Drying Gleaned Cherries

Our town has a wonderful program called Harvest Share. Basically anyone who has any type of fruit or vegetable that they don't want or can't pick can call in and have volunteers come and pick for them. One third of the produce goes to the owner, one third to the volunteer picker, and one third to the food bank, the seniors' program, or some other feeding the needy agency.

Last week we got the call that a commercial cherry orchard had sustained so much wasp damage that it wasn't going to be picked and we were called in to glean it. Lots of volunteers came and lots of cherries were able to be saved. The picking was rough though. It took our group of 3 adults and 3 children 3 1/2 hours to pick 140 lbs. The bonus was that the owner didn't want any cherries so we took home 80 lbs. for us, and 2 ice-cream pails each for our friend and for granny. [Our friend's family is quite sick of cherries and granny didn't want many, we weren't being greedy they were being generous]

And did I mention the wasps? They weren't too pleased to have their food being bothered. Luckily I was the only one stung in our group, I'm not allergic and I'm a big girl so I sucked it up and kept on picking, a little more warily though!


Once we got home we fired up the production line. One child washed the cherries, removed stems, and tossed any with rot or mold.


I ran them through the cherry pitter. It doesn't work all that well on these huge cherries, next batch we skipped this and did the pitting manually.


The next child cut the cherries in half, removed any remaining pits, and put them cut side up on the dehydrator's trays. Have you met our dryer before? It is huge. Amazing what you can find on Kijiji!


Once a tray was full my 16 yo son carried it out to the drier and slid them into place.


When we finally got all six trays full it was time to fire it up and dry those puppies!

About 24 hours later those 20 lbs of cherries were reduced to 10 cups of dried cherries. YUM YUM YUM. We ran another batch through and then I bagged them up 4 cups to a freezer grade Ziploc baggie and tossed them into the box in the freezer marked FRUIT.

We also made 4 batches of cherry jam and there are still about 20 lbs. waiting to be dealt with. Pie? Syrup? Juice? fruit leather? Just freeze them???

On Darning and Mending

Back in the day when we were farming and making a whopping $2-3,000 a year making do was very important. One way I stretched our dollars was by darning dh's socks. Now good work socks, wool socks, can easily cost 3-8-12 dollars a pair depending on the thickness and quality. Dh kept wearing them out in the same place on every pair and I found after they were darned that they lasted FOREVER because they had been reinforced by the darning wool in just the right spots.

Repairing the knees in jeans so they could be wore on the farm was another, then there was the basic hand mending of little rips, tears, and loose hems too.

I'll give you a hint about mending jeans... use one pair that has really lost it to be cut up for patches. If you look at jeans you will see that the inner seam is just a regular stitch, pick that seam open, open the jean leg flat, put the patch on with a sewing machine, then restitch the inner seam. Makes it a whole lot easier!!!

Now that we are powering down the same making do is coming back to me. It's time to set up my mending and darning basket. I was looking for a basket with a lid that I could put on my end table in the living room that wouldn't be an eyesore and that I could store my basic hand sewing supplies in. I found one at a garage sale for $2, it was quite an eyesore when I found it with lots of bright wool stitching and horrid raffia flowers on it. A couple minutes with a pair of scissors revealed the nice plain basket underneath. It now sits on my end table looking just fine. I've put a variety of different threads, needles, small scissors, as well as thin grey, white, and black yarns for darning. An African market basket was then pulled out of the closet and tucked behind my library basket beside the end table for items that need repairing. I'm all set up!

It is amazing how much you can do if you make a point of darning or mending one item a night after the chores are done before you pick up a book or turn on the internet :o)

Tonight I repaired my 11yo dd's favourite skirt. She bought it at the second hand store herself and last Sunday she caught it on a nail and tore a little rip in it. It is a lovely handmade skirt with beautiful hand embroidery around the hem, it would have been a shame to let the tear ruin such lovely item. A little iron-on interfacing and some stitching put things to rights. She can go back to wearing it nearly daily, at least til she out-grows it!

Some resources:

Darning socks video and tutorial.

Fancy darning for hand knit items using a duplicate stitch can be found here.

A quick article and video on mending, here and here.

It is time to buy some basic sewing supplies and a good book about sewing. It is time to learn how to hand sew. Also teach it to your children. They need to know.

Radish Greens???

Lately I've come across recipes for radish greens, really. Are they truly edible???

Dh grows a lot of radishes, 300+ every week in his market garden usually, not this year though as germination has been horrid. If these things are edible we want to know!

Fresh from the garden they are .... unappetizing:


After washing and trimming ....


Well the basket of them left out had children nibbling from it even though they are prickly. Taste verdict from oldest child: 'Like dirt, only greener, not in a bad way.' Strange child. Other children after eating them both raw and cooked said they like them better raw. Might toss a few into the next salad.

One recipe I saw called for them to be cooked in butter and garlic like so:


Yuck, was my thought but then I don't usually eat cooked greens so I have no comparison. Ds ate quite a bit, one dd ate a little and said they were better raw. Personal taste I guess. These were rather old tops, maybe younger ones will be better??

Try them yourself! If you like them - wonderful! If not - no real loss, they were headed to the compost anyways :o)

Dh's lunch

Why a post about dh's lunch?!?!?

Well lunches can be a huge source of GARBAGE and WASTE.

Last year we tried to reduce waste by sewing everyone drawstring lunchbags that could be used over and over. I also made it a point of washing out the necessary sandwich bags and reusing them. They break/rip far too easy! I tried using glass juice jars but when a lunch got dropped there went the jar. I didn't want to use the plastic ones as they often leaked and sending one large tetra-pack or jug of juice for the children to share in their own cups didn't work either.

Then one day at the hardware store I had an epiphany! Those snap-lock boxes with dividers fit perfectly inside Thermos soft sided insulated bags. With the addition of icepacks and juice jars we were ready for another school year. I bought each person in our family a set and we have seen a huge reduction in garbage resulting from our lunches. We do reuse glass juice jars, think Snapple, and they don't break in the bags as they are padded. I do feel guilty about buying plastic but I figure the total is less than all the sandwich bags I didn't use this year.



During the school year I do bake the 'sweet' of the day thus avoiding the wrapper but dh's is the only lunch I pack in the summer and it would take him ages to finish a pan of brownies. I'm saving him the monotony by buying snacks for him. Good wife, bad environmentalist! Next week 3 of the children will be needing lunches so there will be baking in the house and no wrappers in the lunches. We do a selection of tiny plastic containers that are used in the lunches for fruit, trail mix, dip, sloppy sandwich fillings, etc. again I'm taking comfort in the disposable plastics I'm avoiding as these are being reused.

I also find the boxes are perfect for leftovers it the fridge. They fit better than round bowls, need no cling wrap, and stack. Very Handy.

(Did you notice the irony in the lunch, granola bar made in peanut free facility, on a bed of peanuts!)

Now you see them, now you don't...

Usually the view across the street looks like this:

But every Saturday it changes!

Let's just say we are in easy walking distance of our local Farmer's Market. Really easy :o)



This makes the attempt to eat locally very easy too. If it's available locally someone is likely to be selling it here. Today we bought 3 dozen free-range brown eggs. $3 a dozen and we gave him our huge pile of empty cartons. Good way to reduce the need to recycle these. We grow just about every veg that was being sold today, and I do my own canning, so I didn't buy anything else. I should have grabbed some of the kohlrabi and the potatoes MY kids were selling from dh's garden. LOL!

And then we are back to an empty lot for the rest of the week.

Greenhouse Tomato Buckets

Earlier this gardening year my dh and his dad built a small greenhouse for us. I've been thoroughly enjoying trying out various projects in it. One idea was to start tomatoes in it to #1 have tomatoes earlier in the year and #2 to have tomatoes after frost.

I was casting about trying to think of what to plant the tomatoes in. Big buckets that I'd have to buy? Hmmmm..... Then I spotted the stack of empty cat litter buckets. Eureka! They were starting to pile up.



First step was to thoroughly was them, best not to skip this step as I missed a couple and the results weren't pretty as they may have contained residue from cleaning solutions which harmed the tomatoes planted in them.





Next, drill holes in the bottom for drainage. Very important and very easy to do with a 3/8th bit in dh's cordless drill.





Flipping it over it was time to add gravel, an inch or so.




Then came potting soil, I used one formulated for container planting and pre-moistened it.

Then a big hole was dug in the middle to plant the tomatoes as deeply as possible. More soil was added to bring it up to an inch from the lip of the bucket. This was all firmed down.



All the tomatoes were lined up along the front windows of the greenhouse. We have 2 sub-arctic maxi, 2 lemon-boy, 2 long keeper, 2 Russian, and our ds's cherry tomato in a wooden planter in the corner.



This picture of the greenhouse was taken part way through he planting of the tomatoes. Now that they are done they cover the whole front of it with one pot on the far left wall too. Over on the far right are two buckets of long English slicing cucumbers, we'll see how they grow up the wall. I just really don't have the room for trailing on the ground vegetables here at the house garden. Oh, and ignore the date stamp on the photos, long story, new camera, certainly not the correct dates!

Take-out on the Bike

The last couple times we got take-out I picked it up on the bike. Rather exciting I thought. This time I took it a step further, I phoned them up and asked if I could bring my own containers. After a bit of discussion it was decided that I could, if I brought them ASAP and waited while they cooked our Chinese food.

We've used the some containers for lunches all school year and they have dramatically reduced our garbage. Now we have another use for them!

Loaded them into cloth bags, loaded the bags into my bike basket, and off we went! Love living only 1km from our fave restuarant. I handed the bags off to the wait staff and settled in with good book on micro-farming for the duration. It was ready very quickly, loaded back up in the basket and off home we went.

The only thing we'd change is taking a smaller container for the sweet and sour dipping sauce as it ran into the spring rolls and made them soggy. They snuck those little packets in while my back was turned, NO LITTLE PACKETS PLEASE!

All in all a lovely supper on the for a day when I was parenting solo and trying to get a big project done while dh was away.