Since even homesteaders occasionally need cash, I've been working at Measured Progress over the last two months. While the work can be interesting, it is also mind-numbingly repetitive. I'm happy to be taking a break from it.
Canning has basically become my hobby. I make jam the way my in-laws watch movies: constantly. I started with a basic strawberry jam that is almost foolproof, followed it up with an amazing slow cooked apple butter and BAM!; I was hooked. I have enough jelled, sweetened fruit to see the Apocalypse through.
Earlier in the summer, Hay and I went berry-picking at Huber's, a local farm, for an afternoon's entertainment. We picked a gallon of fragrant red and black raspberries and another gallon of succulent blueberries. Huber's has reasonable prices, so the damage we inflicted on the checking account remained minimal.
After my second batch of jam I knew that I wanted to try more adventurous varieties and it was that, more than anything that led me to pick berries with Hay. I immediately made a wonderful raspberry jam that currently looks like deep garnets sitting in quilted jars.
Making the blueberry jam provided me with an opportunity to share my passion with my sis-in-law. She is not, by any definition, a homesteader. She seemed genuinely interested in the process, so I taught her as much as I could. To sweeten the deal I threw in a few jars of the very stuff she spent all afternoon toiling over.
June passed in a haze after that and July goes swiftly, as well. I'm hoping to get back into my larger projects by the end of the month.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Welcome to the World, Baby Tomatoes!
A brief intro is in order: Hay and I are two Gen X/Gen Y gay ladies living in the uber-green big town/little city that is Louisville, KY. This blog is meant to be an ongoing discussion of the trials and tribulations of our little portable urban farm, currently located on the third floor of a huge brick pile.
Like plenty of granola-crunching lezzies in the urban realm, Hay and I have been drooling over the McMurray Hatchery and Baker Creek Seed Company catalogs for a few years, impatiently waiting for the chance to move off into the rural sunset to play with the locals. That dream continues to wait, gathering dust on the dream shelf while we make do with our limited reality.
As renters, relatively new to the Louisville scene, we're stuck with the typical limited space and less than perfect conditions. We managed to get a small start on the urban farm of our dream this spring with a rooftop container garden. In a half dozen plastic, salvage planters (courtesy of a local big box dumpster) we're growing tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, green onions, thumbelina carrots, a sweet pepper plant, and a few adolescent lettuces.
I'd love to wax poetic and insist that all is perfection in the Rooftopia, but alas, it's not. We took an ill-timed trip in the middle of May and came back to find all of our lettuces going through puberty. Major downer. Then the monsoons came in late May, leaving us with a swamp in every container. The onions, cukes, and green onions loved all that rain, while our smallish tomato plants called loudly for a lifeguard! They seemed to be on the road to recovery when yet another vacay took us away from the homestead for a few days and....you guessed it: they were on death's door when we returned.
After some careful TLC one of them seems to be rebounding; we have 6 baby fruits. We'll be keeping a super close eye on them for the rest of the season. To date we've harvested from the roof: 10 green onions, 30-40 micro-green leaves, and (just yesterday) 2 cukes! Can't wait to see what comes in next.
Like plenty of granola-crunching lezzies in the urban realm, Hay and I have been drooling over the McMurray Hatchery and Baker Creek Seed Company catalogs for a few years, impatiently waiting for the chance to move off into the rural sunset to play with the locals. That dream continues to wait, gathering dust on the dream shelf while we make do with our limited reality.
As renters, relatively new to the Louisville scene, we're stuck with the typical limited space and less than perfect conditions. We managed to get a small start on the urban farm of our dream this spring with a rooftop container garden. In a half dozen plastic, salvage planters (courtesy of a local big box dumpster) we're growing tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, green onions, thumbelina carrots, a sweet pepper plant, and a few adolescent lettuces.
I'd love to wax poetic and insist that all is perfection in the Rooftopia, but alas, it's not. We took an ill-timed trip in the middle of May and came back to find all of our lettuces going through puberty. Major downer. Then the monsoons came in late May, leaving us with a swamp in every container. The onions, cukes, and green onions loved all that rain, while our smallish tomato plants called loudly for a lifeguard! They seemed to be on the road to recovery when yet another vacay took us away from the homestead for a few days and....you guessed it: they were on death's door when we returned.
After some careful TLC one of them seems to be rebounding; we have 6 baby fruits. We'll be keeping a super close eye on them for the rest of the season. To date we've harvested from the roof: 10 green onions, 30-40 micro-green leaves, and (just yesterday) 2 cukes! Can't wait to see what comes in next.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)