, Author at Summers Acres

Putting Up Food on the Homestead

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The Importance of Preservation

I grew up learning the value of preserving food for the winter and hard times. Our family grew a big garden each year and canned or froze the extra for later. We visited pick your own farms or combed the fields for wild apple trees to harvest fruit to stock our pantry. I continue to put away produce for my own family now that I’m a wife and mother. I want to make sure there is plenty of food in our house in case a snowstorm closes the roads or price increases put the basic necessities out of our price range. Besides that, I get a real sense of satisfaction when I pull jars of my own home canned foods out of storage and make a meal entirely from foods I preserved!
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Making Blackberry Jam

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We were pleasantly surprised this year by the size and amount of blackberries we picked from our 2 blackberry canes that we planted last year. I made a couple of blackberry cobblers with some of the harvest. We picked the rest as they came in a little at a time and put them in the freezer. We also picked a few wild blackberries from our rural property and froze them. The blackberries from our thornless canes are substantially larger than the wild blackberries, but we are thankful for them all. It is ok to pick a few of your berries a little early before they have completely ripened (with just a touch of red in them) if you intend to use them for jam. The tart red blackberries have more pectin and will aid in the jam setting up. Still the majority of our berries were fully ripe when picked. All total I believe we froze about 4 gallons of blackberries.
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Treating and Preventing Chigger Bites

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I grew up in the country crawling around in weeds and such as a kid. We were always warned we were going to get chigger bites, but never did I in my entire 38 years until this year. While mowing and working out at the land several weeks back, Jon and I and one of the boys got a bad case of chigger bites. I even got them twice. The second time was horrific and they even blistered. No chigger bites in 38 and years and now twice within a few weeks of each other!

What is a Chigger?

Chiggers are the larvae form of a certain type of mite.
Chigger Life Cycle (Photo Credit MedicineNet.com)

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Garden Harvest Showcase

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There really hasn’t been much time to do blogging lately. It seems our “real” jobs, family, church, and our garden has been keeping us busy. It is all a good busy….well except for maybe the “real” jobs. Actually, that is a good busy too. We are both fortunate to have good jobs so I really should not complain. Although, in some ways the unusual weather this year has caused us a few issues, we believe overall this year’s garden is a vast improvement from our first garden last year. Our sweet peppers are a nice size now. The crowder peas are turning purple and popping up all over the place! I love crowder peas. Our corn has several nice ears filling out. They are looking more promising than last year’s corn crop. We’ve also harvested all of the yellow onions and winter onions and they are curing.

Dehydrating Squash Epic Fail

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Last year we had a bumper crop of zucchini. After our zucchini harvest season was long over I came across a post for zucchini chips. I thought I would definitely try it this year. Well, this year none of our zucchini plants did anything. We even replanted them. We may have had bad seeds. Luckily, we still have quite a bit in the freezer from last year. Last year we did not plant any summer squash. This year we did and it is doing well and we are experiencing a lot of squash.

So, I searched the ole internet to see if I could dehydrate squash into squash chips like the zucchini chip post I had seen. I did indeed find some posts suggesting squash or zucchini could be dehydrated. So, Jon and I thought we’d give it a try and see how it turned out. We only did a couple of squash as we were not sure how this experiment would go. We sliced the squash about 1/8 inch thick. This was done by hand so there was a slight variance in thickness. However, Jon is a wiz with a knife from all of his years in the restaurant business and they were pretty darn consistent for not using a mandolin.
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Our First Blueberries

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Last spring we planted two blueberry bushes. Although, we are quite impatient people and would love to have immediate returns we were really not anticipating having any blueberries this year. So we were ecstatic when we saw how well they were growing this year and saw them putting out blooms. Each bush was a different variety and one of them was about a week ahead of the other with blooms and the blueberries ripening. To our dismay the birds picked the first bush clean before we even knew what happened! But Jon put bird netting over the other blueberry bush along with our other berries and we were able to have our first small harvest of blueberries. We had just enough to eat fresh and some for blueberry pancakes. Two more times we have picked a small handful such as this. The rest we have been just eating fresh and throwing in smoothies with some other fruits. How blessed we are to be able to have our own fresh fruit, even if it is only in small handfuls.

Our First Handful of Blueberries Ever!

Seed Storage Organization

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Last year was our first time having a garden. We just bought some random seeds from random places and started planting. Since that time we have done a lot of researching, planning, discovering, and failing. I’m sure we have much more of all of that to come. We decided that next time we wanted to start right and that meant (among a million other things) using heirloom seeds.

First, we shopped around a bit for some reasonably priced heirloom seeds and bought most of what we needed. We also had a few random seeds left over from last year that were not heirloom that we were going to use up and get rid of. We had some seeds from Jon’s Mom from her garden. And lastly we harvested some of our crowder peas to attempt our hand at keeping and using our own seeds. We dried some of the crowder peas successfully. We had the second attempt mold. Because of the mold, the third time we thought we would not air dry them but try drying them in the oven on low like we read online. That worked for some and well I burnt some because I forgot about them and didn’t set a timer.

Here we are only on our second garden and had seeds in store bought packets, seeds in sandwich baggies, seeds in small mailing envelopes, and seeds in boxes from orders online. I could already see we needed to come up with a seed storage method.

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No Shell and Soft Shell Eggs

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It’s been 14 days since our first egg and in that short time the four oldest hens are now all laying. They are getting the hang of laying in the nesting boxes.

In the Nesting Boxes

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My First Crochet Scarf

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It seems we are having several “firsts” around here lately (first plum, first apple, first egg) and now I have finally completed my first crochet scarf (although it did take me 3 trips to WV and 1 to SC)! Technically this is my 4th crochet project as I did the Beginner’s dishcloth 3 times before it all clicked and I got it right (mostly). I am very excited about learning news skills even if it is taking me longer than anticipated.

Back in March we were driving to West Virginia to pick up Jon’s boys to stay with us on their spring break from school. I wanted to get a new project picked out and started before our drive up so that I could work on it on the ride. I made a goal that with each new crochet project I would learn 1 new stitch or crochet concept. It can be quite difficult to search for a new pattern that only has 1 new thing rather than 3 or 4! I was worried about getting overwhelmed so I kept searching until I found just the right “simplify scarf pattern” on ravelry. This pattern uses the chain, single crochet, turn, and the double crochet (my new stitch to learn). Some crochet patterns can be a bit confusing to read, but Sally’s pattern was simple and concise, just what I needed.

I got on youtube and reviewed several examples of the double crochet until I had figured it out.