape the dough into tiny loaves).

Easy French Bread Recipe

2 and 1/4 teaspoons yeast
1 cup warm water
2 Tablespoons olive oil (or other oil)
2 Tablespoons honey
1 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
about 3 cups of organic flour (again, depends on type of flour you use)
egg white for brushing

Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and form into a dough. Knead for five minutes. Clean, dry, and oil your bowl and cover with a damp towel. Place it by a wood stove if you can, but let it rise for between an hour and an hour and a half.

Roll the dough out thin to about 1/3 of an inch and then roll it up, tuck in the ends, and shape it into a French bread shape. I a not the greatest at this, as the dough sometimes bosses me around, but I am getting better with practice. I am learning how to be a little more forceful with the dough.

Cover with your damp towel and let rise another half an hour. Meanwhile preheat your oven to 375 and prepare your egg white. When your dough is ready, slice little cuts into the top to make it look like a French loaf, brush with the egg white, and bake 18 to 22 minutes, depending upon your oven. Basically, you want to be able to thump the loaf and have it sound hollow when it is done.

Here are some links to some recipes from the web that we use as well:

Martha Stewart’s Classic White Bread (only Ron makes this with wheat flour)

40 Minute Hamburger Buns

Cranberry Raisin Bread

5. Pizza Crust for Homemade Pizza

I just checked and a single, thin organic pizza crust is $10 at the grocery store. You can make two thick organic pizza crusts yourself for about half the cost of one at the store. We use our homemade sauce and top with whatever is in season in the garden, but you can top how you please, of course.

This recipe is so easy, but it does take a while to rise. You will want to plan ahead, but it’s so worth it. It’s the best pizza crust I have ever tasted, and my family can’t eat even the best pizza from local restaurants now. This recipe was modified from The Homemade Pantry by Alana Chernila. If you want to save money on your grocery bill, buy this book! This recipe makes one pizza crust, but I always double it to make two because my son is 6’4″ and eats a whole pizza by himself.

Ingredients

1 and 1/4 cup warm water
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons olive oil
3 to 3 and 1/2 cups organic flour (some combination of white and wheat to your taste)

Directions

In a very large bowl, add the water, yeast, and sugar, and let it sit about five minutes. It should bubble a little. Add the rest of the ingredients until a ball forms and then knead the dough about five minutes. I have a very large bowl and just knead right in the bowl. Remove the dough, wash and dry the bowl, and then lightly oil it. Put the dough back in, cover it with plastic wrap, and let it rise about 10 hours. Don’t worry. The plastic will not touch your dough as long as you bowl is big enough.

After that 10 hours is up, pull out the dough and place it on a floured surface for rolling and shaping. It’s ready to go after you add your sauce and toppings. Cook at 425 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes or until your pizza looks done and bubbly to your liking. One trick I learned from Alana Chernila is that you don’t want to put your sauce on the dough until you have all the ingredients ready and can just throw everything on. If the sauce sits on the dough too long, it will make your dough soggy.

OK, I realize that’s a lot to take in. I hope this is a helpful post. We save so much money and eat so well thanks to making things from scratch. It does take a bit more time, but I work full time and have a farm and a son who is a cellist, so I try to keep things fairly quick. The key to the pizza is to just start it in the morning, so it can do the work on its own all day.

Good luck, and let me know if you try anything. Oh, and if you have a tip on a delicious money saver, please share it!


A Season of Harvest in Pictures

~ Crystal Sands ~ 4 Comments

December 2 is definitely the latest we have ever harvested anything, but last night, Ron pulled the last of the carrots from the ground. They were so delicious. We learned to always let your carrots stay in the ground until after the first few frosts. The frost does good things to the sugars in the carrots, and the taste is so sweet.

It seems like forever ago that we started this whole process, and I was so tired this summer and fall from the long COVID that I didn’t post as many pictures as I normally do. With that in mind, I decided to go through all of my photos from the summer and fall and show you what we do around here–and how we eat. There are so many more things to share, but I think this gives you a pretty good idea.

Harvest starts in May, and this year, well, it went until December. Both last night and tonight, we had carrots with dinner. They were magnificent.

It always starts with the rhubarb. I make rhubarb cakes, muffins, and jelly. I didn’t even get to share a single jar of this jelly. I made five jars, and Ron had eaten it all within two weeks. I have to make more next year, but rhubarb jelly is a bit more labor intensive–at least if you want pink. Our rhubarb is not super pink, so I have had to learn some strategies for picking and processing to get more of the pink color.
The first greens! And that’s Saint Saens in the background. That sweet girl will be seven this spring. She really loves the greens. I did share some after this photo.
The green beans did pretty well this year, and we froze a record number of quarts. I have not yet been brave enough to try to can them, but I must try next summer. Also, our neighbor gave us several old harvest baskets years ago, and we use those things all the time. I would love to get a few more.
One of my favorite meals every summer is the organic ramen. When the cabbage and onions are ready (usually we have carrots at this time too, but they were late), I boil duck eggs and warm up some organic ramen. It’s a quick, easy dinner–and it’s pretty!
These were the first raspberries of the season!
Ron planted purple cauliflower this year. I mean, just look at that!
We always have a couple of months between running out of potatoes from last year and the new potatoes of the current year coming to harvest. Every year, when we eat the potatoes, those first meals are so precious to me. I don’t buy potatoes. I just wait until the next crop is ready. It really makes you appreciate good potatoes.
When the blueberries are ripe, I am so excited to put them in oatmeal in the mornings. We all love oatmeal with blueberries around here. This year, the birds ate almost all of our blueberries, so Ron and I spent two days picking at a local farm that has really good prices for beautiful berries. We stocked up and still have gallons of frozen blueberries that we will eat all winter. This summer, on one hot and miserable day of picking (the heat makes long COVID symptoms worse), I said to Ron, “We are the ants, aren’t we?” He agreed that we are, indeed, the ants.
I just had to share this sunflower because neither Ron nor myself planted it. A bird or a squirrel planted it in a flower pot on our deck, and I treasured it. So did this awesome bumble bee.
We had melons this year! They were fantastic! When Ron first tried to grow melons about 10 years ago, it wasn’t hot enough. The Maine summers are plenty hot now.
It was a banner year for tomatoes, and we put up a record number of jars of pizza and spaghetti sauce. This is some of the pizza sauce. Each one of these jars contains enough sauce for two pizzas. We use the tomatoes, onions, peppers, and garlic from the garden to make this sauce. It is slow food that is just so good.
We eat pizzas all fall using vegetables from the garden. This one has onions, peppers, and tomatoes from the garden, and, of course, we make the sauce from the garden too.
Ron chose a hybrid corn this year, so I couldn’t seed save; it was so good it was worth it though. It was a really good year for the corn.
I love apple season. We do not grow our own apples, but we found a local apple orchard with very good prices for pick-your-own, and drops are crazy cheap–and still so good. We load up on apples every fall. We always freeze many gallons of apples, but this year, I started putting up applesauce in jars. I put up eight large jars. They are already gone. My teen son stays up late and, apparently, ate a lot of applesauce this year. I would wake up every other morning or so and find another jar had been opened. Truly, there is nothing like homemade applesauce, right?
Right around apple time is also grape time. We have our own grape vines, and Ron built a beautiful arbor for them this fall. However, we have no grapes yet. Thankfully, I have the kindest neighbor who always shares her grapes with me, and I always make grape jelly. Homemade grape jelly is nothing like the store grape jelly. It’s so tart and so yummy!
Ron plants a fall round of greens each year, so we can have greens when the tomatoes are ripe. This beautiful salad as greens, beets, carrots, peppers, and tomatoes from the garden–and walnuts and dried cranberries from the grocery store.
Our pear trees had a good year. I canned 15 large jars of pears from our trees. We planted two more pear trees this spring, but only one really started to take off. Aren’t pears so beautiful?
I love cranberry beans. A few years ago, we had a bumper crop and haven’t grown any in several years. But Ron planted some this year in his Three Sisters garden, and they are so beautiful. I was glad they were back this year.
We always plant three varieties of carrots–Yellowstone, Scarlet Nantes, and Oxhearts. These are the Oxhearts, and they are great for rocky soils like we have here in Maine.

Food System

~ Crystal Sands ~ 2 Comments

Warning: This post includes a brief discussion of processing chickens for food.

This morning, we began processing our last batch of meat chickens for the year. We normally do one batch for our family and one batch for our dogs, but we did three batches this year because our Pyrenees, Bairre, has decided he really only likes to eat chicken for dinner. We can either buy meat from the food system where we know the animals are abused or humanely raise and process the chickens ourselves for our dogs to eat. We choose the latter.

And, when I say “we” process these chickens, I mean mostly Ron. I am just the assistant. Ron humanely culls, cleans most of the feathers, and then cleans the insides. It is my job to then get the chicken looking like one from the grocery store, so, when cooked with vegetables from our garden, our family just sees a beautiful chicken dinner as the end result.

I get the final feathers and hairs, clean the chicken super thoroughly, and process the internal organs for the dogs. We try to avoid waste. After all, a life was given for that food. Waste seems sacrilegious.

Even with my assistant job, I get so worn. I am up and down our stairs a lot, as we keep the chickens in the basement, and I spent a lot of hours leaned over our deep sink. It feels worth it though when I think about the alternative. The “humanely raised” is really important to me, but food safety is becoming more and more an issue.

Recently, it feels more and more important that we choose to live this way.. I have known for a long time that our American food system is in some trouble, but the recent listeria and E. coli outbreaks remind me of how important it is to build our own food system–at least as much as we can. The FDA and the USDA both regulate our food systems here in the United States, but they apparently do not communicate well and are also quite backed up and overworked. On top of these issues, apparently, some states, specifically I read about Texas, have simply quit complying with some required testing from the USDA. This was related to the bird flu, but who knows what else states or companies will decide to not comply with. It’s already quit a bit. Self regulation is not a great plan, at least if experience has taught us anything.

We also have a lot of inexperience and arrogance heading into our government, and in my other life working as an academic administrator who worked with federal agencies to secure grants, inexperience and arrogance are not a great combination when it comes to dealing with the giant bureaucracy that is government.

Yeah, I have some worries. I think we had better start working hard to get our food from a more local system.

I know it’s not possible for everyone who reads this to start raising meat chickens, but it seems important to start trying to remove ourselves from a broken food system in whatever ways we can. Maybe we get chickens for eggs and compost their poop to fertilize our organic vegetable garden. Maybe we connect with local farmers and join a CSA. Maybe we support any local markets that keep their supply chains local. I don’t know how common those are in other states, but we have a lot of them here in Maine. Maybe we work harder to create low-ingredient homes, cutting down on or eliminating processed foods (more on that later).

Pay attention. Wash your food well. Organic carrots were a recent culprit for E. coli. Cook your meats thoroughly. Make sure they reach the proper temps.

I wish I had more answers, but I do think we are on our own more than I feel comfortable with. I’ll always share what I learn to help us get through it all, and I hope you will as well.

photo credit: Anna Jakutajc-Wojtalik, Unsplash

Apple Butter: Slowest Food

~ Crystal Sands ~ 2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I made my last batch of grape jelly and wrote about how grape jelly is slow, slow food. Well, I had never made apple butter–until now.

I have always wanted to make apple butter. I have heard people talk about using the end-of-the season apples to make it and thought that was the most wonderful thing. Also, I always thought it was so beautiful and felt so fall-ish. It was on my list to be the last of my six Maine jams and jellies collection, but I had a struggle making time to make it because it requires some planning.

Come to find out, apple butter is essentially apple sauce that gets WAY overcooked. I was worried when I was making it. I kept wondering if this looked right, but after mine was finished, I Googled pictures of it, and it looked perfect! I was so relieved. I always worry when I am doing something for the first time and really need it to work. It worked! And it’s so yummy! I love apple butter. I don’t love it like I love grape jelly, but it’s still really good. Plus, it’s the slowest food. I think that makes me treasure it more. It had to cook 12 hours in a crock pot. I was able to do other things during that part, but I am a slow apple peeler and had to figure out a time when I could get all of those apples peeled and cut and then have 12 hours of time to wait on it.

But it’s lovely, and when I sat a jar on the bar and saw the apple butter next to one of my favorite dish towels, I thought to myself, “Oh, I’m taking a picture of this.” And here it is. It makes my heart happy that I made apple butter.

P.S. Happy Halloween! My son had orchestra rehearsal tonight, but one of the mentors organized all of the parents for a trunk-or-treat for the kids. It was wonderful. The music was wonderful. It was a lovely evening. I hope you had a lovely evening too.

Grape Jelly–Slow, Slow Food

~ Crystal Sands ~ 1 Comment

I am right now waiting for the cooked grapes to cool, so I can run the grapes through the cheesecloth to get to the smooth grape juice. It’s my favorite part of making grape jelly because the color is beautiful. The purple stains the cheesecloth and my hands, and I feel so deeply connected to this food. The color makes me want to dye fabrics, but at the moment, I can’t think of any practical thing to make. If you know of an idea, please let me know.

My least favorite part of this jelly-making process is picking the grapes off of the stems. Five pounds of clean grapes are required for my recipes, and it’s a slow go picking like a million grapes and measuring out five pounds. I was telling myself tonight, “We eat some really slow food around here.”

It’s so worth it though, at least I feel this way most of the time. I’m not going to lie, sometimes cooking everything from scratch wears me out, but usually, it’s a joy. The grape jelly is absolutely a joy. This is only my second year to ever make homemade grape jelly from my neighbor’s grapes, and the last time was before the pandemic. I was a little rusty on my first batch this year. It was a little thin but still so delicious. My son has eaten two jars so far.

Tonight, I get my second and last chance to make it perfect. I am altering the recipe I was following, hoping to correct the issue. I am hopeful, as, over the years, I have become pretty good at tweaking recipes. I can normally tweak them before I try them, but sometimes, I don’t know enough and just follow the recipe.

This grape jelly is a part of my series of jellies I have made this year as gift sets for a few friends and family. I still have to make the apple butter, and I hope to get to that this week as well. The trouble with slow food is that you have to time for it, I suppose.

Hopefully, this jelly will be beautiful though. It’s my grown daughter’s favorite jelly, and I can’t wait to share some with her. She told me last week that “she’s a big jam and jelly” person. I hoped she would be. Not everyone is, but I surely am. I can’t eat store-bought jam or jelly at all anymore. There’s nothing like low-sugar, organic grape jelly. I wish for everyone to taste a bite at least once. It would make people smile. Maybe it would make their heart smile too.

Pounds of Potatoes

~ Crystal Sands ~ Leave a comment

We are still wrapping up harvest. It’s been an unusual year, and we still have not had our first frost. Twice this last week, we have had salads for dinner–in October–in Maine!

I am working extra right now for my job, but I have just one more terrible weekend to go, and then I have big plans for finishing out my “great jam and jelly project” for the summer. I will write more about this over the weekend, hopefully, but I started a series of jams and jellies in the spring, when we had our rhubarb ready. I had the idea to make a jam or jelly from all of the amazing fruits on our farm (plus some I get from a local farm because we do not have apple trees). I got these gorgeous little jars and have the plan of giving a whole set of these Maine jams and jellies to some special humans I know. I just have to finish up this weekend with apple butter and grape jelly. I’m super excited about the grape jelly. I have only made it one time, and it was delicious. I use organic sugar and the low-sugar recipe, and it was divine. I hope I can do so well again. My neighbor said I could have her grapes because the birds are just eating them. So I’m sorry, birds, but I’m making jelly.

Making the apple butter and grape jelly is going to be my reward for working extra this last month. I’m very tired of the computer and antsy to get back into the kitchen more.

Anyway, Ron harvested potatoes this week, and I was so impressed. That man complains all summer long about how the potatoes aren’t going to come out right. The blight. The bugs. But he finds organic ways to overcome these struggles, and look at these beautiful potatoes!

To store our potatoes, Ron leaves the dirt on them and puts them in a dark bag with holes poked in it and puts them in our basement cold room. It’s not as good as a root cellar, but it works fairly well. We will have potatoes until next June. How cool is that? He put up two varieties, Red Gold and Yukon Gold,

The pears are ready!

~ Crystal Sands ~ Leave a comment

I am behind on everything, as I always seem to be this time of year. My teaching load increases; homeschooling starts; and it’s still harvest season. This morning, when I went out to take care of the chickens, I saw two pears had dropped from the trees. When I let the chickens out, they were on those pears so fast, which is interesting to me because they won’t eat apples.

Tomorrow, I have try to can those pears, as it’s the biggest bunch we’ve ever had, but I am a little nervous because we have never had enough pears to put up. I am worried about messing up and ruining the pears. Surely, I can do this.

That reminds me: My three sisters garden is doing amazing. After I planted it, I told my neighbor and her grandson about it. Her grandson, who works a lot with the Native tribes here in Maine said, “Oh, it’ll work. It’s been working for thousands of years.” The only thing I could think was that I would probably find a way to ruin it anyway. But I have not. So far, it looks like I’m definitely getting corn and beans, and if this warm September continues, I might get some long pie pumpkins. I am trying to work on feeling more confident. I swear, if I can grow delicious corn, that will surely be a boost.

I also found a great home for one of Ruby’s roosters this morning. He was the sweetest one, and he got to go the best home. It was the farmer who told me last week about how intelligent chickens are. It turns out that she was looking for a young rooster. What a lucky boy!

She drove about an hour to get him because she wanted to make sure he came from a good environment. This is critical if you are getting a chicken from someone else. You can’t know everything for sure, but you have to at least look at the environment they have been living in. It’s always risky to take in an outside chicken and introduce it to your flock. I was happy for her to come and see where our chickens live. It’s a very good chicken life. I did make sure I cleaned the coop this morning though, just to make an extra good impression.

It’s funny. It’s kind of like cleaning your house when company comes over, I guess. Our coop is not fancy at all, but it’s sturdy and safe–and it’s nice when it’s all freshly cleaned.

Anyway, tomorrow is pear canning day. Then, Monday, I have to make another round of sauce from the tomatoes and peppers. Somehow, I have to finish the online annual this week too, and we start homeschool on Monday. It’s a busy fall already.

Just Enough

~ Crystal Sands ~ Leave a comment

We finally got enough tomatoes to make our sauce. We live on this sauce for meals throughout the year, so we’ve been a little worried about the tomatoes. Thankfully, we had just enough today for our first batch. I think we will get enough for one more batch, and that will do us because we still have some left from last year when we had such a bumper crop of tomatoes.

Last year, we processed 125 pounds of tomatoes, had about 75 pounds for farm shares, and gave away 50 pounds. This year, I think we will be fortunate to get 50 pounds in total. Those horn worms came during a time when our son was at music camp, and we were swamped. Those little caterpillars did big damage. But it’s okay because we have just enough for sauce.

It’s a long day making the sauce because you have to pick all the veggies, wash and peel the tomatoes, make a puree out of the onions garlic and peppers, and then it all has to simmer for six hours. Oh, and you have to stir it every 15 minutes. I have just one round to go, and then it’s time to can. It will be a late night, and this is real slow food. It’s totally worth it though. Slow food always is, I think.

Also, the baby chicks are doing so great. They are just perfect!

Slow and Steady (or Gardening without Sunshine)

~ Crystal Sands ~ 2 Comments

It has continued to be a gray, rainy summer here in Maine. We have had a few breaks and nothing like we saw where it rained all of June. Still, it’s been wet and gray most of the time.

Some foods in the garden have done well. The greens have been amazing. They have done so well that Ron just kept planting them over and over, so we could keep eating salads. The green beans also did well. The beets finally did something, and after so much carrot drama, we are now eating carrots. In fact, every single night, we eat from our garden, and I am thankful for the beautiful food full of good nutrition.

But I’m a little worried about the last things to finish every year–things like the corn and the tomatoes. Our tomatoes have struggled extra this year because of a horn worm outbreak. We found 21 of those very hungry caterpillars, and two plants were pretty much just gone. Those horn worms are so hard to see. It’s like they wear invisibility cloaks. Somehow, they match both the stems and the leaves from the tomatoes perfectly.

On top of the horn worm buffet, our tomatoes are lingering green because we just are not getting very much sun. This morning, I woke up and couldn’t believe how dark it was outside. Hopefully, the tomatoes will ripen. We depend on them heavily for sauce and soups.

The corn is another worry. Ron has a corn patch, and I planted my own corn in a three-sisters garden. I am seeing tassels, which is very exciting, but oh my goodness, we need some sunshine.

I’m crossing my fingers for a warm September. It’s possible. Two years ago, we didn’t get our first frost until after Halloween. Of course, last year, we had a frost in mid September.

In the meantime, we are eating well from the garden. It has been a “slow food” summer for sure and a year to learn extra patience about growing food in times of climate change. We spent years learning how to grow food in drought and hot summers. There has been a bit of a learning curve this year.

I would love to know how your gardens are doing. Where are you, and what has this summer been like for you?

Strawberry Season 2023–or the Waiting Is the Hardest Part

~ Crystal Sands ~ 2 Comments

I took this picture exactly one year ago today. It was the first small batch of strawberries, and I was so excited because there were so many more berries nearly ripe and coming soon.

Strawberries are my favorite food in the world. As a child, all I wanted for my birthday was a strawberry cake. My great grandmother had strawberries in her in-town garden and would make strawberry jam, which I am still convinced, on homemade bread, is the best, most comforting food in the history of the world.

I love the strawberries.

This year, it feels like we are forever away from strawberry season still. It has been cold and gray and rainy, and everything in the garden feels stunted and slow. I have patience for the other things, like the radishes and beets. I am having a hard time waiting on the strawberries.

I just weeded the strawberry beds this morning and studied the state of things. The plants look great, and there are a ton of green berries. But they are all so green! It looks like it will be a couple of weeks before we have strawberries, and I am bummed about this wait. It’s all we can do though, I guess. Just wait and hope for sunshine.

Tom Petty said, “The waiting is the hardest part.” Those are wise words.