It was the final week for the two online classes I have been teaching. That combined with some extra time spent in volunteer related activities and I didn’t accomplish much. Here is what I remember doing.
Plant: Chives, more beans, sunflowers, more squash (not sure it will produce but I had the seeds), parsley, spinach, and two kinds of kale.
Harvest: Chives, basil, chard, parsley potatoes, lots of small tomatoes and the first of the larger paste tomatoes, a couple of summer squash, a few green beans, two eggplants plus snippets of other herbs for use in cooking
Eat Something New: Can’t think of anything
Preserve:
- dried: chives, basil, parsley, rosemary, and sage
- dried tomatoes
- dried chard
Managed: Spent several hours tending my container garden. Pulled out some things that weren’t working (e.g. beets were only a inches tall and showing no sign of growing; squash that was fading), moved all the pots and swept the deck, rearranged a few things, trimmed, weeded, staked, and generally tidied things up well for the first time since before leaving town for two weeks back at the end of June. Working on using up odds and ends of things from the kitchen so there will be more space for storage.
Prepped: I haven’t made much progress on personal preparedness this week in part because I spent all of one and part of a second day involved in community level preparations by helping with create a new disaster response plan for my county Red Cross chapter.
Learn Something New: This is more of an accidental discovery than intentional learning. Early in the spring I cut a couple of kale plants that weren’t doing well back to the ground so that they didn’t waste space in the containers where other things were also growing. They have sprouted back from the base. I need to remember that kale will do this. It has potential for intentional use. I also learned in the hard way the importance of being more diligent about hilling up potatoes. The vines had a growth spurt while I was gone to Rockford and I never got back on top of covering the stems. As a result my harvest is much smaller than it could have been.
Reduce Consumption and Waste:
This will sound wimpy but given how hot it was an how much I didn’t want to eat much less cook, I am giving myself credit for it. I made a sort of clean out the fridge curry in the crockpot. I used up some vegetables that were dangerously close to becoming compost. I have overstocked brown rice given its shelf life. Eating the curry for a few days will put the veggies to use and help use some of the rice.
This afternoon I’ll be making stock to use “every last scrap” of some things I have been preserving. The stock will be based on the bones from a chicken used in my One Local Summer meal for the week, the cobs from a dozen ears of corn that I put into the freezer last week (after removing the corn, I stuck the cobs into the freezer to wait for cooler weather to make stock), the stems from the rosemary, basil, and chard that I have been drying and other assorted veggie ends and scraps.
Otherwise the usual recycling, composting, using cloth bags, etc.
Local Food System: nothing this week; I didn’t NEED anything and had things I needed to use so I even skipped the market this morning.
