Last Christmas my mom gave me a fun carrot peeler.  She learned how to make veggie bouquets at Relief Society, then became veggie connoisseur to me and the granddaughters during our family Christmas party.  She gave us a fun tutorial, then slipped in the secret peeler into our Christmas stash.

One of my goals in 2012 was to lessen the garden waste due to end of summer burnout.  Are you familiar with this?  You have buckets and buckets of corn and you take the time to pick it, haul it, shuck it (*ahem, this taken a few days in years past) and by the time you're ready to process it for the freezer it's starchy and gross.

In July, I spent 2 weeks to find the perfect shade of aquamarine for the farm.  Red, White, & Aquamarine--kind of Americana with a twist.  I priced a high quality paint, swept in during a one a year rebate, then brought it home with big plans to freshen up some outbuildings once the kids started back in school.

But the thing is, once the kids started back in school the garden was unloading harvest after harvest upon us.  It was a frenzy.  So the bucket still sits in the garage, and August, September, and October I was in the kitchen canning garden produce!

Here are a few long overdue (I don't think I updated much about our own garden last year) pictures from Our 2012 Garden.
Prepare to do the scroll dance.

Here the 3 sisters near harvest time.  This bed we planted sugar-pie pumpkin which are the perfect size for steaming, pureeing, then freezing for pumpkin muffins throughout the year.

I feel quite passionate about providing fun creative avenues for the kids to play in the garden setting.  I was enamored with the idea of a labyrinth (labyrinths are different than a maze! I won't elaborate to spare the boring details) so I found a pattern I liked and roughly shaped it out with flour.  Then we added new compost to the pattern and planted in that. 


 Here's the Labyrinth shortly after planting.  Eventually I laid down layers of cardboard in the paths to suppress weeds and it did a great job!  I planted a hybrid corn called Optimum Sweet because it is a very tall corn (and more importantly, a very sweet corn).



This shows the teepee a little better, along with my best garden helper last year, Gideon.  He loved to be outside with me while I worked in the garden.


Blurry!


Here was another addition last summer.  We took cattle panels and bent them.  They act as a support to peas, beans, while shading the cooler crops like spinach, salad, and broccoli.  Here it is pretty early on when our peas were starting to take off.
 Prior to a weedfest, my little orphan child in the hoophouse.
  A little later we got some mulch down to help with the weeds.  This is my favorite picture of Leif in the garden.
 I strung lights around the opening, it was so magical at night!  But darnit it didn't last with garden sprinklers hitting it 3 times a week!  Baby + Baby Rake = Happiness.


At the mouth of the hoophouse is the sandbox.  I wanted to clean it up a bit and bought lots of wooden alphabet letters, sea shells, and glass coins.  Here's my two blondies having fun!
This is my favorite picture of the hoophouse.  I took some old sheets to keep the shade coming.  Boy did we have a HOT summer.  

Also, did you know it takes about 8 hours to shell enough peas for a big pot of creamy potatoes and peas?  I had so many, and they were so intensive to shell, that we did have much go to waste in the pea department :(


After trying to grow a plethora of items in this top tier, I finally broke down in July and just planted the drought tolerant Portulaca flowers.  They filled it up nicely and could handle the HEAT.


Tomato guy!


We planted a cover crop of Clover after harvesting fava beans.  They will enrich the soil, suppress weeds, and provide happiness for our bees in the spring. 


The Mister of the House was cute.  I would stack a box of completed jars and ask him to take them downstairs, but instead he kept stacking them in the piano room.  He wanted to keep seeing our progress and take a picture when we were done.  

Although I know there are many awesome woman who canned more produce than I did, I was happy with the progress we made.  We still have lots of food preserved and it is serving our family well.



 Sadness = roasting peppers and garlic for a tomato sauce, only to ruin the entire HUGE patch with too much parsley for the garden.  Lame!

 The pears came to Idaho with me and my mom helped me put them up.  Thanks mom!


Green tomato relish, peach jam (sweetened with honey), and peaches!


I love this jar of salsa with a mashed avocado and fresh cilantro.  Also good on it's own!

Here's our parting shot.  We took some trimmed branches and made an arch leading from the garden/yard to the "farm" area.  I love it!  Looking from the farm into the garden. Stay out chickens!

Here's a view from the deck. Lots of intoxicating views of Idaho potato and wheat fields. In the distance, on a clear day, you get a glimpse of the Tetons. Gorgeous! That's just the backdrop to Hoser's dirt patch.


So here's the actual yard. The clean line of the lawn is edged with railroad ties, and then it slopes down down down and gets to the garden. For a good 15 years the slope had wildflowers - daisies, asters, lupine, yarrow, poppies. Sadly, those days are gone, but magic is still happening in the earth below.


uno. Nooooo! Don't take my picture. Can if I want.
 dos. Down the steep path.
 tres. Aspen and pine surround a firepit to the side of the garden.


This is why this garden is lovely. A) Because of lovable little Hoser, Coach, Daddio.  B) It's the untamed slope, meeting the edge of the fields, all teeming with weeds. But his garden path is clear and pure. I love it! It gives me hope that my raspberry patch can be good someday. I threw up my hands when it was surrounded by fields and canals and couldn't keep up.

 When asked why he gardens, my dad just kindof shrugged and said I like to eat corn. Notice the pines and aspen at one end of the garden, with the willow windbreak on the other end. The willows were so thirsty he cut some of them out to help his garden thrive. Oh, and I had to water every damn tree as a punishment for breaking curfew with a boyfriend back in the day. Welcome for the shade everyone. Is anyone reading this? Am I officially making my blog boring? I'm kindof obsessed with gardens right now!


Here lies the major trick with gardening - weed management! Gardens are manageable if you tackle weeds before you start. Compost, manure, tilling - there's lots you can do. So my dad's plot was CLEAN, and his management is EASY. Triangle hoe slices under any seedlings sprouting up. Not many sprouting up because he has a dripline only watering his veggies. Did you know that driplines don't work that well with secondary water? They get clogged up too easily. But when you conserve, you can more readily afford culinary water. That's what's going on here: Driplines with culinary water.

This past Monday, seven (Count them seven!), friends and neighbors that don't live in my house saw me:
*Bed-Headed
*shuffling in my nightgown
*viewing my very personal and triumphant competition with The Mister of the House as to who could get the hairiest legs (that would be me) as my nightgown stops about the middle of my shins.

On Sunday, I was literally on my back with insane lower lumbar spasms initiated by an early morning sneeze in the shower (lame right?). It's now Friday, and I'm up and going again (although very gingerly and with the aid of copious amounts of muscle relaxants).

One of my first acts performed after getting a back that could bend was to shave my legs. Today marks the ability to sit in a chair. I'm celebrating by updating this here blog.



I wanted to give a waning garden tour, even though I failed to get pictures of the garden in it's full glory. I can't believe it's harvest time already. Here's the baby steps we made in the garden this year.

Remember this dead patch in the spring?


We edged it with railroad ties, had some composted manure hauled in, and planted this.


This was our big heirloom year. I'm going to have to admit that I might be on the fence about some of this. Mostly because we ate approximately two ears of corn from our garden. I'm not sure if it was because of spring-time medical trauma, an insane wet and snowy spring/summer, or the fact that our corn was planted too late, but it wasn't a huge success in the corn department.

I did have a pretty garden though. I transplanted my teepee right in the middle, seeded a winding cosmos path to the teepee, and gave it privacy on three sides with the corn. On the south edge I planted heirloom zucchini, spaghetti squash, pumpkin, and peppers.



I thought it was a little ironic that I had pretty foliage but NO FLOWERS as of the first day of school. But now with half the plants zinged from frost, the cosmos is high and proud. I love to wind down the path and find an invitation to sit Pocahontas-style in the teepee.



Here's the view from both angles. As a weed barrier, and bug deterrent, I seeded marigolds all around the border. The pops of orange have been a delight this autumn (mostly because that's practically when they showed up too...I guess snow on Memorial Day will do that to you).

Here's that cute baby. He's six months old! He's like a cancer patient all hairless and pale. Isn't he adorable? He is off the charts for his heighth BTW.



Around the edge of the teepee we planted pole beans. About 3/4 of the way around I ran out of our heirloom seeds, so I pulled out leftover pole beans from last year. This is when I really started to wonder (and I have yet to fully research) about hybrid seeds, as they clearly outperformed the heirloom in terms of germination and growth. GMO seeds - lame! Heirloom - necessary and very cool. Hybrid - not sure if I'm going to categorize that in the lame department just yet.

I threw carrot seeds inside the teepee and treated it like groundcover. I wanted it to keep weeds out, and thought that perhaps it would be alright and keep rooting into that dirt even if the kids were playing in the teepee.



This kid is at the stage where he puts everything in his mouth! Ah I just love him!

Chomp. Chomp. Who me? What? Yes stupid goat. I'm staring at you! Our goats got out of the fenced area and went to town eating our...orchard! Out of 9 fruit trees, about 7 were chomped to bits! Damn goats.


Our Mellow Wood Pond experiment this year was Muscovy Ducks. Last year we had a ton of fun with the trout, but that pond dried up lickety split and we didn't have a fishing party before it happened.

The Mister of the House researched Muscovy Ducks and how they are AMAZING bug eaters. Love mosquito larvae and start munching it when their still little ducklings. What with flooding of the rivers and a HUGE mosquito year forecast, I was prepared to get eaten alive. But these ducks (we have 7) really did a great job. The mosquitoes were not bad in our yard or the pond. Plus look how gorgeous they are!



Baby has a drool rash, and older brother has a window in his mouth!



Happy Harvest everyone!

This summer while the chickens snuck into the garden,



and Rainbow Girl and I milked Betty the Goat,



on the milk stand built by The Mister of the House,

where if you kept a watchful eye you would catch frequent summer accidents averted by toddlers-with-initiative;


and even wobbly-headed newborns became bright-eyed infants before your very eyes (although you're not quite sure how),



...well while all of this happened at The Olsen's over this summer, the flowers bloomed and dangled pollen like candy-bait for kids.



Except pollen isn't bait for kids, just bees. And boy did they work!

Out of two hives we set up this spring, we harvested just ONE this week. The other hive swarmed, and we lost the majority of that hive (plus their delicious honey). But how could we be too sad when we pulled in this harvest?

Have a looksie!



We borrowed this honey extractor from a like-minded neighbor. What a blessing to have like-minded neighbors! The Mister of the House donned his special bee jacket, smoked the bees a bit so they would be nice, and pulled out 7 panels of honeycomb.

After shaving the tips off the combs, we placed the panels into this extractor and cranked the heck out of it!



I pulled some nylons off from my fungus-ridden feet and put them over the valve at the bottom of the extractor.



Those were clean, Gomer. What're you thinking?! But see all the waxy crappy that comes out with it? We used clean new stockings to serve as a filter.

We didn't have the specialty bee cutting knife, so for a second we worried that our cuts were so sloppy we would be wasting too much honey. So we set up more filtering over bowls, just to be prudent.

From 2011.FARM PICS

I think people used to chew this wax back in the olden days, which was probably a healthy alternative to chewing tobacco. Look how much there is! In the future we may try to make some candles or chapstick or something, but for now, it was enough of a sticky mess just to process the honey.

We had TWO pitchers that we hoped we could fill with the honey. Here's us happily filling our second pitcher. The progression of the slow but steady fill went like this:



so in the end we filled THREE pitchers full of honey, plus some here and there in extra bowls. All in all, we pulled out about 30 POUNDS of honey! Isn't it absolutely GORGEOUS?



The next morning we put out the sticky spent panels by the hives, and the bees went to work pulling in the wax and leftover gooey. What good little bees.



I totally facebook-bragged about this haul and heard all sorts of ego-inflating comments. In reality, this is truly the work of The Mister of the House. He is an AMAZING farmer guy. I am his biggest cheerleader! Love you dude.

How can school shoot a hole through summer's official tide while still being in the 90's outside? I'm still thinking of garden ideas, feeling like I just had a baby and it's still spring. Does this time-space formula get worse with each passing year? So, in order to maintain the chaos of information I am needing to record for my own sake and that of my family, I'll just pull up some snippets of our fleeting (now gone) summer. I'd say it has been a good one!

Here's my pasty-white children at Easter time getting ready for festivities at Grandma Cozy's. I was then homebound hiding from the world with a newborn, but as you will see in the next picture, the mutts did actually go out in the sun--and kid #1 and kid #3 turned delicious chocolate. Yum!



See! Chocolate.



More Chocolate. And wifebeater. With stains. And a buzz. The Mister cut his curls, which was tragedy #5 this summer.



Here with our two adorable Vanillas with their Chocolate Siblings. We finally blessed that baby boy when he was a ripe and chubby four months old!



Give it to me ladies. Aaaaawwwwwwwww....{sigh}.

Okay wait. This was end of summer. Let's go back. Remember pasty-white but still turning green Easter pic at the top? This was Memorial Day this year (AFTER Easter)!



Can you blame me for STILL thinking of garden ideas? The garden had a late start this year, what with all that rain, snow, and tragedy #1 and all.



Brrrr!



Here's a peek at the annual work party in the backyard (June I think?). I was still hiding a little, but you can see our garden boxes from last year, as well as a big DEAD rectangle where we tore up some more grass for MORE garden. I kept telling The Mister when he was having garden dreams last winter: "Ummm, you know I'm going to have a newborn right?".

But then we went to intensive care without insurance (more on that later) and decided: "Let's just try to grow more food and save some money."



I did manage to can some apricot jam. Gorgeous right?



Here's some old friends. As it would happen, we all had babies within about a month apart. We had some good lunch dates where a million kids were running around. I love these ladies!



We checked on the bees early in the spring. The honey was clear and sweet.



We pulled out this section of free-floating hive. Look closely and you can see the detailed architectural perfection. Each comb is staggered on the opposite side, so that it doesn't collapse as easy. Seriously amazing.

Oh, and one of our hives went AWOL and flew away. Lame!



I tried to be better about weeding this year, but my garden got most of my attention. At least the daughter and the neighbor girls harvested a beautiful flower pizza before all weeds went loose.





See the inner tubes. What with this wet spring, Mellow Wood Pond has been enjoying a full season to the point of neighbor kids coming to float around in the backyard. I have no problems as long as NOBODY DRINKS THE WATER.



Bake sales and cleaning the office with me this summer means Rainbow Girl earned $54 this summer. I, on the other hand, ate inventory and am getting fat{ter}.

yay :(



Aaahhh....




Legos! We are going nuts over them throughout this whole house.



Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday the water comes on and there's a good chance that Isaac will be found with his little buddy "No-one" = Owen.



And lastly, two years in a row the renowned local opera company has had a show featuring this guy. It's so cliche of what some seriously out of touch theatre man thinks will swoon the ladies right? I can hear every gay man's heart breaking a mile away when I see it. Ha ha!

Please tell me you still have one big fat zucchini on your counter that you've been wondering whether or not to throw away? Well don't! Here's another garden recipe sent to save the day! (do I still have good karma Tonya?)

This recipe is great for when you have a glut of tomatoes. And anyone who has ever escorted tomatoes through a salsa recipe requiring you to blanch, peel, core, and then de-seed the tomatoes will hopefully find a return of motivation to process their own food. No more wondering where half the tomato went, and no burning hands! I haven't tweaked around with it to see if it can be canned, so for long storage use your freezer.

This recipe is from The Weight Watcher's New Complete Cookbook. So if that's your thing, this sauce has zero points!

Here we go!