• Canning,  Garden

    Tomato Sauce

    We eat a lot of tomato sauce in this house. It is easy and fast. I make some kind of Italian dish at least once a week. Plus, we started having pizza and movie night every Friday and I use tomato sauce for the pizza as well. We have started planting enough tomato plants that we could keep ourselves supplied in tomato sauce without buying it from the store. That is usually about 10-12 tomato plants. That means that I make a lot of tomato sauce. So we had to come up with a good method for doing it. I think we have got it down. I have looked up…

  • Dehydrating,  Growing Produce,  Preserving

    Plum Fruit Leather

    Our plum tree did pretty well this year. It doesn’t usually produce a ton of fruit which is good, because I don’t know what I would do with any more plums. My favorite way to use them currently is to make fruit leather. Plums get very sweet on the inside, but the skin stays pretty tart. And they are so juicy, they can be so messy to eat. Unless you pick them before they get ripe. But then they are super tart. As you may have noticed, I am not exactly sure how I feel about eating plums. I can’t say they are my favorite, but I do enjoy them.…

  • Canning,  Garden,  Growing Produce,  Preserving

    Pickled beets

    This year we dicided to try a new variety of beets. They are supposed to be striped like a peppermint candy. They turned out to be really pretty. Unfortunately they don’t look quite as good pickled as the good old dark red ones. But, they taste just as good. Maybe even better. It’s hard for me to compare because the last time we grew beets I was expecting our second baby and I was a bit nauseous when I was doing the pickled beets. I had to fight to overcome my association with morning sickness and beets. I have been dragging my feet a bit actually. This time around Tyler…

  • Garden,  Growing Produce

    Squash

    This year when we did our compost pile we threw in a couple pumpkins from two different varieties and some Hubbard squash. We thought, with it being so cold, that all the seeds would be frozen. But come spring we saw patches like this picture below all over the garden where we had spread our compost. My husband calls the plants that come up on their own “volunteers”. Which I have no doubt is a common term. I just wasn’t into gardening much before we moved here so I had never heard it. With all these volunteer squash plants we didn’t have to plant any of the pumpkin or squash…

  • Canning,  Preserving

    Pickles

    I was a little surprised at how easy pickles are. I didn’t think I liked pickles because my family only bought dill pickles growing up and I just didn’t like them. But as an adult I had sweet pickles. I don’t even remember when I first tried them. They changed my opinion of pickles forever! When I was pregnant with my first child I didn’t understand what all the hype about pregnant women craving pickles was about. I wanted rot kohl. Long story. But anyway, that was before I knew about sweet pickles. With my second pregnancy all I wanted was pickles. Luckily we had cucumbers growing in our garden.…

  • Canning,  Preserving

    Apricots galore

    If you have, or have ever had an apricot tree, you probably know that they don’t do well every year. And you probably also know that when they do well, they go a little crazy. One apricot tree, in a good year is enough to keep anyone rolling in apricots for a few days. You will probably end up giving a lot of them away as well. Well, that being said, we have four mature apricot trees! Needless to say, on the years that we get apricots we are swimming in them for a few days or weeks. We recently bought a freeze dryer which is great and it means…