Garden Food Preservation and Safety

Last August, the 16th to be exact, my dear Godmother Auntie Clara and Uncle Nick gave Shermen and I a pressure cooker for a wedding gift. It was so appreciated, especially considering I'd started home preservation in 2006 by canning pickles in a water bath using a camp stove. The camp stove / water bath combination really limited what i could safely preserve via canning to pickles or the highly acidic tomatoes. Everything else was blanched and frozen, (taking up huge amounts of freezer space.) One of our frozen favorites was a stewed up batch of tomatoes sauteed with herbs, garlic, onions and eggplant. Even after freezing and reheating, it tasted like summer.
Last fall I was so excited to recreate the recipe, only preserving by canning rather than freezing. My new pressure cooker allowing me to can the non-acidic veggies without worries. However, this winter when we opened a jar of "stewed tom w/eggplant," the smell was just off. The jar was properly sealed, but the fear of botulism caused us to turn to a jar of Prego instead.
Yesterday, there was a great program on Wisconsin Public Radio with Larry Meiller about gardening and food safety. There you can find a link to listen to the actual program. Besides food safety, they all discussed state laws when it comes to setting up "road side stands" to sell produce, and what you actually can sell at produce stands in terms of enhanced, or preserved, produce. I found this particularly interesting because living in a tourism area, I have considered selling preserved items for tourists to take home as gifts / momentos, but wondered about legal issues. Think I'll be waiting a few years on all that.
The website FOODSAFETY.WISC.EDU has tons of information also.

Rain Gardens

The contractors installed the drainspouts on our four seasons room,or solarium, yesterday. My mom suggested putting in a rain garden where the water collects, and it sounds like a great idea to me! The UW Madison Extension has a very informative site, with a pdf manual on how to install your own little rain garden, as well as some great photos of the installation stages, and pages listing WI plants ideal for sunny or shady rain gardens.


http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/runoff/rg/

The plant above is Prairie Smoke, a native to Wisconsin, ideal for rain gardens. Image found on the "Links to Other Rain Garden Sites" from the DNR web-page. http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/runoff/rg/links.htm

Spring on the Farm

Some greatly anticipated changes have occurred out here on the farm. The Vernal Equinox has arrived! Grasses are greening, and there are hardy perennials peeking out everywhere. It's too early to plant (almost) anything, we are still in danger of hard frosts up here in zone 4 Wisconsin; but we have trays of seedlings growing and waiting. So far we have started bushel and dipper gourds, white coneflowers, morning glories, blue corn, and some other items that didn't make it due to our cat Maude living (and having kittens) in the seed starting area. Maude and her babies have been relocated to the pump house, and we are ready to try again.

A few pea and lettuce seeds have been sown, as well as some fragrant oriental lily bulbs. We've split and transplanted some hostas, and they seem to be doing well. It looks like every variety of garlic planted last fall made it through the winter, and the strawberry beds are also coming to life.

The "Four Seasons" room has been installed on the front of the house, and we have really been enjoying it. Enough siding has gone up to really allow us to see how close we are getting to our dream. Walls are being torn down and put back up. The electrical lines outside are going into the ground. Shermen has moved some major earth, redirecting water routes so we never, ever have to deal with a wet cellar again. He has also fortified our driveway, raising it, putting in culverts and drainage fields. The days of parking and walking through knee deep mud in the spring will soon be behind us.

We have decided to have the lambs "processed." After successfully castrating them this winter, it has been easier to move on to this next step. Sadly, we lost our sweet cat McLovin on March 28, 2009. He was a good cat and will be missed.