What is going on at Heart's Ease Cottage

This summer has been an unusual one. We have been deluged with rain. We had rain every day for almost 30 days. Not just a little rain... constant rain, heavy rain, more rain than we usually see in a a whole year! One of my four 25 foot beds of tomatoes drowned, many other crops fared poorly as well. We lost the cabbages to an onslaught of slugs that used the rain to cloak their activities, the kale and chard rotted from all the moisture... sigh. But the constant rain seems to have passed, and the ground has dried out a bit, so there is hope for what is left in the garden.

I am harvesting blueberries and tomatoes regularly. As I sit here writing I can smell the tomatoes in the dehydrator, they smell wonderful!  I dehydrate all of our veggies at 115 degrees, so that they remain "raw", with all their enzymes and nutrients intact. I will vacuum seal them as soon as they come out of the dehydrator to protect them from moisture. These tomatoes will be used in many of our meals during the colder months when fresh tomatoes are not available.

The blueberries have been plentiful on the bush but sadly, we lost a lot of them during all the rain. Many of the ripe berries were knocked to the ground by the rains before I could get them picked. Even though we lost a lot of the berries, I still have picked 25 lbs. of berries and have probably that many more still ripening on the bushes. We should have plenty for the table, some for the freezer and some for sharing with friends and neighbors. Even if it is not as many as we usually have it will be enough.

The flowers and herbs have survived the wet conditions and I have been making lovely bouquets for us to enjoy, (yes, I used herbs in my flower bouquets!). I have been cutting the parsley every couple of days for adding to our juicing and as soon as the Sabbath is over I will pick basil to make pesto. The tarragon has pretty much taken over one end of the bed it is planted in, while waiting for it's permanent home to be available, (we are doing some long needed foundation work on the east side of the house where the herb garden resides, so some of the plants had to be temporarily relocated, more on that project later in this post).

The kitchen herb garden is in full bloom with the Rudbekia taking center stage. This garden has been a little hard to access since we have dug out a fair chunk of the walkway access and have supports and plastic sheeting up to protect our 3 foot deep trench from filling with water from all the rain. But I have still managed to keep it weeded, and snip and pick herbs for eating, even with all the construction mess in the way. The comfrey that I planted this year seems to be happy and I have harvested our first batch of stevia. It is in tincture and will be ready for use in a couple of weeks.

The butterflies have shown up in force this year. They spend their days sailing over the gardens, snacking on nectar from the zinnias and buddleia. They look like floating flowers from my vantage point on the deck.

As I was cutting parsley the other day to be juiced with the carrots and other veggies, I noticed this little fella munching away on my parsley. It is a Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillar. They show up every year to help keep my parsley and dill well pruned. With their voracious appetite they can make quick work of a patch of parsley, so I always try to plant double the amount I will use, to make sure that we both have all the parsley we can eat!

 If you gently stroke the caterpillar on the back while he is munching, it will give off the scent of chamomile and little orange antlers will appear out of the top of its head and wave a warning at you. I am not sure what the scent and antlers do to deter predators, but I think they are adorable! I love to provoke them, (just a little....) so that they will "threaten" me!

We have been trying to get some foundation work done since January. Actually we have been trying to get it done since the reconstruction after Hugo in 1989, but there was so much to do back then and afterwards life took over and there was no time for such a project until recently. So Da began digging out the area in January, got the footer form built to pour the cement and shortly after was hit with a huge project at work. This project waylaid his efforts until yesterday. Yesterday there was no rain in the forecast so we jumped at the chance to mix, pour and level out sixteen 80 lb. bags of cement.

 Da calculated that he lifted about a ton and a half  yesterday, between the toting bags in and out of the car and to the work area. I wore the skin off both knees and elbows crawling around in tight spaces, moving , tamping and leveling cement. It was hot, hard work, but it is finally done and so the project can move forward.

  Sunday we will knock the wooden footer form apart and back fill with dirt. After that comes the easy part... paying someone to lay the block and finish off that section of the foundation! That will bring to conclusion a major repair that has needed to be done for a long time. As I am writing I hear thunder, so we must be going to get some more rain. I am very glad we seized the opportunity yesterday and got the cement work done. Who knows when we will have another dry day!

I have a special indoor project that I have been working on, as well as the regular "projects" that take up my days during the summer... weeding, harvesting and preserving goodies from our garden. This is a project I am very excited about, but I will save that story for a blog post of its own!

I hope that you are all well and enjoying a beautiful day! Until next time, Shalom!

A Look Back at Summer 2012

   Summer began in April this year...  Spring began in late January... It was an odd weather year. It was very warm very early, which caused all the fruits to bloom too early. The weather was warm all the way up to a few days after the last frost date, then we had a cold snap. Most everything fared well, but the blueberries suffered. Any of the blossoms that were open when the cold snap came were burned and no fruit formed behind those blossoms. We lost about 1/4 of our blueberry crop, but even so we harvested 35 lbs. of blueberries. We ate blueberries by the handfuls, made smoothies, froze them for later and shared them, so we really didn't suffer much from the lost production, but I hate that we had less to share than we normally do.

   One of my goals for the summer was to renovate my herb garden. During our year in Costa Rica the herb garden went to weeds, an obnoxious weed that invades everything. I had to dig out my surviving herbs, sift all of the soil to eliminate the network of fleshy roots that went a foot deep, and then amend and replant the herb bed. I will make a blog post that shows the process, but for now I am just posting some mid-summer photos of the herb garden, which you will find further down in the post.

Raw Jalapeno Poppers with Cashew "cheese"

   By this point Da and I have been eating vegan/raw for a couple of months. I spent a lot of time researching and developing recipes to convert some of our favorite recipes to a no cook version. I came up with several recipes that we have been very happy with, but I still haven't come up with a no cook pizza that I like. For the most part we have been eating simple meals, but for Shabbat and other special occasions, it is nice to have delicious and beautiful food to serve. I will be posting more about vegan food preps and recipes in the future and leave you with a photo of a finished product for now.

Trail view of the Cascades

   As part of our "take our health back" plan we have been walking and hiking as much as time will allow. We have traveled on many day trips around the North Carolina and a few over night trips a little further away. One trip was to the Cascades outside of Pembroke, Virginia. I lived in Blacksburg in my high school years, which is close by, so I used to go to the Cascades a couple of times a year. It is a beautiful place. Even more so since they repaired flood damage a couple of years ago and did a beautiful job of improving the trails and restoring the river trail. We met a couple at the top, near the falls and I took their photo, so in turn they took ours. It is rare that we have a photo with the both of us in it, so that was a real treat!

   Due to the fact that we are eating as much raw food as we can manage, we didn't do much canning this year. But we did do some canning of things that we need to keep on hand for our emergency pantry and some things like bread and butter pickles, pickled beets and salsa that we just like to have on hand. I have plans for a once a week blog entry on Pantry Keeping. I will discuss maintaining a regular working pantry, but also I want to talk about a 3 month and Long Term Storage (LTS) pantry. I won't call myself a "Prepper", since I am not planning for any particular scenario, but I will say that I don't like being caught unprepared to take care of my family when life happens.

   Finally, I just wanted to share some of the beauty that surrounds us here at Heart's Ease Cottage. We have tried to encourage both flora and fauna to live here in abundance. We live with the windows and doors open when we have to be inside and for much of our life during good weather, we are living outside. So having Flowers, birds, butterflies, and bees to add color to our life is a real pleasure.

 This little bunny fountain is planted with seasonal flowers to cheer a spot near the front door. Impatiens always makes me think about Costa Rica, where they grow wild. My outdoor laundry sink had them growing out of the cement, it made me smile every time I did the laundry.

 Sweet juicy blueberries and strawberries were on the breakfast menu daily. With organic berries costing $6 a pint we were very grateful for the abundance of berries we have growing in our garden!

Zucchini and cucumbers must be planted on the last frost date here in North Carolina, in order to bear fruit before the insects that plague them emerge and ruin them. There are few organic solutions to cucumber beetles and zucchini vine borers, so knowing their life cycles and timing planting dates to harvest before the insect adults emerge is the best solution that I have found.

This Russian Red Mustard was planted in the fall and used all winter and spring as greens. A few plants were left to bolt so that we can collect the seed. Seed collection is an integral part of self sufficiency, but our limited space doesn't permit us to collect seed for everything we grow.

We have an herb garden outside our kitchen door that is planted with a variety of herbs that I can run out and snip and pinch while preparing meals.

Basil and zinnias mingle in the main garden. We reserve a 20 foot bed in the vegetable garden for bulk plantings of larger herbs like basil, dill, tarragon, oregano, which can occupy a lot of space.

Encouraging bees to visit our garden is only one reason that we plant flowers in the vegetable garden. The paint box colors of zinnias and nasturtiums also add cheer and beauty to the garden.

We grow a variety of tomatoes, some for fresh eating, some for preserving. This basket is filled with heirloom slicing tomatoes like Cherokee Black, Mortgage Lifters and German Pink and a tasty little currant tomato that packs a lot of flavor into its diminutive size.

Wherever we can pack them in, we plant flowers and bushes that draw butterflies. By mid-summer the Buddleia bushes and Lantana are covered with 15 varieties of butterflies and skippers. This Tiger Swallowtail is a frequent visitor to the Dark Night Buddleia that is planted below our deck.

This tiny little female hummingbird is smaller than a D-ring on my clothes line. She uses the clothesline as a perch to rest on between visits to the nectar feeder on our front porch.

The Graham Thomas rose, better known around here as Patrick's Rose.

The Graham Thomas bloomed early this year, as did most of the perennial flowers in our garden. Its citrus/rose aroma blended deliciously with the night scented jasmine that grows near by.

Foxgloves are one of my favorite early summer flowers. They grow in great spires in front of the rosemary in May and are completely gone by the time the Rudbekia blooms in July.

Da took me for a visit to my hometown, Blacksburg, Virginia. While we were there we made a day trip to The Cascades in nearby Pembroke, Virginia. It was a great way to end the summer!