Food, glorious food

We're still alive! Gotta find time to blog at some point. Here are a couple of pictures to hold you over. :p

Right, I have a blog!

Goodness, life has been busy. Actually, Elly hasn't been quite herself for a while now. First she got a tooth, then last week she was busy incubating something that ended with some throw-up and a fever on Saturday. She's slowly returning to normal, but she's been nursing A LOT lately, and waking up 5 or 6 times a night. I'm exhausted. I almost find myself longing for her newborn days when she'd regularly sleep 6 or 7 hours in a row. She's got the whole sleep thing backwards, I'm afraid. I'm really hoping that she'll go back to a normal sleep pattern now that she's beginning to feel better. Sleep deprivation does not for a happy mother make. :p I do have some cute pictures to post, but the power cable to my laptop got fried, so I have to wait for new one before I can get on to upload from my camera (can't find the USB cable to upload to my desktop). So, keep checking back, and I'll have some pictures and a longer and hopefully more interesting post coming up soon!

Time to harvest

After the heavy rains last weekend, I was really worried about the potato plants. The water just wasn't draining well, and potatoes don't like sitting in wet soil. Throughout the week, I've been watching as the potato plants seemed to be slowly withering away. I considered them a total loss. Today, I was talking to my neighbor, who had also planted potatoes around the same time I did (in fact, I'd gotten my seed potatoes from her). She told me she'd decided to take out her own plants, since they were all dead, and she actually found potatoes. She was pretty surprised. So I decided to go back and dig up my garden, too. Lo and behold, I found potatoes! And tons of earthworms. Yay for healthy soil! I was rather excited. Now I don't know if the plants were wilting because the potatoes were done, or if it was indeed the water that did them in. I'm leaning towards water, because there were quite a few small potatoes that still had a lot of growing to do. At least it wasn't a total loss, though! Out of six potato plants (about 1.5 pounds of seed potatoes), I got 6.5 pounds of potatoes. Not a huge harvest, but at least it's something! Actually, I probably had closer to 7.5 pounds, but some of the potatoes I had to throw out because they were all mushy (I'm thinking spoiled from sitting in the wet soil). So for dinner tonight, we're having fresh boiled potatoes with butter and sour cream. Yum! I also decided to pull out my one and only kohlrabi plant, and we already at it up. If you haven't eaten kohlrabi, you should try it sometime. Just slice it up and eat it raw (you could dip it in veggie dip if you wanted to).

potatoes and kohlrabi


We also have an abundance of carrots. They are delicious!

Fruits of my labor

Or rather, vegetables. :p I processed the second batch of kale today. I tore out 6 of my plants, which had somewhat fallen over after the heavy rain and winds on Saturday. They were the plants that I had already harvested a lot of leaves from, so they were a bit more susceptible to the weather, I guess. Anyway, I tore them out and took off the rest of the leaves to process today.

cleaned and ready to be cut


blanching process


nearly 8 pounds of vacuum packed kale, in 5 bags


Today's harvest doubled what's already in the freezer. I now have kale all ready for 10 batches of soup. Yum. I also saved some of the blanching water, to use as stock for soups or something. Now to figure out what to do with all the rest of the kale that's still growing out there. I may try freezing some without all the processing, just to use in frittatas or green smoothies or something. My freezer is going to be full of kale, haha!

Texas Downpour

Insane!

backyard


frontyard


neighbor's car


fire hydrant on our street