Growing, Harvesting and Using Sweet Basil

Growing: This is the first year that sweet basil ( Ocimum basilicum ) has really taken off in my garden. It is located in the border outside the main garden. This spot gets sun most of the day, with a bit of shade in the late afternoon from the arbor just to the NW of the plants. The soil is heavy clay, with some compost added each year. The plants survived the drought conditions here in Texas very well with only minimal watering. Toward the end of the summer, the leaves were small, about the size of my thumb, but still tasted great. In September, we began to water this patch heavily and the plants quickly responded by putting on a new flush of large (almost palm sized) leaves.



Harvesting: The leaf is the edible part of the basil plant. To harvest for meals (usually pesto cream sauce, mmmm) we simply plucked leaves from the plant as needed.

Near the end of the summer, the plants bolted and began to flower and set seed. Since this has become a favorite cooking herb of my family, I decided to harvest and save some of the seeds for next years basil crop (if it does not self seed for next year, which I hope it will).





After it flowered, I allowed the blooms to dry on the plant (this was more of a happy accident and the result of garden neglect more than any actual planning or foresight on my part). We collected the dried flowers put them in a colander, which was then placed over another bowl.



Using pre-school labor, we crushed the dried flowers and seed pods to release the tiny black seeds. Shaking the colander gently to allow the seeds to fall through to the bowl below.



Once most of the seed heads had been crushed, we gently blew the chaff away from the seeds, leaving about 1/4 cup of dark black basil seeds.



Uses: Our favorite use is to make Pesto and Pesto Cream sauce (recipe to follow). I also add leaves to spaghetti sauce, stir fry and salad dressings.

Another fun Basil use is to prepare seed packets for friends. In this case, I wanted to share seeds with the attendees of my bread baking class (we made pesto with dinner) so we prepared several seed packets.

I used tiny zipper top bags (like the kind that come with the extra button when you buy a new shirt) and portioned off about 1/2 tsp of seeds per bag. We cut a sheet of plain white paper into small rectangles, folded them in half, and then stapled them onto the bag. My son drew a picture of a basil leaf and I labeled each packet Sweet Basil.

June Garden Update

2011 has been a lackluster year in the garden. Things are growing, but only doing okay, not great.

First the good (of course).



The green beans have made a good showing. We have had more than enough for dinner and to share, and I have also put up about a quart into the freezer. As of June 14th, the plants are looking wilted and tired and I think the harvest is tapering off.



My potatoes did well, but I did not buy enough seed potatoes. I planted 2.5 pounds and harvested 12.5 pounds. It is a decent yield for me ~6x and right on par with my best potato harvest ever (planted 7 pounds, harvested 35 pounds in 2009). I had zero bug problems in my main potato patch this year, not so much as a bug nibbled potato in the whole harvest. This is great news, and much better than a friend of mine who reported that his potatoes got blight and he does not expect any harvest at all this year. I think one big factor was that I rotated the location of my plantings this year. One volunteer potato plant came up in the 'old' location and that plant suffered from pests and some sort of wilting disease so I pulled it early.



Sweet Potatoes. Well, I can't count this as a harvest yet, but I am so happy that this year I was able to plant over 35 sweet potato slips grown from sweet potatoes that we had bought to eat. Each time I found an eye on a sweet potato I was about to cook, I would cut off a small section of the potato containing the eye and stick it in a pan with water. After about 6 weeks of this, I had a huge crop of sweet potato slips in my kitchen window. I planted 9 plants prior to June and then planted the remaining 25 slips after I harvested the white potatoes. There are about 10 more slips that are still forming roots in the window. This was a great learning experience and very successful way to get lots of sweet potato plants (even before the harvest).

Also doing well (without photos) are: Swiss Chard, mint, oregano, basil, also pumpkins and winter squash (all very healthy and producing volunteers).

I had okay luck this year with my spinach, garden peas, summer squash. These are producing okay, but just not thriving.

And now the bads... my poor tomatoes look awful, the plants are small and anemic, there is very low fruit set (no fruit at all on most of the plants), and there is some sort of disease or pest causing a yellowing of the leaves. The "Little Porter" tomato is the only one that seems to be thriving. Brandywine has a strong plant, but no fruit. All the others look awful. Considering that Hubby judges the success of my garden by the weight of tomatoes produced... this is a dismal year.

Eggplant, cucumbers: both fell victim to the hail and never recovered.

Corn. I guess since this is the first year I have planted corn, and it got the shady side of the garden, I can't call this a true failure. I have about a dozen corn plants, waist high, and they are starting to flower (tassel?, ear?, fruit?, produce?). I am not sure what they are doing, but they are starting to form something that I hope will turn into corn. Since I have such a small patch, I am counting on having to pollinate these things by hand (with a brush) since corn is wind pollinated and you need a strong stand of corn to get good pollination.

Peppers: the seeds I planted did not germinate, so on June 10th I bought two pepper plants from the store.

Mulberries: these are not in my garden (or even in my yard) but the trees down the street had a very light harvest this year. I kept watching and waiting for the fruit fall to really kick in (last year, it stained the sidewalk and street purple from all the fruit), but this year... not much. We did not even walk down to try to harvest any, I figured with such a light harvest the birds needed them more than I did. Hubby points this out to me as proof that we should take advantage of the good years when they happen (for example, we are still eating last year mulberry jam with about 8 pints left to go). Good lesson.

Peaches: similar story to the mulberries, not my tree, but my friend's and he has reported a very small harvest this year. We do NOT have any peaches left over, so I will have to buy them to can this year.


Other milestones in the garden this year: compost! Hubby has taken over the compost area and expanded it to 4x what I had. He is diligent about turning it and even brings home other people's veggie scraps and coffee grounds from work to add to his compost bins. We have already gotten a 55 gallon drum full of finished compost which we added to the garden when we planted the sweet potatoes. It is some very pretty stuff.
Rain water: the water totes are hooked up and working great... now if we can just get some rain.
Bees: the girls are working hard and as of May we had more supers on the bee boxes than we had at harvest time last year. Hooray bees.

April Garden Update 2011

It is hard to be excited about the garden after it was smashed by hail on April 14th, but ~2 weeks later, it is nice to see how well it has recovered.



The purple heart is blooming, but the leaves are all beaten up. This used to fill the garden near the Cottonwood tree, but the chickens love to scratch in this area so most of the purple heart has been killed off. It still hangs on in the area right around the tree and I know it will refill the garden over the course of the season.



My 'Paprika Yarrow" is growing and blooming nicely. It has spread some, and I hope it will fill the whole area of the flower bed.



My Swiss Chard survived!

It is battered and beaten, but it lives on... phew. Of all of the plants, this one seemed to take the worst beating from the hail.


I planted four varieties of chard this year. The red is "Rhubarb Chard", it is the most scraggly of the bunch and has the poorest performance.

The large yellow is... umm the strongest variety... bu I will need to check my garden journal for the actual name.



The pale white stems were Fordhook Giant. It has the second best performance and seemed to withstand the hail better than the others (could be location too, it is near the mint and may have gotten some protection from that).



The small yellow stems at the front are Fantasia Chard. It is doing fairly well, probably ranks third out of four varieties.

Scattered through the gardens are German Camomile

(the ferny light green plants near the hose). I bought this as a single 4" pot from Northhaven Gardens and there were hundreds of seedlings in the pot. I was able to carefully break the cluster of seedlings apart and planted them all over the place. They seem to be doing great this year. Camomile is a medicinal herb and the flowers are harvested for a calming tea, it can also be used to lighten hair color.



This awful picture is the red amaranth I planted. Amaranth is a grain and ornamental and will grow to five feet tall according to the seed packet. I planted to varieties, but only the red seems to have germinated (no sign of the Golden Amaranth)

The amaranth is over seeded in my asparagus bed. The poor asparagus just limps along.

I saw a few spears, less than 10 and definitely did not harvest any. This is New Jersey Giant (?) planted last year from ugly dried out roots. I need to get a real start of asparagus from my mom. Her patch of asparagus is about 15 years old, and completely untended it has produced more asparagus than she could eat this spring.



The snow peas are starting to produce, it has been too hot for them to really do well. These peas are from my spring planting. The winter peas I planted all froze out in one of our ice storms this winter.



My spinach did not freeze this winter and it has been a great producer. This short little three foot row has kept us in spinach since about February. Unfortunately, due to the heat it has started to bolt. I keep pinching off the tops, but it keeps sending up new ones.



My poor tomatoes. Most of the main plants were damaged by the hail, but most have grown back from the roots.



The squash looks great. Strongest by far is the zucchini (black beauty)



Weird angle on this photo, but the first hill of squash along the fence is zucchini, then yellow crookneck squash (poorest performance), then a hill of the mixed squash (same mix I grew the last two years with excellent results).
The squash mix has already bloomed.

Last is the dead out hill of cucumbers. The four plants I had were completely obliterated by the hail and did not grow back.



Brussel sprouts... I have no idea. Is this what they are supposed to look like? When do they produce sprouts? I suspect that they already made the sprouts and they are now just getting leggy. A few weeks ago, I noticed very loose leaf clusters forming along the main stem of the plant, but they never resembled brussel sprouts to me. It may just be too hot to grow these here. Too bad.




My lovely Red Lasoda potatoes are growing great and I spotted the first few blooms a few days ago.



I only bought 2.5lbs of seed potatoes this year, I wish I had bought more to fill the whole section of garden. I waiver between wanting to try lots of varieties and also wanting to grow huge quantities of what I know will do well.



The beans are blooming. I planted three varities: Jade Bush, Black Valentine, and Blue Lake. It seems that my three bean mix from previous years did better, but it could also just be the weird weather this year that is causing them to grow so slowly.



Jerusalem Artichokes are coming up everywhere. I have replanted from this patch, taken a 5 gallon bucket full of plants to my MIL, and still they keep sprouting. Silly me for moving these spreading weeds to three different areas of my veggie garden over the years. Oh well, if I have to deal with an noxious spreading plant, I'm at least happy this is an edible noxious spreading plant... and it blooms very prettily in the fall, like little sunflowers. I kind of have a love hate relationship with this veggie, mostly I love it, but boy can it be a pain.



Speaking of noxious spreading plants, yikes my mint is going nuts. This little 4" pot purchased in 2009 now covers a huge swath of my garden. I find little mint plants popping up 10 feet away from the parent plant... all connected by a pencil thick root system. I'm happy to weed it, it smells pretty and I have been replanting it in tricky areas of the yard where nothing else seems to grow. The kids like to pick handfuls of leaves to sniff.



New to me this year is corn. I have never planted corn before, claiming I did not have the space, but hubby got me a huge variety pack of heirloom seeds this year and I did want to try something new.



Plus pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins... we had about 10 pumpkins to decorate this Halloween and after the holiday, they were carried around the yard by the kids, dog and squirrels. This spring, pumpkin seeds are popping up everywhere. In the garden,

on the path

by the garage door (where we walk all the time)



in the lawn... I'm going to try and let most of them grown (apart from where they will get mowed or stomped) in the wild areas of the garden. It would be fun to have lots of pumpkins, but I'm not counting on them to do great. Last year, I allowed a volunteer pumpkin to take over a huge area of my garden and it only produced one small pumpkin.

Overall, the spring garden is doing well, despite the cold to hot to cold weather and hail. My tendency this year was to plant lots of varieties of plants, but not huge quantities of any one kind (except tomatoes, I have a full section: 9 plants of tomatoes). I will see how it works out for me. Right now, I'm wishing I had planted more potatoes and less winter stuff (beets, broccoli, radishes, carrots--all doing poorly and taking up room). It is hard not to be distracted by all the pretty seed packet descriptions. It is all a learning experience. Like every year, late April and May are the glory days of the garden. Plenty of rain, not too hot, not too cold, everything growing great, it is hard not to be excited.

Mulberry Wine

Last year we picked tons of mulberries from a tree in a neighbors yard. We ate all we could, I made jelly, juice, and syrup, but we still had about 6 pounds of extra berries. I wrote about it here. On a whim, hubby decided to make Mulberry Wine using a recipe from a 1970's cookbook. The 6.75 pounds made about 3 gallons of what we hoped would become wine

After fermenting for 11 months in our dark, cool, master bathroom we finally got brave and tried some... it was delicious!




The wine is sweet, has a taste that is very much mulberry, but also kind of has a hint of watermelon.



It is sweet, which is what I like (I'm more of a wine-cooler than a wine kind of girl).

I should note that we are not really drinkers. Curtis has a beer occasionally, mostly when out camping or grilling out, and I sometimes have a glass of wine before dinner. I used to guess that we maybe had a glass of wine per week, but since we started our own batch, we made sure to save every wine bottle we finished over the past year... the grand total?



Eight measly bottles, so my guess of 'a glass per week' was definitely an overestimation, we did not even drink a bottle of wine per month. A few of the bottles were not even wine that we drink, it was left at our house after a dinner party. We are definitely light weight drinkers.

Hubby carefully siphoned the wine from the carboy (what the big jug is called) and decanted it into the cleaned wine bottles. When we made the first batch of wine last year, we lucked into a deal on craigs list and got some carboys, a corker and a bunch of miscellaneous brewing gear for a great price.



Ta-da!



We ended up with eight bottles of wine, plus an extra half a gallon in the fridge, less a few 'test glasses'.



(pardon the fingerprints, they are much easier to see in the photo).

We shared two bottles of wine with some of hubbies friends from work and the rest are for us.

Another big check box for our 'bizarre skills' list. We officially made our own wine, hooray!

I'm thinking of using this photo for the wine bottle label...

Meat Processing 2011

On the last weekend in February, we headed down to Nada to process and prepare the meat our family will eat for the year.





The starting totals this year (for four families and one guest):
Deer 249 pounds
Deer Jerky 18 pounds
Wild Pork 104 pounds
Purchased Pork 120 pounds
Total.... 491 pounds of meat!



Usually, we are able to use wild hog for 100% of the hog meat, but this year, they had a hard time trapping wild hogs, so we had to buy pork from a local meat market. It was easier than cleaning a hog, but also not free.

All of that meat went into the four variations of processed meat we make each year:


Jerky, dried sausage (like jerky), summer sausage, kielbasa-stlye sausage and ground meat.

Most of the meat is ground in two industiral sized meat grinders (I usually end up running a grinder for most of Saturday).





We brought home 98 pounds of finished meat this year. 35 pounds ground meat, 50 pounds of sausage (yikes, this sounds like a lot!), 8 pounds of summer sausage, 5 pounds of dried sausage and jerky. My family will eat this for the next 12 months... and with 50 pounds of sausage, that means I need to serve 1 sausage per week!

Homemade Yogurt

This year (okay so next year, 2011... in like 2 days) we have decided we want to learn how to make more dairy products. Apart from making homemade butter (which is as simple as putting heavy cream in a lidded jar and shaking), yogurt was the next easiest dairy product to make at home.

I started my online search looking for a 'yogurt machine' for hubby for Christmas, but quickly saw that actually buying a machine was overkill for just how simple the process seemed. Basically it is as simple as this: heat milk, add a cup of starter yogurt, keep warm for a few hours, and... yogurt.

Back when I was a kid, my paternal grandparents used to make yogurt on the back of their stove top at night (I guess the pilot light kept it warm enough). I don't remember eating it, but everything I ate at their house was delicious.

We heated 1/2 gallon of whole milk on the stove (the milk was from Sprouts, not sure all the details, rTBH free?).



We cooked it until it was at 180F. (I think this is to kill any bacteria in the milk)



We then cooled it quickly to 120F by putting the pot into a sinkful of cold water. (this brings the milk back to a hospitable temperature for the good bacteria we are about to add)



We then stirred in 1/2 cup of the starter yogurt into the 120F milk. In this case, I used Stoneyfield plain cream top (this stuff is SOOO good).





Meanwhile, I also sterilized a random collection of canning jars to put the finished yogurt into. (not sure if this step is necessary. I figured we were intentionally creating the perfect environment for bacteria to grow, I wanted to make sure it was the 'right' kind of bacteria and not some random bad bacteria from my jar storage box)


We ladled half of the new yogurt into jars as is (just hot milk and yogurt).





We put the filled, lidded jars into a cooler filled with about 3 inches of hot water (target temp 120F).



This water and cooler will help to keep the new yogurt at a warm constant temperature for several hours to allow the bacteria to grow.



(I don't have a lot of kitchen gadgets, but I really love my digital thermometer.)



As an experiment, we added honey and vanilla to the second half of the batch.



These were lidded too and placed into the cooler to begin the yogurt incubation period. The recipes I found online all called for warm incubation periods of between 3 hours and overnight. Since we finished the cooking and mixing portion of this experiment at 9pm... and we are big babies who go to bed at about 9pm... we opted to allow it to incubate overnight. I read that the longer the incubation period, the tangier the yogurt would taste.

The next morning...



Viola! Yogurt!

Side Note: In all honesty, I only tipped the jar like this because I saw a picture of someone else doing this online to show how lovely and thick their yogurt was. I did it and was so thrilled that ours was that thick too. I snapped a quick picture then in the two seconds it took me to turn back around to put the camera down, the thick creamy top on the yogurt had given way and the sort-of-thick yogurt had poured out and pooled all over my counter. Oops.


Once stirred, the consistency was like a thin smoothie, not terribly thick, but no where near as runny as milk.



We ended up with about a half gallon of homemade yogurt and it was yummy. It was a tiny bit tart, and we all preferred the sweetened version to the straight plain yogurt we made.



By far, the best way we have found to eat this is to mix in a giant glob of my runny homemade peach preserves. Mmmm.



I was a little bit worried that the kids would not care for the tanginess of it, but they really loved it. Since it was so runny, I served it to them in cups with a straw and they slurped it right up. It is basically the consistency of the smoothies we make.

Considering the fact that the Stoneyfield yogurt we all like so much costs between $3.99 (on sale) and $5.00 (ouch) per quart this is a huge cost savings. In Dallas right now, a grocery store price war with the new Aldi store has milk going for around $0.99 per gallon! Even at the usual price of $1.99 per gallon (and with four quarts to a gallon) making our own saves a lot of money.

Basic Recipe:
1 gallon of milk
1/2 cup of live culture yogurt

seasoning:
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup sweetener (honey or sugar)

1) heat milk to 180F
2) cool milk to 120F
3) stir in starter yogurt
4) sweeten if desired
5) ladle into sterilized jars
6) place in warm spot for 3-8 hours to incubate
7) refrigerate after incubation period is complete