Harvesting

August and September are the months for harvesting. And yes, it was quite silent the last days but the fruits of our garden have been continuously growing.

Yesterday I harvested all the potatoes.  

 On the backside you can see our sunflowers. The seedlings were eaten by the snails, the drought in spring stopped them from growing. Roe deer came by and destroyed some (still visible on the picture) The strong wind has blown them down. But finaly the left overs wer big and strong over 3 meter. They will serv as food for the birds in winter. 

The poptatoes are stored in our newly discovered basement. The perfect place for such a storage. 

Meanwhile the rest of the vegetable garden is suppling us from different vegetables. 

 This vieuw on our vegetable garden looks more or less fine. There are still some nettles between the salad. We use the young nettles in the soup.

Worse is when you take a picture from the other side. It doesn't look any more the perfect kept garden. This pictures will help also those who felt guilty about their own wild garden. :-)

 

Zucchni and kale between the marigold.

Sorel, Cauliflower, broccoli, marigold and a lot of weed

Also the fruit is ripe. The blue plums are nearby finished. The yellow are on their best. The little pears are falling down  (What do you do with pears from a thumb big?) And the first appels are used in applecake and other things in the kitchen. 

Of course also some other animals love to eat them. Butterflies on the plums and wasps on the pears.

Vespula vulgaris

Some old pictures

Our history on our farm is very short. The former owners had a bigger history going back to the seventies. Before that it’s empty, a white page. But sometimes there are some nice little things that pop up. So are there 2 old photonegatives from our farm taken from the air. We got them from the former owner. There is a black and white negative from June 1949 and there is colournegative from somewhere in the sixties we guess. With some tricks with our camera and my free image program I could get a nice view of the content of both negatives. 

The black and white one is the most interesting one because this picture is from the longest ago. On that one we can see the old dunghill. This one doesn’t exist anymore. Also the old garden is partially visible. There were much more bushes and trees in that garden. But it seem to be fruit trees. The side was a simple hedge. Now it’s an overgrown border with quite some nice things in it. But the fruit trees have reduced quite a lot or better changed place to the backside of the garden.

The buildings don’t seem to be so much changed.

Zooming in to our courtyard there is, hardly recognisable, a thing that looks like an old tractor. A person seems to be behind it. 

The door to the basement, which is just restored, is visible too at the right. 

Our courtyard June 1949

Cherry time

The garden starts to give fruits and vegetables. Especially fruit needs to be picked and processed.

We had already made some raspberry marmelada, and enjoyed the woodland strawberries. 

Now the sour cherries (klarbär – krieken) were ripe. They had a good taste and were totally black ready to be picked. The birds found them too. I even had to scare away a big swarm of starlings (Stare - spreeuw). We would not have got one berry left. Luckily they didn't return when I turned my back to them.

Time to start picking.

 But what to do with it?

 First take out the stones.

 

The pits stay in the container at the underside. The cherries fall in the bowl.

These are perfect fruits to preserve on sugar and vinegar.

We preserved our fruit in different ways. 

Preserving them on sugar and vinegar was the first trial. The jars we could find in the lokal supermarket. 

An others bunch of cherries were used for juice and marmelade. I use one of this old fashoned but very handy juice presses. It's made in the Czech republic. 

And emptied bowl for marmalade and a full bowl with juice.

The juice is poored in bottles and the remnants of the cherries are used for marmalade. 

Sugar and fruit starting to boil on the fire.

In a second set of cherries I made my own recipe. I had still some confit lemon slices from making the elderflower juice.  So they were poured in. Also some herbs in powder were added (cinnamon, clove,  star anise, ginger). The first tasting by my privat jury turned out into a big succes.

The result of all this cooking  was a whole corner of our kitchen table filled with all kinds of cherry products. 

And this are some of the bottles with fresh juice. The right bottle is cherry vinegar to use in cooking and salads.

Next are the red currants. 

But first cleaning upp.