Worm Food

I have been delinquent in posting this month!  I got caught up in summer fun...we had our back yard fenced in, bought a canopy/umbrella and a picnic table and so have been spending most of our non-work time outdoors.  This past week we were on vacation down the shore, which was the place to be in the record breaking heat!  We were fortunate that we were not in the path of the derecho either at home or down the shore - it passed between the two.  Our home is far enough north and my parents' home down the shore was far enough south that we were very fortunate. 

We've spent this week getting back into the swing of things, unpacking, cleaning up, checking out how the garden did in the extreme heat while we were away.  My plants all survived the heat just fine, but something is eating all of my bean, squash and zucchini plants!  To the point that I don't think many of them are going to make it.  There are times when I wish I had a security camera pointed at the garden so that I can see which critters are responsible.  It's hard to formulate a defense without know what is getting in...through the ten foot fence!

The week before we left for vacation, we bought a Worm Factory and set it up.  We have been there done that with traditional compost piles and we have a compost tumbler.  Both worked fine, but I was really looking for an option that would allow us to compost our kitchen scraps year round.  I prefer to keep as much as possible out of the landfills, and composting is so easy.  I had been thinking about giving vermicomposting a try for quite some time, but it took me a while to get past my hang ups about having worms in the house.  I am so happy I did get over it, because it's actually fun to vermicompost.  My daughter is especially enjoying it.  She loves checking on the worms to see if they are eating and loves to watch us feed the worms.  I was a little nervous initially that she would be inclined to relocate the worms, but she understands that they live in their composter and are very happy there. 

So when we bought the Worm Factory, I was thinking that we would put it in the garage, because I didn't really want worms inside the actual house.  When it arrived, we were experiencing such extreme temperatures that the only option was to set it up inside the house so our worms didn't get cooked.  It's in the kitchen, and I am really impressed that there is no smell whatsoever to this unit.  The worms settled right in and made no attempt to make a run for it.  I must admit, the first few mornings, I half expected to walk into the kitchen and see worms everywhere, trying to get away!  I made the obvious rookie mistake and overfed the worms, but it worked out to be perfect timing for our vacation.  A week and a half of benign neglect solved that particular problem, and now that we are back, we are well on our way to some really nice looking compost and we and the worms are ready to start the next feeding tray! 

My next challenge will be learning to pressure can.  Everything I have read seems to be designed to scare people away from pressure canning with warnings about how you can easily kill your whole family.  I am refusing to be frightened off, though.  I live near a large state university, which has a large agricultural school with a food science department.  I am hoping I can find some kind of resource there.  Many of the warnings I have read tell you never ever to can your own recipes, that they must be tested thoroughly by food scientists before it is okay to pressure can them.  I'm wondering if there is somewhere that I can submit a couple of recipes to have them tested out by pros. 

Going Into Homesteader Mode

I sometimes think I lived on a farm in a past life...though if I was, my proclivity for sleeping until at least 9 am would have been a problem.  I have the itch to grow ever more in my garden and am gradually branching out into other areas like growing from seed, composting, and canning.  It's addictive!  My husband has been itching to get a couple of chickens, and for the first time I am thinking I should agree.  Then I think about cleaning the coop and having to find someone to care for them when we go away.  I also think our senior German Shepherd would be a problem...rather than herding, I suspect she would treat the birds as prey. 

This time of year, as the weather gets warmer and we start spending more and more time outside, I love to be in my vegetable garden.  It is ever expanding, despite the fact that the wildlife in our suburban neighborhood makes a pretty substantial fence around the garden necessary.  For years, we had green garden fencing about 6-7 feet tall, with rabbit fence buried about a foot deep.  We figured that the buried rabbit fence would thwart the many, MANY groundhogs that seem to be drawn to our yard.  For the most part, it did, with only one exception that I am aware of.  We were trapping the groundhogs and relocating them across the river from our home.  There was one groundhog that would not be caught, probably because he was too big to fit into our have-a-heart trap.  I couldn't figure out how he was getting into the garden to take two bites of our unripe produce before discarding it on the ground for us to find until one memorable night when I came out onto the second floor balcony in the back of our house and saw him HANGING from the top of the fence.  He was scaling the fence to get in and out for his munching sessions. 

That worked (the one ornery groundhog aside) until the unfortunate day when we found that somehow a deer had leaped into the enclosure and then panicked, knocking over and smashing several tomato plants and cages on his way straight through the fence on the opposite side.  He was clearly fine, he demolished the fence with one charge and it didn't even slow him down. Happily, there was no blood or fur left behind, so I am confident that he was fine, having watched his panic and subsequent departure in horror.

So that brings us to our current fence, ten feet tall and with posts set in concrete.  I love it!  There will be no deer getting in from now on - safer for them and for my heart.  I planted from seed this year, so of course I have more plants than I have space in the garden, but have been happily giving the extras away to friends. 
I kept way more than I probably should have, so I know that if all goes well with growing this season, we will have more harvest than we will be able to consume.  One year I happened to be unemployed when planting time came, and I planted 75 tomato plants.  They were different varieties, but there were 75 of them!  From this past experience, I know that we will have more than we will be able to give away, even though we will be well under a total of 75 plants.  We grow tomatoes (beefsteak, heirloom and cherry), peppers, zucchini, squash, bush beans, sweet potatoes, melons, raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. I am toying with the idea of putting some of the extra harvest down by the street with an honor box - a common practice where I grew up (about an hour from here), but not sure how it would go here. 

I also just invested in my first pressure canner.  Despite hearing horror stories of them exploding and being afraid of the process, if I can get the hang of it pretty quickly, it will save both produce and freezer space.  I have canned in the past, but never ventured beyond the water bath canner.  I need to be able to can low acid foods, which you can't do with a water bath canner.  I also really like to make soups in my crockpot, and it would be nice to be able to can several batches of our favorites.  I went with the All American 921 21.5 Qt, but I've heard very good things about the less expensive Presto pressure canners as well. 

Now I'm off to craigslist to prospect for more canning jars - hopefully I'm going to need them!