It's darn hot out there...

so I'm in here studying. Esme is watching Paddington Bear, a favorite of mine from when I was a child. Mark found a DVD of it at the store the other day when we were in Jackson.

A few links I found yesterday when looking up the squash info:
Nourishing Days : a family going 'back to the land' and trying to grow their food, some nice recipes.
Food Wishes : a few nice recipes here as well, including how to pickle peppers
Root Simple : a few good posts here that show some different garden items and their journey with them (and cats)

The garden is hot, but the corn is starting to tassel. That is very impressive! I have put more into the garden this year than we had planned... as proof from Mark seeing my paypal bill from the last bit of seeds, a piece of fabric and the pattern I bought *hide*. Well, most of the time Mama is very thrifty, except when she isn't.

I went to the library the other day and picked up a book called 'Self-Sufficiency' (edited by Abigail Gehring, if you're looking for it) and it has interesting overviews of gardening, baking, canning, preserves and a few other little tack-ons like basketweaving and different kinds of animal husbandry. I gained a little insight about raised beds and reading it and probably will return to it before it has to go back to the library. The other book I rented was 'Victory Gardens', published from the series on PBS - and it was interesting to see what varieties they had planted and how. In a way, I think ours is a form of Victory Garden, as it is always nice to know there is something to fall back on and to be able to produce a little for yourself. Victory Garden on Wikipedia The garden is proving itself to start producing more than we can handle in a few weeks, which is why I have been harvesting some things young and paying close attention to others.

To date we have the following in the garden:
sweet corn - 6 rows about twelve feet long
Indian (dent) corn - interspersed with the sweet corn on a very small percentage (to bring other kernel flavors in) and a small row of five stalks or so in the corner that is just the dent corn.
basil
carrots
radishes
green snap beans
pole drying beans (many types... pinto is the most mature)
lima beans
black eyed peas
summer squash (zucchini, crookneck, pattypan)
winter squash (butternut, turks turban, 2 types of pumpkins)
tomatoes (paste, pear and slicing, some heirlooms)
peppers (sweet and pimento)
cucumbers
other gourds
heirloom seed sunflowers, and mexican sunflowers (tithonia)
zinnias, marigolds (lots), and a geranium
the hyacinth bean
out in the rest of the property I've sown english daisies, painted daisies and shasta daisies, all of which are perennials

I would eat almost all of the food items there - and Mark will enjoy the tomatoes and the corn. I am reading up on how best to preserve the squashes and other things to do with the rest of the produce (drying the beans, 'succotash' recipe for the limas, drying and roasting the squash seeds etc etc.. We have a lot of canning jars already and just need to go through the work of using them when the time comes. That is much easier said than done.

extremely good article on milo, Mark suggested we might grow a small plot of this somewhere if not just because it was pretty but the seeds can be saved and used again.

The other item we ordered was pyrethum daisies, also a perennial, and the main source of a mostly non-toxic pesticide that can be used to deter fleas on cats and dogs. Mark already buys this pesticide in powdered form from the co-op.. if we could propagate some out here on the property and process it that would save some money in years to come.

I think our garage and data center are going to get lots of dry buckets and jars of things to store! Not to mention the freezer!

I should get to some more cleaning up in here while Esme is occuppied, and maybe put back together her green leaf dress which I took apart after our Jackson trip. One of the front facings was coming loose.