first grapes

Yesterday we harvested our very first grapes here. We've been eating one here and there, checking to see if they were ripe yet. With the rain some of them started splitting. Yesterday morning's taste test revealed that we had a bunch that were ripe, sweet to perfection, and ready to harvest. We brought in a big bowl full. There were still many more clusters than needed to ripen a bit more, so we left those for later. We've been dreaming of having these grapes growing here for a long, long time. (And some of you long time readers have heard them mentioned over the years.) When we fell in love with our neighbor's grapes, we brought some starts home. I've tried quite a few grapes in this area and while I love so many of the different varieties, these ones are my favorite. They are purple concord grapes with crunchy seeds inside. They are just so darn good and having them in our own backyard is simply wonderful. Waiting for these first grapes, this first year, made them all the sweeter.

backyard food (early september)

 We're still bringing in green beans, some white elm mushrooms here and there, cucumbers (for making pickles, eating fresh, and for juicing), and zucchini. Most of the time we saute our zucchini, but sometimes Jeff makes battered zucchini rounds that are so good. He dips the zucchini rounds in egg, dips them in coconut flour, and then fries them. Just a smidgen of apple cider vinegar on top and we could eat plate after plate of them. We harvested lots of kale last week in the garden and Jeff made kale chips, with Bracken's help. They added lots of our homegrown garlic. We all love them. We're trying to make them last a little longer this time rather than eating them all at once.

I told you how excited we were about getting our first duck eggs. Last week we had two days where our duck eggs were huge. (I placed two in a picture next to two pullet chicken eggs, to give an idea.) The next two days the duck eggs were tiny, nearly the size of chicken pullet eggs. They seem to be slowly growing larger again. 

We have a favorite huckleberry bush that grows right next to our house. The huckleberries are ripe right now and Bracken loves to pick them while I water the garden or harvest. Basically whenever we're in the vicinity. Not long ago he wanted to head straight for the blackberry patch every time we went outside. Then the plum tree. Now I smile at how content he gets at the huckleberry bush, picking away. Last week he asked me for a container before we went outside and then he would come over and proudly show me how many berries he had in his bowl. I grabbed a little ladder one night so Bracken could reach some higher berries while I picked right next to him. Jeff was working in his shop and Bracken surprised him by showing him his bowl full of little berries and then putting them one by one in Jeff's mouth, saving many for himself of course. Another day he ate all the huckleberries out of his colander and then put it on his head for a hat and acted his silliest to make Jeff and I laugh. Jeff had just juiced some vegetables and Bracken still had a mustache from drinking his juice.

Last week Bracken noticed that a few of our grapes were starting to turn from green to a little bit pink. This week they are turning even more. Grapes are on the way! We love food from the backyard.

end of august (a haircut, a dehydrator & such)

At the end of last week Bracken got a much needed haircut. Last time we gave him a haircut our clippers broke before we had finished. They were secondhand clippers that Jeff had picked up somewhere and I decided I wanted to get some brand new ones this time around. I figured I'd save up for a bit and then go buy a good quality pair of clippers. At the store the mid-range ones were not as expensive as I expected them to be, so I probably could have purchased some sooner. By the time I did, Bracken's bangs were nearly to his eyes and it looked so hot and uncomfortable in the summer heat. These clippers also happened to be cordless which meant we could do Bracken's haircut outside, which was wonderful. Jeff tried out the new clippers on Bracken's hair for a moment or two and then passed them over to me. Awhile back, Jeff and I had looked up youtube videos on cutting little boy's hair. I had a lot to learn because I haven't given the best haircuts in the past. Bracken went to the barber's a few times, but then really didn't like it so I didn't want to bring him back. I knew if I could learn to give decent haircuts at home: it would be more convenient, easier, more relaxed, Bracken would enjoy himself more, and we would save lots of money. (He doesn't adore getting haircuts at home either, but much better than the barber's. He isn't fond of being still so long, I don't blame him.) So after a few youtube videos I felt a bit more confident. I'd never used clippers before. I put the longest extension on the clippers (one inch) and did it from all directions so it wouldn't make lines. Easy peasy. I felt so empowered! I used the scissors for his sideburns and area around his ears and wasn't totally happy with how they turned out, a bit too short, but overall it was by far the best job on Bracken's haircut I'd ever done. The clippers made all the difference. No wonder I couldn't make his haircuts look good with just scissors, I just didn't have enough experience for that. After his haircut was done, he jumped in his little pool and got cleaned up. No hair to sweep up, like in the house. Doing haircuts outside is the best. Then I took a few pictures of his new haircut while he ate a plum and decided to be silly for the camera, as usual. 

Oh, and we love slathering ourselves in clay. Have you ever tried it? It feels incredible.

We traded a neighbor for some bartlett pairs. We waited for them to ripen, watching them go from green to yellow. Looking at them, you'd have no idea just how incredibly sweet and delicious they are inside. So, we had a bunch of pears to process all at once. That's where the dehydrator came in. Quite a few years in a row, we bought dehydrators from the grocery store. They never lasted though, because we used them so much. They weren't the highest quality, to be sure, but cost enough that we didn't want to purchase yet another dehydrator that wouldn't last. Last year we went the whole season without one and we really missed having one. I said I wanted to save up and buy a high quality dehydrator. Jeff said he wanted to build one. I looked at good quality dehydrators and yikes- they cost a lot. An investment like that would be worth it, because I knew we would use it so much. Whenever we had dehydrators before, we practically had them constantly going. But with those prices that would mean saving up for a very, very long time and we didn't really have extra money to save anyway. Jeff is always one to find a solution, though. He had a metal box and painted the outside black so we could put it in the sun and rely on mostly solar heat to do our dehydrating during the day. On the side is a thermometer, so we can check the temperature inside, and also a dial to turn it up or down. The racks he got secondhand. I know I don't do it justice in explaining it here and there's probably much more that Jeff would say if he was writing about it, but I don't understand all the details. All I know is that he jerry-rigged it as he always does, costing us hardly anything at all, and that it works well and I'm really grateful for it. He's not satisfied with it because he said he could do this or that so much better if he had more a) time and  b) money to put into it, but there's always many other things that are needing his attention. But, to me, it's great and we have a working dehydrator again! Jeff has something else he built that he named R2D2 because they look so much alike. So he jokingly called the new dehydrator R2D3.

Now we have dried pears for the winter and we also freezed a bunch. On Thursday I finished processing the last of the pears. Next week's project: apples.

We had another encounter with the "funny bug." This time it was during the day when I could photograph it more easily. Bracken picked a flower and got the beetle to crawl on it. The beetle hung out with us for a long time and didn't fly away. We all enjoy this bug and are happy when it visits our garden.

 All summer I've been meaning to get a picture with Jeff and Bracken by the runner beans. I wanted to show how tall they are. Also Jeff said he wanted to show my dad what we did with some of the fencing he brought us. He had some short fencing they pulled up at his place and asked if we wanted it. Jeff and I made trellises with it for the beans and cucumbers (to the left of the beans) to grow up. Jeff even made an archway for the beans to grow up that we can walk under. Growing vertically helps us grow a lot more food with limited space to work with and recycled fencing works well for that.

We had two firsts this week. The first sunflowers started blooming and we got our very first duck egg! We've been bringing in pullet eggs from our new laying hens for a few weeks now, but then one day this week Bracken gathered eggs in the lowest nesting boxes and one looked different. I knew right away it was a duck egg. While in a basket of chicken eggs, it may not stand out a lot, but there are subtle differences. When you break it open, you can really tell because the shells have a harder and different sort of consistency and the whites are much thicker. Some people think duck eggs taste a bit too strong, but we love them in our house. Four days in a row we gathered a duck egg in the lower nesting box. Bracken was so excited. On the second day I think it was, he couldn't wait to show Jeff the duck egg and then a chicken flew down from the roost to eat and bumped into him, which cracked the duck egg. He was so upset he cried. I told him we'd probably have one the next day, but he said he had wanted to show his dad and he wanted to eat it in our food. He did get one the next day. What makes me happy, besides getting duck eggs now, is the fact that our duck Fennel is actually laying them in a nesting box. I've heard that ducks sometimes lay their eggs wherever they want and are not as good about laying them in nesting boxes as chickens are, so I hope Fennel keeps this up.

There's something so fun about firsts. Our family gets excited over the first daffodil. Later the first zucchini. The first cucumber. The first green beans. And then, in the case of the last three things mentioned, it can shift from first and exciting to overwhelming. The last few weeks we've been bringing in basket after basket full of zucchini, cucumbers, and green beans. It's wonderful and it's feeding us well. And it's also a bit overwhelming at times. Our sauerkraut finished and we finally had a crock free for cucumbers. We put nearly five gallons of sauerkraut in the fridge. Then a gallon of pickles. Then two gallons of fermented beets. We can barely fit it all in there, but we want it fresh and raw because of all the probiotics so the fridge is the place we want to store it. Yesterday I had another crock of sauerkraut to jar up and it took some creativity to fit it all in there. I managed to fit a little over three gallons more of kraut in the fridge by putting it in quart jars on the bottom shelf, which is just the exact height for a quart jar to fit. I flavored them with some of our homegrown garlic, turmeric, and coriander seeds Jeff saved from the garden. In one I put some dill Jeff saved from the garden, but we're mostly saving that for pickles. And I have a feeling our next crock of pickles is ready. Now that will really take some creativity to fit it all in there.

Jeff took the straw in the greenhouse that we had inoculated with white elm mushrooms and used it to mulch around the garden. We've kept it watered and have had white elm mushrooms popping up regularly, it's great! We're watching our winter squash grow. Sometimes our season isn't long enough for them to finish completely, but I'm hoping it might be different this year. That's some of the things going on around here at the end of August. A few more days to soak up August, let's enjoy it to the fullest!

This post was mostly written yesterday. We'll be heading to the Eugene Saturday Market this morning. 
Come say hello if you're by!