A short and fun video on how to harvest a Luffa sponge.
Favorite fall apple varieties
Our local farmer’s market has the most apple varieties I’ve ever seen, all harvested close to Athens, Ohio. As a result, I’ve been running taste tests over the last few years, picking new (and old) favorites.
Before I go on, I should tell you what I like in an apple — a good blend of sweet and tart, preferably also crisp (although taste is more important to me than texture). You won’t find apples like these at the grocery store even if they share these names. Head to your own farmer’s market, fruit stand, or U-pick orchard to find the tastiest treats.
Okay, which varieties won the prize? The first one is the old standby I’ve been enjoying since I was a kid — Stayman Winesap. When caught at its peak, this is an A+ apple. If harvested a bit too early, it tends toward sour and might be more of a B+. (Look for the bright red skin as a visual clue of sweetness.) Later in the winter, Winesaps turn mushy and are more of a B.
Goldrush was a new one on me, but has become my go-to apple in the winter. It’s a little sweeter than Winesap but still has some tartness and a good flavor complexity. Plus, it stays crisp for quite a long time. The tastiest Goldrush apples tend to have a bit of a red blush, but even the solid yellow ones are an A to A+.
I’ve yet to find Liberty appples being grown by a traditional farmer, but homesteaders often plant them because they’ll bear fruit without any chemical sprays. They’re a bit denser than the others but boast a flavor explosion that definitely beats the pants off any other apple I’ve eaten. That said, I can’t be sure whether the difference is the variety or the cultivation method. Beyond-organic techniques lead to lots of micronutrients in the soil which in turn tend to turn flavors up extra high. Regardless, this is a solid A+ apple, maybe an A++.
I can’t wait to hear the results of your own taste tests. And if you end up with way too many apples after buying up every variety at the local farmer’s market, definitely try making a vat of skin-on applesauce.
Shopping cart for firewood transport and storage
We upgraded from a firewood tote carrier to this Wellmax shopping cart with wheels last year.
Now we can carry twice the amount with less effort.
The side spokes mostly popped out but weaving some steel wire or thin rope is an easy way to fix it.
Once inside it provides a tidy way of storing the wood.
Anna lifts from the top while I push from the bottom to make it even easier and safer.
Harvest End Soup
When your harvest looks like this:
It’s time to cook this:
Ingredients:
- 6 cups of cherry tomatoes (or 2.5 cups of stewed tomatoes)
- 1 chicken breast with bone in (or 3 cups of chicken stock and one cooked chicken breast)
- 1.25 cups of chopped sweet peppers
- 2.5 cups of carrots (or some combination of carrots and sweet potatoes)
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 1 tablespoon paprika (I used unspicy, but you might like it spicy)
- 1 teaspoon turmeric
- 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 3 bay leaves
- 1 clove of garlic, minced
- 2 cups of green onion tops, chopped into small pieces
- sugar (to taste, if your tomatoes are late season and sour)
Serves 4.
Optional serving suggestions:
- Stirring in cheese is always yummy at the end. Parmesan works but an herbed goat cheese was amazing!
- Mark likes bread on the side.
How to make it:
This is a basic soup recipe, so you don’t really need to read this part. Here’s what I did:
- I cooked the chicken in the instapot with a bit of water for 10 minutes on the meat setting. Once this was done, I picked the meat off the bone and put the bones back in the instapot with three cups of water to cook for an hour to make broth. Cooking longer would have been better, but I was impatient.
- Meanwhile, I cooked the cherry tomatoes in just a little water until they were soft (about ten minutes). Then I ran them through the foley mill to remove the skin and most of the seeds. If I was using roma tomatoes I wouldn’t have bothered with this processing, but cherry tomatoes are very seedy! I suspect foley mills are not the modern way to do this — please comment if you use a different gadget to get the same result…
- Next, I mixed the processed tomatoes with everything except the chicken, the broth (because it wasn’t done yet), and the sugar. Cooking this mixture for about an hour on medium to low heat will soften the vegetables, at which point you can remove the bay leaves then use an immersion blender to create a relatively smooth texture. (If you prefer vegetable chunks, skip the blending step.)
- By this point, the chicken broth was done, so I added it into the main pot along with the cooked chicken breast (broken up into bite-size pieces). The soup probably would have been even better if I’d simmered it for about an hour with all ingredients in the pot, but I was hungry and it was delicious just thrown together like this!
Side notes:
I used the littlest carrots from the harvest (on the left in the photo above), which wouldn’t keep long in storage. If you have sweet potatoes, I’d recommend using half carrots and half sweet potatoes, in which case you shouldn’t need any sugar.
If you prefer beans over meat, chickpeas are your best option in this soup.
Soup color depends on tomato color. I usually make it with red, but our tommy-toes were yellow this year. It tastes the same either way.
What did you turn your last big harvest of warm-season goodies into?
How to make kindling with a Kindling Jack Jr.
At least one of you didn’t quite understand Mark’s initial review of the Kindle Jack Jr. So we made this short video to show you the nuts and bolts of easy, safe kindling splitting.
(Side notes: Mark lost his Uncle Thomas yesterday, which is why I’m making this post for him. Also, if you tried to make a comment and failed, please try again — I think I found the bug!)
Replacing a bathtub faucet in a trailer
Replacing a bathtub faucet turned out to be much easier than either of us anticipated. Turn off all water to the trailer, unscrew both hot and cold water hoses along with the hose leading up to the shower, then slip the old faucet out and the new one in. There’s nothing complicated going on with the shower — water pressure is what makes water flow uphill.
The only real roadblock came when Mark noticed that an old leak (long since fixed) had weakened the wall the faucet was going to be screwed onto. How could we strengthen that area in a quick-and-dirty manner that would also hold up over the long term?
The back plate from the old faucet turned into a perfect solution. Applying it to the screw side of the wall while the new faucet’s back plate stayed on the faucet side of the wall resulted in a much stronger sandwich. Ta da — running water with no leaks!
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On a semi-related note, Mark has been busy turning Trailersteading into an AI-narrated audiobook. You can enjoy a sneak preview above, then if you enjoy what you hear you can buy the full shebang on Kobo or Google. Enjoy!
Kindling splitter after one year of use
We’ve had this new kindling splitter for a year now and it has really paid for itself in time saved.
Making a bucket of kindling this way takes about 10 minutes and feels super safe.
I’m a little embarrassed that it took me this long to get hip to using a hammer and splitter to make better kindling faster and so much safer.
The intersection of Homesteading and Werewolves
Where does a Venn diagram of werewolves and homesteading intersect? Nowhere…except me.*
Yes, as some of you know, my pen name’s werewolf books have been paying the bills around here for years. I have a blast spending my mornings in fantasy worlds and my afternoons in the garden, but I usually don’t try to mesh the two lives.
However, Mark and I are running our first ever Kickstarter campaign this week, and I realized there might possible be a few people other than me who love both homesteading and werewolves. Sound like you or someone you know? Then check out my campaign and/or share it with a friend. Thank you so much for your support!
*(Okay, so maybe the diagram also intersects with paying attention to phases of the moon? Maybe other places too? What do you think?)
Pros and cons of gardening on top of a hill
Frost pockets are real (and so are anti-frost pockets)
Mark and I picked the last tomatoes and peppers today in preparation for what might be this fall’s first frost. But will it be?
Back when we lived at the bottom of a hill in Virginia, we could count on cold temperatures dropping least as low as the forecast, sometimes five degrees colder. Up here on a hilltop, in contrast, the opposite is true. A week and a half ago, with a forecast low of 33 F, we only got down to 38. Driving out that morning, however, I saw frost a mile and a half away as soon as I reached the bottom of the hill.
So will this week’s forecast low of 28 freeze our crops? Only time will tell.
Water — the downside of hilltop gardening
Of course, hilltop gardening has its downsides too, the primary one being water. In the summer, I can feel the groundwater dropping out from under us. No matter how much water I add to our garden beds, the soil is always thirsty. The ground cracks. Plants are slow to grow.
I used to say that you can always add more water, but you can’t take water away. While that’s true, I’ve yet to figure out how to add enough water to keep our garden happy without spiking our monthly bill out of sight. I’m hopeful that continuing to boost our organic matter will increase the water-holding capacity, but there’s a lot of truth in the saying “high and dry.”
Bookkeeping note
This looks like our very first post, but it very much isn’t! We just hopped over from an old blog to a new blog to make our lives easier. If you’d like to enjoy old gardening posts, you can find hundreds (thousands?) here. If you’re an old faithful subscriber, be sure to update your RSS feed!