Preserving Summer

It's been a beautiful summer here in Tennessee. The weather has been cooler than average, and we've been getting lots of rain which has been great for the garden. Keeping busy has been easy, and I've been trying to balance my time between keeping up with the garden and preparing for our first year of homeschooling.

In the last couple of weeks we dug up enough carrots to fill the 21.5 quart canning pot. I'm not sure how many pounds that translates to, but it was a lot! It was exhausting work because our soil isn't root vegetable friendly yet. We're slowly trying to amend our soil, but it still has a way to go. Right now the soil still has a lot of clay and it makes it difficult for root vegetables to grow. We also have an abundance of rocks! The clay soil makes it even harder to pull root vegetables up, so we have to carefully dig them out. I snagged some of those garden gloves with claws on one hand, and they worked wonderfully for digging around the carrots. My fingers hurt for days afterwards, though.

But once we got them dug up, we rinsed them off in the kiddy pool to get most of the mud and dirt off. Then we brought them inside and started cleaning them up for being canned. The plan was to can as many as possible as just plain sliced carrots, and then can a few jars of pickled carrots. I used about half and canned 12 pints of carrots in the pressure canner. I didn't get to pickling any. It was the first time using the pressure canner, and I was a little afraid. My husband and I watched videos on YouTube, and read both the manual that came with it and the Ball book that came with the water bath canner. Once we triple checked the steps we got started. We succeeded without blowing anything up! And my fears are mostly gone, and I'm looking forward to pressure canning lots more!

The day after we dug up the carrots our neighbor stopped by and asked if we wanted some green beans. We can't turn down free food so she popped her trunk and handed me a full 5 gallon bucket. Much more than I expected! Luckily we had already Christened the pressure canner, so I picked out and cleaned the beans, snapped them, and canned those, too! She had given us a type of green bean that's a beautiful deep purple until cooked called Royal Burgundy. They're a delicious bean fresh or canned. I was so grateful because we had lost our bean plants to Japanese beetles. Once I got the beans ready I had a really awesome helper who really enjoyed snapping the beans and filling the jars, and it was awesome being able to preserve food and teach the little one about canning.

In the last couple of weeks we have also added a few babies to the farm! One of our hens went broody last month and hatched an egg. She had 4 other eggs under her after the one hatched, but one of the other chickens got to them. Addie and I built a temporary Mama and Baby Sanctuary in the middle of the garden and moved Tom (the mama) and baby. Since she lost the other eggs I was hoping if I brought home some chicks that she would adopt them. Well, I was wrong. Our local Tractor Supply had chicks and we brought home 4 Isa Browns, but Tom didn't want them around. So we have 4 adorable chicks living inside for a few weeks until they're big enough to move into another pen outside.

With all this extra dirty work we've had a lot of tough stains on our clothes so I've been using the pure coconut oil soap bars as stain sticks. It works so well I wanted to share the awesomeness with everyone. You can find Niffer's All Natural Laundry Bars in the Bar Soap and Eco Bag Laundry sections in the shop. I use a simple recipe that packs a punch and lifts stubborn stains with pure and natural power. You can dampen the cloth and rub the bar directly onto the stain, or you can grate some of the soap into your laundry as an added booster. So check it out, and keep the summer memories but not the stains!

I've got more updates about our bees soon. So check back often for more updates!
Until next time, have fun and stay natural!