I've been feeling very tired the last month or two. Over the weekend, I asked my family members to take on some of my smaller tasks, so I could focus on my main ones. One such task was organizing the kitchen fridge. One daughter went through every container in there, freezing some items, combining same and similar items into a single container, asking family members to eat up their own leftovers, and throwing away a few spoiled foods. She also put foods that should be used up in everyday meals soon in one spot and suggested a plan for using those foods. I didn't take a before photo, but here's the after. It is such an improvement!
This same daughter will be picking vegetables for our lunches each day, too.
My other daughter agreed to bake desserts for us. She picked the blackberries and made a pie for us on Wednesday. This daughter has also said she'll bake cookies for us each week.
My husband has volunteered to clean up the kitchen in the mornings after breakfast for me and tidy up the deck and patio periodically. All of these changes have been making my week a lot less stressful. I was wearing myself out trying to fit everything in each day, Since the changes, I've had more time to make jam, syrup, and blackberry juice, as well as dig all of the garlic, start winter salad seeds, organize all of my saved seeds for next year, and put together all of the food for our Labor Day cook-out.
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| This year's garlic -- I hope it lasts 9 or 10 months. I'll be replanting about 70 cloves in October for next year's harvest. |
Sunday
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| I was able to use all of this produce in our cook-out on Monday |
Monday Cook-out
Tuesday
Wednesday
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| the last serving of apple crisp baked with apples that had been knocked off the tree |
I baked a double batch of hot dog buns, 2 loaves of sandwich bread, a small batch of blueberry muffins using the last of the garden blueberries, and this apple crisp to use as breakfast 2 days this week. Our breakfasts have consisted of homemade yogurt, blackberries, fresh apples, apple crisp, eggs, toast, biscuits, blueberry muffins, milk, coffee, tea, and juice. I salvaged enough fallen apples over the past month to trim bruises, then chop and fill 3 gallon sized bags of apple pieces to use in crisps this fall. I know many people eat apple crisp as a dessert. In our house, apple crisp is breakfast fare for late summer or early fall mornings. Our lunches used produce from the garden plus bread, cheese, peanut butter, raisins, eggs, rice, and blackberry lemonade.
We are now harvesting tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, zucchini and patty pan squash, green beans (pole, mainly, but a few bush beans too), lettuce, kale, carrots, spinach, nasturtiums, radish greens, garlic, blackberries, apples, figs, blueberries (the tail end), and rhubarb. When I pick celery, we use the entire rib, leaves and stem both. If I only need the stem for a salad, I save the leaves to use in something else, like soup. And I'm only cutting one rib at a time, not the whole plant like what you would buy in the store. I'm hoping to get more celery overall this way. 11 of my celery seedlings made it to the plant stage, and of those 11, only 6 really grew well.
