Independence Days Week 29: Peaches for Free, Peaches for Me
Friday, July 23rd, 2010Anybody else remember that song? We are still rather fond of it at our house and it gets regular play on my iPod, even more so this week when we harvested our first peaches! We don’t have millions of them, but it looks like we might get a couple dozen this year. This is vast improvement over last year when the urban wildlife (a combination of rats, raccoons, and squirrels methinks) stole every last one of our nearly ripe peaches. I might be a vegetarian pacifist, but after they stole my food I had some decidedly un-PETA like thoughts. Happily this year, the rat population has been culled and while about half of our peaches have gone missing, the other half is now ready or nearly ready to be picked. I plucked off six this evening and we devoured two of them mere steps away from the peach tree, fuzzy skin and all. Besides the peaches we’ve:
Plant something (or take care of something you’ve planted):
- Green Beans (from seed)
- Sugar Pie Pumpkins (from seed)
- Waltham Butternut Squash (from seed) I already have some ripening, but I decided that one can never have too many butternut squash.
- Cucumbers (Marketmore 76, from seed) Sow bugs ate all my seedlings so I am trying again for a late crop.
Harvest something:
- Bell Peppers
- Anaheim Peppers (We had a week of very hot weather which seemed to act as a catalyst for dozens of peppers to ripen.)
- Carrots
- Tomatoes (There are so many green tomatoes on the plants – very exciting – like the food equivalent of a stack of unread books.)
- Eggplant (Such a pretty plant with purple and white flowers and purple and white striped fruit.)
- Shallots (Grown from a few bulbs saved from last year’s crop.)
- Cannelloni Beans
- Burgess Buttercup Squash
- Blackberries
- Raspberries
- Strawberries
- Peaches
Seriously, all the above from our backyard! How awesome is that?
Preserve something:
- 11 cups carrots (shredded, frozen)
- 2 cups cannelloni beans (dried)
Waste Not:
- Reusing plastic seedling pots as protective covers for newly sprouted seeds. This year we have had a problem with sow bugs eating the leaves of newly sprouted seeds – especially squash and beans. I cut the bottom off of a pot, place it a centimeter or so down into the dirt, and then plant a seed in the middle of it. The plant emerges and grows up through the bottomless pot. Once the plant clears the sides of the pot the leaves are out of sow bug territory and I remove the pot.
Want Not:
- Lately I have been feeling very fortunate and not wanting much of anything save perhaps an afternoon nap every day.
Eat the food:
- Cooked eggplant for the first time by making homemade Baba Ghanoush. When I first looked up recipes for Baba Ghanoush I was disappointed to find that they all contained tahini – sesame paste. Thomas is severely allergic to sesame so it is forbidden in our house. I then found a recipe online for sunflower seed tahini and blended some up. The sunflower seed Baba Ghanoush was delicious and we ate it all in one sitting with fresh homemade bread. Even Thomas tried some and proclaimed in a somewhat surprised tone, “I like it.”
- Cooked Burgess Buttercup squash for the first time.
- Back in a really good groove of making bread approximately every other day – that’s about our rate of consumption. I can only imagine how much bread I’ll have to bake when the boys are teenagers. (I am not complaining, I love making massive amounts of food.)
Build community food systems:
- Does “sharing” half of my peaches this year with the squirrel and raccoon communities count?
How’s your summer going?