My dream season extending bed.

Made some chive vinegar

More giving gardens flowers.

Gerties Gold Tomato. A late season tomato, not very productive, but worth the real estate and worth the wait. Every time my husband eats one, he comments on how that is the best tomato!

Tastes likes melon and mango.

This year was my first for flowers. I planted this lovely dahlia.

Tomatoes ready for dehydrating

This was the prettiest bed I made, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and some red russian kale.

This bumble bee spent the night in this flower. Talk about bee crack.

Making a strawbale bed. This worked well for the plants inside, but the plants we planted on the straw bale did not grow optimum but it was a nice experiment.

A nice large zuchinni, the squash puttered out early this year with powdery mildew,but not before harvesting about 20 nice zuchinni.

This year has been excellent for beets, I staggered plantings and none bolted.

Making more sauerkruat.

It has been a good year for tomatoes! I have been harvesting several yellow and red tomatoes. One change I made was not to concentrate on Glamour tomatoes and long season tomatoes, but instead I planted dependable early season tomatoes and a few glamour tomatoes.

Mason bees started to hatch 3/23/2011

3/27 ~ It's been so cold and wet the bees are just hanging out in the box. I hope they make it.

I made coconut yogurt and fabuloso lemon pickles. They are so good I ate half the jar of lacto fermented key limes.

The coconut yogurt I make with

tapioca flour, rice flour, coconut milk, tapioca pearls and coconut yogurt. They put so many

additives in coconut yogurt and I can make a quart for much less and more healthy.

Some of my mason bees have hatched from their cocoons. The beige smudges on the box prove it. The mason bees make marks all over the box and their new clean houses are ready! I am anxious to see which kind of bee apartment house will be their favorite to use.

The worms just loved their local microbe type fermented compost. There are so many worms, the herd has increased 100 times. My hill has as many worms as my compost pile thanks to this new method. I will more post photos soon. The birds were having a feeding frenzy in the hill and now I know why. There are oddles of worms, nearly a hand full to hand full ratio to compost.

This is my continuous kombucha brew system.

I need to get those extra scobies out. But it us ready in about 3 days this way. Much cheaper than store bought kombucha. For the cost of5 bags of tea and about 3/4 cup sugar I get about a gallon compared to the store cost of 3-4 bucks a bottle. Kombucha is a great drink and economical when made at home and I believe it tastes better because you can drink it at its best.

Fermenting in my cupboard, dill pickles and sauerkraut. I finally got another batch of sauerkraut I haven't made a batch since Thanksgiving.

This is shredded cabbage, carrots, and beets for a beautiful red veggie kruat.

These were very good, carrots, black radish, turnip, caraway, cardamom, cayenne pepper.

This one is carrots, daikon, red onion, serrano peppers, cayenne, dill, caraway, juniper. Gotta wait to try it. This is my first pickle I have added onions to.

Fall Garden Update

This is cabbage sliced thin, sprinkled with sea salt, juice of one lemon, and red pepper flakes massaged with a previous batch of sauerkraut the veggie mix then goes into a jar for fermenting for about 3 weeks until it turns red and sour. Green cabbage gets lighter.

This is some sauerkraut with carrots added to the above ingredients and grape leaves to keep the cabbage crisp while fermenting.

This is a lovely head of cabbage that I made into kraut.

This was a miss... I added kale, garlic, apples, to the basic sauerkraut and it was too strong. This gallon went into the outskirts of my compost pile. Didn't know about the salt, so I figured if salt was a problem, it would first kill some weeds.

Some of the last tomatoes

Bee apartment nearly full.

Beautiful Golden tomatoes, pickles green beans, pickled beets and carrots, garden radish and raddicchio.

A pickles, sauerkraut, garden radish, cabbage.

These dill pickles I added some beets they were good, just a bit pink reddish.

Love those colors...Purple cabbage yumm....

This is my lovely dino kale and chard forest, in my edible landscape.

Mamma bringing in the goods!

My lawn is slowly diminishing. Yay.

I love this tomato, it's called tomango. I haven't seen it anywhere on the internet, but it sure is lovely!

Two great heads.

My pickle crocks.

Making pickles.

Squash was pretty good this year.

A fabuloso orange tomato with L's in it! It was delicous, tasted like mango and cantelope.

Tomango, sauerkraut, radish, red lettuce, a few cherry tomatoes.

These are some beans and cabbage at the giving gardens where I volunteer.

Seed Saving Open Pollenated Tomato Seed

This is how I save my seed and ferment. I write the name on the bag, snack size works best. You can also use glasses or yogurt cups if you like. I am a little lazy it usually takes more than three days but I still get great germination rates.

I strain the seed with water and let them dry with bag underneath. The bag has the name of the seed on it.

My germation tests are done with a bag a damp cotton ball and I place that bag on top of the water heater.

Momma Samia lucked out with these birkenstock Jolly clogs, I bought them on Ebay and accidentally got Mens size. Happily they fit her just fine, so now she has a pair of garden shoes and she has put them to good use! Since I couldn't return them, glad they fit her and they didn't cost much. But I am green with envy, aren't they happy little shoes? They are shaped just like the dutch wooden shoes.

Recent kitchen activity

We made some pickles with carrots, beets and turnips with yogurt whey, water and salt and lemon pickles with black seed, jalepeno, whey and salt. Economical also.










My neighbor kid asked for a carrot for the Easter bunny. He was waiting by the door jumping up down when I brought over this baby carrot from the garden. He put the carrot on the table for the Easter bunny. Cute.

Economical Yogurt maker without elctricity. I usually put mine in the dehydrator, but mamma makes hers without electricity. I like that better. Mamma Samia cooked the milk to just boiling, lowered the heat until it was not super hot and added a mixture of the store bought yogurt mixed with some of the warm milk in a separate bowl than mixed it in the main warm milk pan. We poured the mix in pyrex and put it in a warm water bath and closed the small cooler. 75 cents is much better than the 3 buck yogurt.

This delicious dish was economical also.

Pappa Murphy's cheesy bread sticks used the dipping sauce for the pizza T $2.50, 1 long eggplant sauteed until crispy .50 cents, red pepper 50 cents, 4 large mushrooms 50 cents, olives 10 cents, artichoke hearts 50 cents and red pepper flakes. Under $5.00 and it was fabulous! The eggplant added Egyptian flare.






Our new convection oven. We wanted something to cook just for us to save energy and to save our cheap oven! We don't really bake that much and have already had to replace 2 handles and the oven's service warranty is up this year. It also has a rotisserie so we can make fresh rotisserie chicken without the all the junkie stuff I can't pronounce that some big stores and clubs serve. A bonus is we can move it to the patio or garage when it's hot.




Here is my freezer finally being delivered. I waited quite a few years for this baby. Took a few months to decide if I was going to go manual or frost free due to price. Decided to go with frost free, because who is kidding who? I am never gonna defrost, and my hubby wont either. I hope it's big enough. I am so happy to be able to freeze my greens, tomatoes, grape leaves and berries. Yay!