If I was in a position to design a beautiful place and meaningful things to do for a very, very long time, it would include many aspects of our day today! Reading back over that sentence I realize that that is exactly what we are trying to do here at Tangly Woods and today it felt like just a little taste of heaven on earth. It felt so wonderful to drive up Fruit Farm Lane at about 12:30 this morning. Home at last (all except for Kali who is cashing in a very special Christmas present to head to Pittsburgh for a fun-filled weekend with aunts, uncles and cousins)! Had we been gone much longer we may have had to bush whack our way to the front door - clearly Virginia did not experience a dry spell in our absence. I could hardly fall asleep last night from my eagerness to see what the new day would bring and what changes the sun would shed light upon for us. I was not disappointed. A blog post about the vacation will have to come later and so will pictures to accompany this post (my work-issued computer finally decided to die once and for all on the trip and so I'm without it and our pictures - which they were thankfully able to recover today - until my new one arrives...). In short, we are glad we went, we are glad to be home, there were good times and bad times and wonderful things to see, people to visit, foods to eat AND it rained a lot both here and there.
Tonight at dinner (which was supposed be an early dinner and ended up being around 8:30 or so...), I listed all the fresh foods we had sampled/savored in one form or another that were picked from the property today: basil, garlic, red onion, mint tea, yellow squash, zucchini, yellow pole beans, kale, sage, parsley, sugar snap peas, green beans, wineberries, round zucchini, black raspberries, gooseberries, cucumbers, dill and black raspberries.
Let's just say that we are not fully unpacked from our trip because Jason and I could not stay indoors long enough to unload our suitcases. I got a little of that done, some bills paid, and a few of those annoying but necessary phone calls about scheduling repairs or troubleshooting tech challenges, in between all the fun. Alida was my little side kick and such a fun one - she was clearly glad to be home and this morning said to me as we were talking about our trip: "I yike our house more than Maine." Me too!
Here is how Alida and I spent most of our day while Jason got reacquainted with the chickens and ducks (and found a good number of new chicks under mama hens) and started hauling produce in (beans, cucumbers, garlic, zucchini and tomorrow will be onion pulling day):
It was one of those days where one thing led to another thing which led to another thing:
The basil needed to be picked as it was wanting to go to seed. That landed us two huge bowls of basil to make pesto out of. In the process of getting the basil we needed to free it from a peppermint take-over. So we picked enough peppermint to load up the solar food dryer and weeded out the rest from that bed and the bean bed below it. On one of our ventures out to the garden, I couldn't stand the weeds growing between the bricks in the front walk any longer so we go distracted weeding the front walk - it looks SO much better. We took a large bucket of weeds to the chickens in the composting chicken coop and then got back on track... We pulled some garlic bulbs and proceeded to make three large batches of pesto for the freezer (Alida is a super taste tester when it comes to pesto). By that time it was already nearing 10 and we hadn't had breakfast so we picked the squash, got some red onions from the garage and whipped up some veggies to go with scrambled eggs and toast. The other food processing in our day included the first batch of dill pickles and the first round of dilly beans, which just came out of the canner. We are also trying some beans that we just can with vinegar and salt to see if we like to use those in some recipes or to just eat cold or heated. We also just delivered 5 trays of green beans to the freezer. For supper we savored (Alida devoured) the first cucumber dill salad of the year and I experimented with stuffing the little round zucchinis with veggies, sauteed venison and a little cheese. I had also made butter from the cream for the week and so had buttermilk and decided to make apricot, craisin, walnut, almond, oat muffins to go with dinner (this was also to increase the caloric content of the meal...otherwise we'd be tired of chewing and give up before we got full). We enjoyed delivering some veggies to neighbors; it feels so very good to have an abundant harvest to be able to share. There have been years that the hard work didn't necessarily feel like it matched the pay out. This year it feels like we are reaping the harvest from years of building the soil and developing the land in a way that hopefully will maximize its productivity over the long haul.
One of our goals as this season goes along is to really enjoy the hard work as much as possible - which means trying to not do too many midnight canning parties. I knew this day was going to fly by and it did. Thankfully there are two more at home before I head back to work. Hopefully I'll have my suitcase unpacked by then!
Jason's note: I can see the squash vine borer taking its percentage, and I can see the bean beetles setting clusters of eggs under the leaves...no year is free of challenges in the garden! All the more reason to be grateful for this first summer flush of rather pristine, sweet, and tender garden produce. And we are!
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