Potato Experiment Update

Trench on left, tower on the right

I just harvested the last two potato plots in the garden. Both were experiments of course because I just can't leave well enough alone. I had russet potatoes that never got into the ground until the first week of July. Even though I was waaaaay late and my other potatoes were well on their way I decided that I could let the russets rot then throw them away or just plant them and see what happened. I opted for the latter. TA DA! Another experiment is born. I built one more potato tower and planted 5 potatoes in it. Two more than my normal 3 but what the heck. I had plenty. Then because I saw this on another blog I decided to build a potato trench.

trench-click to enlarge

Here are the results. I slipped the chicken wire basket off the potato tower and quickly and easily ran my gloved hands through the soil. The potatoes were perfect! A little small but what do you want when you plant in July. This took me less than 5 minutes.
Then I went into the garden to harvest the trench. The idea of the trench was to be able to pull the chicken wire lining the trench up and have the potatoes roll out of the soil. It wasn't that easy. The wire was hard to pull, cutting into my hands and the soil so heavy that I finally just dug out the excess soil in the trench until I found the potatoes. This took over half an hour and a lot of work and sweat. A couple potatoes had grown into the wire in spite of the straw lining. But the potatoes in general were just as beautiful and small as the potatoes in the tower.
Potato tower 7 lbs. Potato trench 12 lbs.

Since the trench was about 6 feet long with approximately 15 to 18 potatoes planted in it I will say it was equal to three (2 ft diameter) potato towers in size. The total for both plots was 19 lbs of russets. Not a bad haul for planting them in July. However if you compare the two techniques the trench should have produced 21 lbs. (not 12) to be equal to the tower. Given the fact that the trench was so much more work and produced less I will continue using the towers. BTW. The russets are really good.

My other conclusion is even if you have missed the normal planting date for your potatoes plant them anyway. These are an easy, delicious, and calorie dense crop that anyone should be able to grow and the biggest bonus of all? No pesticides! Potatoes (along with celery and strawberries) are one of the dirtiest chemical laden food you can buy at the store. Do yourself a favor and limit your families exposure to them and grow your own lovely potatoes.  http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/summary/

Potato Harvest

Sorry it has taken me so long to post. I think I have several subjects simmering and waiting to be written about. I will get to it. Most of you remember how I made potato towers last year out of chicken wire lined with straw and filled with soil.  (see here) This year I used the many paper grocery bags that I got from the grocery store as liners. They were a lot easier and quicker to put together. (cheaper than straw too) I planted 9 towers with three seed potatoes in the bottom of each one adding a liberal amount of bone meal (my dog Lucy was convinced I had buried bones and was very confused). I covered each with about 3 or 4 inches of soil and waited. When the plants started showing up I started adding more soil to each tower. I kept doing that until the towers were filled and I ran out of soil.  I also placed a layer of straw mulch on the top of each tower when I was finished filling them. This allowed me to water less. Over watering potatoes can lead to rotting and I think less is more. I watered well when I first planted and then left them mostly alone watering only if and when they got dry. I think if the towers had been five feet tall those plants would have just kept growing. As it was each tower was about 18 inches to 2 feet high, the width of a grocery bag. Those potatoes grew so well that the spuds were poking out of the top of the soil. Needless to say we had several meals with those potatoes. It was fun to trek down to the garden just before starting dinner, put on a glove and shove my hand into that nice soft soil and yank out a big fat potato. Several dinner guest got a kick out of doing that too.

They were growing so well that I finally just had to bend the plants over and stick them inside the tower to get them to quit growing! This also shaded the potatoes that were trying to jump out of the soil. After leaving them for two weeks to age (this allows the skins to set and increases storage ability) my daughter and I harvested two banana boxes of them by simply lifting the wire up and letting everything fall to the ground where we could sift through it. Now this is a kid that doesn't like gardening but she kept saying "Oh! Potato!" every time she picked one up. Well almost every time.  I had planted both red Chieftain and Yukon Gold. I don't have a scale so if I had to guess I would say we had about 30 lbs that we harvested and at least 15 more that we had already used. Not bad for an investment of less than 30 seed potatoes. Some had been saved from the previous year.

I have tried several methods to grow potatoes and so far this is my favorite. I think the fact that the towers are lined with paper or straw allows the plants to "breath". I have tried growing in buckets and garbage cans but this works the best so far. I save the chicken wire baskets from one year to the next so once they're made your good and they can be flattened for storage. The towers keep the chickens from scratching in the soil and this allows me to grow potatoes outside the garden fence extending the total growing area of the garden and killing the grass so that the next year I can extend the growing area without killing myself removing the turf.  The deer so far have left the potatoes alone.

Potato trench. Click to enlarge

I was very late planting the russets and they went in in July. I ended up making one russet tower outside the fence and the rest of the russets were planted in a trench inside the garden fence. That trench was line with chicken wire, a thin layer of straw,  then potatoes were lined up in the trench on top of the straw and covered with soil and bone meal. I used the soil that had been dug out and placed on the sides to hill up as the plants grew. The idea is to be able to harvest the potatoes by pulling the wire up. We will see how that works. I was about 2 months late getting those in so they are still in the garden and the geese ate all the leaves off of the russet tower last week so who knows how that will be.

I use to think growing potatoes was a waste of time. After all they are usually relatively cheap at the store.  I was wrong. There is no comparison. A fresh potato actually cracks like a fresh apple when you cut into it and the taste is amazing. Plus what else can you plant in the garden that can give you such a calorie dense return? Maybe carrots? Potatoes are fun to grow and add a lot to your self sufficiency. Next year I think I will try taller towers.

What I learned this year?
1. Potatoes will not grow in wood chips even if they are full of chicken poo. I had been dumping the wood chips from the coop in the area that I was going to put towers to help kill the grass. I noticed that not one potato had rooted in the chips.

2. Towers allow the potato plants to breath. I think that garbage can trick is a myth.

3. Use bone meal. Apparently potatoes are a potassium rich vegi.

4. Don't over water!

5. Plant early.

6. There is no potato like a fresh potato.

Strawberries, Canning, Gardening, Ducks, the Milk Man and a Berkey!

When I was a kid we had a milk man. It was normal to have milk delivered to your doorstep and put in a little insulated box every week. As a kid I never gave it a second thought. The Smith Brothers Dairy was just a few miles from our house. When I became a teen some of Smith Brothers Farm was bought and a really big shopping mall was built on some of the best and richest farmland in the valley. We stopped getting milk on the porch and the dairy moved several miles further south in the valley. As an adult I moved in the same direction only up on the hill above the valley and I still didn't have milk delivery. The store was so close. Now I live several miles north and west on an island and guess what I just discovered I can do? Ya! Milk delivery! Half and half and buttermilk and anything else I might want. And who have I chosen to get milk from? You guessed it. The same dairy I grew up with. And why?  Because I am tired of wasting my money on dead ultra pasteurized milk.

 I'm also tired of lugging home that yummy milk in the cute heavy glass bottles that cost twice as much and that requires a deposit. Then you have to remember to return the bottles. Not to mention the occasional broken 1/2 gallon of milk in the bottom of the grocery bag and the fact that the nutritional value of milk is depleted when it is exposed to light.  Smith Brothers delivers for nearly the same as the grocery store charges, delivers in cartons that are made of recycled material and the milk is fresh and NOT ultra pasteurized. This means I can actually make cheese out of it too! Haven't tried it yet but I am about to. I will let you know how it works.

Strawberry season is finally here. In a good year the season would have started the last week in May. A normal season starts sometime in the first 2 weeks in June and only last a couple of weeks maybe three.  I know this because it was always so easy for me to miss it. The last few years strawberry season has been extremely late due to wetter and cooler than normal weather and has actually been overlapping raspberry season. Around here we have a saying that summer doesn't start until the 5th of July. I never minded that it was wet for the 4th. I figured it just cut down on fire hazards. But this berry thing is getting a little hard to manage. I need the time between strawberries and raspberries to get another pay check. Not to mention Bing cherry season is in full swing. I can a lot of cherries. It is very handy to open a quart of cherries and put them on the table with dinner in the dark of winter when you need to round out a meal. At any rate

strawberries are finally here. I bought two 12 lb. flats two day ago. I made jam, canned ice cream topping, and froze the rest. They weren't the greatest tasting berries I have ever had. We have had way too much rain and way too little sun so they were big, plump, and watery tasting. Now that the 5th of July is here (and so is the sun right on que) I will give it a week and go see if they taste any better.
Notice the picture of my jam to the right?  In the background is a gift from my man. Recognize it? Ya! A Berkey water filter! I have been complaining about the taste of our water since we moved here. For the first time in years we are on city water and it is very chlorinated. It taste awful and sometimes it taste like dirt. Nothing like the clean fresh tasting water we use to get from our well. Even our finicky cat hates the taste. I have also not been too keen on having to rely on the water company in the event of some catastrophe to provide clean potable water. With the Berkey we can filter the pond water if we have to. This could come in handy since the Cascade earthquake fault runs right in front of our four acres. In the mean time I'm going to drink water that resembles the good stuff we are use to.

The garden is finally almost under control. (if that is possible) I will be harvesting sugar snap peas this week and from the look of it we should have a bumper crop. The tomatoes have some size to them and I was smart enough this year to space them far enough apart to have room to grow. I did get the out of control section of garden weeded and the squash, pumpkin and zucchini plants all put in. I bought those as starts so

they should be taking off here in the next week. The potatoes are huge and I have pulled a few out here and there for a couple of meals. They were nearly the size of my hand. The plants are still green and growing so I will keep hilling them up in my potato towers and see what I get. I planted green, wax, and purple string beans about three weeks ago and the plants are about 4 inches tall. The day time temperatures were still in the forties to low fifties so I was a little concerned the beans wouldn't germinate. So far so good. Cucumbers are not very happy. I didn't have much luck with those last year either. The lettuce in the cold frame finally bolted but we had several salads from that. I pulled the rest out and fed it to the geese and replanted bell peppers and cherry tomatoes.
I'm on to planning a winter garden. I am hoping to convince the man to help me with a small hoop house/row cover to plant broccoli, cauliflower, beets and other fall crops.
The geese and ducks are all doing well and seem to have got past what ever was making them sick. I still don't know what it was for sure that was doing it and I still can't help but look out the windows and count heads every hour or so. That is my update. Now I am  going to try to switch to the updated blogger interface so if I disappear you will know what happened. Blogger ate me.

Cold Frame and Garden Update With a Splash of Goat Milk

Remember the cold frame that the man built for me? We are finally getting greens and they are great! No bugs or slugs and easy as pie to wash which makes me want to make more salads. You in southern climes probably can't relate because you are already getting tomatoes and your squash plants are huge. We up here are waiting for peas, and it hasn't been that long since our last frost. (April first-ish?) Our last bout with snow was March 17th even though it didn't stick it wasn't what you would call gardening weather. Since then it has been windy and almost constantly rainy (really cold and wet rain that lasts all day) with just a few days of reprieve so our growing season doesn't really start until May. You still have to get the stuff in the ground in order to get anything out so gardeners here are a tough breed. Temperatures here can be as low as mid forties upper 30's. The highest so far have been barely 60. This is great for lettuce, peas, potatoes, and cabbage type stuff but not beans and tomatoes. So that is why the cold frame. I need fresh greens before June! My potatoes are in and coming up although I still have a few I haven't put in. Mainly the russets.

I am (as usual) experimenting with a technique for the peas. I love fresh sugar snap peas. I hate trellising them. It's a pain in the a$$ and the string type trellis just seems to be flimsy and falling over all the time. Not only that we have birds (robins I think) that love sprouting peas. They come down in the garden and peck out the newly emerging pea plant so that the next time I go down to the garden I find neat little holes exactly where my plants were, all in a neat little row as if they just went down the line and plucked them out one by one. So this year I think I have foiled the little buggers. Like last year for the broccoli and cauliflower plants I covered the ground with nylon netting from the fabric store. bug covers for cool weather gardens This stuff is cheap, reusable, lets in all the light and water, and the birds don't like it. heheheh. I simply spread the netting over the planted area and put in a garden stake to hold it in place so the wind couldn't blow it off. You only need to do this until the plants are about an inch tall. The birds leave them alone after that. Then you can remove them so the peas don't grow up through them.  For trellises I am trying upside down tomato cages. I'm not sure if the pea plants will be able to grip the metal on the cages but if not I will figure out what to do about that but I am hoping for pea tee pees. I wrapped the fabric around the bottom of the cages and held it in place with clothes pins. It has worked like a charm. I removed the fabric and I have lots of peas coming up. In case you noticed that some are planted in rows and some in tee pees it is because I didn't think of the cage idea until I was half way done. So this will be a real experiment with a control group. Ha!

 So here are the results!



Other than that I have been very busy baking, teaching a class last weekend and making cheese. I don't have goats anymore but I still go over to my breeders farm and buy goats milk from her. She has Kinder Goats which is what I had. http://www.kindergoatbreeders.com/ They are the best little goat ever. They are great milkers, easy kidders, and a good size for meat. They also seem to be less trouble than the bigger goats as far as escaping and taking care of in general. I guess I will have to dig out some of my old pictures and do a special blog on them. I do miss the babies and she had a ton of them. All of them friendly. I even had one that jumped into my arms. At any rate I have been making simple cheese with the fresh milk and a chocolate goat milk ice cream that my kids ate up as fast as they could get it in their mouths. Come to think of it the cheese is gone too. Guess I better go make some. I'll take pictures this time.

Comments are a way of Communicating

I want to thanks those of you who take the time to click on the word comment at the bottom of my page. Sometimes it is hard to get up the gumption to write these blogs because you think "what's the point". I love hearing from all of you and suggestions for blog post are encouraged. What would you like to read about? Let me know. Communication via blogs is more fun than e-mail!

Memorial weekend! Yay!

Memorial weekend. The Man has three days off in a row and we are taking one of those days to go for a ride on the Harley. I spent most of Saturday outside in the garden mostly building up the potato towers. (see march 8th blog, Fifteen days and counting) I did most of them with the straw and then had an idea. Why couldn't you line the towers with brown paper bags from the grocery store? They still hold in the soil and they go in faster and leave more room for growing in the towers and they compost. After having to buy a bale of straw at $9 it is also a lot cheaper. So I did two with bags as an experiment. I guess the down side of that is the bags wont add as much compost at the end of the season. Decomposing straw really adds a lot to soil but at $9 a bale I think I would rather spend my money on compost.











Earlier I had started peas in the house in toilet paper and paper towel tubes cut into 2 inch sections and placed in a cake pan or flat plastic container. I added soil and one pea per tube and kept them watered with the intention of planting them in the garden with the tubes. One container had a paper liner in the bottom. Not a good idea. The pea plants like to attach themselves to the paper on the bottom and it is hard to pull them off. The other container had no paper liner on the bottom and the roots just slid right off and I was able to plant them with a minimum of disturbance. I also grew them under a grow light and noticed that after awhile the paper tubes gave off a moldy odor. (They went out on the porch after that). But at least I have a row of peas that will hopefully produce something. The rest I planted in the garden in the normal way even though it was late.

My original 6 chicks that were raised by my Buff Orpington are now teen agers. They are still trying to find their place in the flock. The four Americana's will lay pretty green/blue eggs and make a lovely dozen  for my customers. The other two are Dominique's a breed on the endangered list. The one with the scissor beak will probably not be much of a layer but is such a pet now that she thinks she can fly up on my shoulder any time she wants. She is all personality.

The two silky mom's are busy raising their brood together. They definitely know which chicks are who's but seem to have reached an agreement to not fight with each other and that makes my job easier since I only have one chicken tractor to put them both in during the day to keep them safe from the other birds.

With all these pictures this post wouldn't be complete without a picture of the geese.

This next week promises to be very busy with a 16th birthday coming up. Because the man and the oldest girl have unusual work and school schedules I am having to do different birthday things on different days. One day will be a family dinner at home with the requested home made mac and cheese and a chocolate cheese cake for the birthday cake. Then the hard stuff will be done on two other days. I will let you know how that turns out.

What the H$&#? My newest Rant.

A couple months ago I went shopping at my local Costco. Like most of us I like buying the best quality stuff at the least amount of money in large sizes and since I preserve food that includes vinegar. Now maybe most of you think "vinegar, not a big deal" and maybe it isn't but I use vinegar in a lot of different food not just pickles. The other day I hauled out the jug of Heinz apple cider vinegar to make coleslaw while The Man was sitting there watching me. He pointed out that just under the words "Apple Cider" and just above the word "Vinegar" the label said (in small lettering) flavored distilled. I couldn't believe it. Why would a trusted brand make an apple cider vinegar that was artificially flavored? The ingredients say it is "distilled vinegar from grain, natural flavor with caramel color,diluted with water" to get the 5% acidity. I immediately called my Bro to rage about this new deception by big food industry and to check what his smaller bottle of vinegar contained.

His said from apples. So did the vinegar at his local store. So why this? When we both looked it up the only conclusion we came up with was they are trying to make a cheaper product for mass market stores. The label didn't actually say what grain it is made of but the web site claims their products are made of corn or apples. I assume it is corn. Probably GMO corn since you virtually can't find anything but GMO corn on the market and corn is probably cheaper than apples. The web site claims that apple cider vinegar and wine vinegar are the only vinegars that are gluten free since they are made from apples and grapes respectively and only vinegar such as malt vinegar is not gluten free because they are made of grain so that wasn't a reason. I consider this a dirty trick since I try to avoid corn as much as possible. In this day and age thats like trying to avoid breathing. Go figure. So I guess what I actually bought was colored white vinegar. Hmmmm. So what is the lesson here?

1. Don't trust any company and throughly read each label! Great. That should make a two hour shopping trip turn into four.

2. Make sure what you are buying at your big box stores is what you think it is and if not COMPLAIN! Chances are they don't know it either.

I quit buying Crest toothpaste at Costco in the large 4 pack because there was so much water in it that it would run out of the tube if the cap was off. I thought I was imagining it but it happened with more than one purchase of toothpaste. So maybe there is a pattern developing here. I've always wondered how Costco could sell something so much cheaper and always chocked it up to selling mass quantities.

I'm all for being self sufficient and making a lot of our own food. However I think of cider vinegar as a simple ingredient that is to be used to make other things not something that is made up of other things. Why can't I trust a company to produce a simple ingredient without trying to make it a concoction of several other things. I have a feeling when the effects of peak oil become more noticeable  we may all be making a lot more of our own "stuff". Don't know what peak oil is. You will before long and it will be up close and uncomfortable. If you want a quick, not too in depth explanation go here and watch this video from Mother Earth News. (The link is near the end of the article.) High Gas Prices got you down? (Peak Oil) The video will be quicker than another rant from me.

Books, Obnoxious Animals and Noxious Weeds! (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

 Ever had a weed you hated? This is one of mine. Thistles come in two forms here and you have to be able to identify the one you are fighting with. A Canadian thistle grows in worn out soil and spreads by underground runner roots. Just for good measure it also will bloom and form thousands of seeds from purple flowers that blow away in the wind to sprout somewhere else on your property. I truly hate this plant. I have battled it for years. I just found an article on getting rid of this obnoxious weed and it makes perfect sense. Pulling the damn thing sure doesn't work. The one thing I know is you have to cut it down before it even looks like it is going to bloom because even though it is cut the flowers will still bloom and make thousands of seeds after cutting and laying on the ground. So if you have this thing check out this link.

http://www.truehealth.org/acanthis.html The picture above is of what we call a bull thistle or spear thistle. It is fairly easy in comparison to eradicate. But you have to get all of the long tap root which can be nearly impossible. Years ago I went with a friend to a garlic farm in Oregon. One of the things we did while we were there was thistle hunting. I have since used this technique to get rid of these "prickers" (my youngest calls them that when she accidentally steps on them with bare feet.) You will need salt, a cutting or weeding tool, and gloves of course. But beware! The stickers still go through the gloves so handle with care. Simply slice off the thistle at ground level then put a pinch of salt on the exposed root. Works like a charm for me. And I have had some in my front yard that are about 2 feet in diameter.  You will have to keep weeding other plants out as they come up from seeds but eventually you will see a difference and you don't have to rely on poisons which don't work on thistles anyway and can make your animals sick if ingested.

 
I love curling up with a new book. Reading in the winter time is the one thing I really look forward to and sometimes I have to be prodded out of my comfort zone by friends to read something I don't normally read but I have seldom been disappointed with their suggestions. My brother is a writer and until recently I had not been asked to read anything he had written. Perhaps he didn't want to deal with my criticisms. Ya I can be that way. However I was asked to read (and proof) a copy of one of his stories and guess what? I liked it! So much so that I read another and liked it too. I suggested that instead of dealing with agents that only want to handle a proven writer (read easy money) that maybe he should try putting one up on Kindle. After all, those agents are going to be unemployed soon due to downloadable e-books and not so high and mighty. (Ya, ya I like having a real book in my hands too but I also didn't want a cell phone and now look at me.) So he did. It took some time to figure out how to do it and the learning curve was steep but low and behold he is selling books! He writes mysteries mostly and is very good at painting word pictures. To view his stuff and reviews follow this link. Don't have a Kindle reader? Did you know you can download to your computer and read anything you can get as an e-book? Here is a link to his stuff. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_8?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=schankel&sprefix=schankel Oh and by the way. I just set up the hammock in the backyard and now when I have an hour or so I can lay in the hammock and read and still be around my animals and in the fresh air. So take an hour or two for yourself. You deserve it.

Busy days

I seem to have gotten very busy since my last post. Trying to get the garden in, raising geese and ducks, raising new chicks, dealing with broody hens, a graduating senior, two birthdays, and the work here is coming fast and furious. I'm working on the garden between rain and wind storms and temperatures that are 10 degrees below normal. The potatoes are up and need to be mounded. I am still tilling and re-tilling and pulling out the stupid grass that keeps re-sprouting.  I have some lettuce in and some peas. I am also bushwhacking nettles, and what I believe are cow slips, (a big leafy wet plant) in my spare time. I simply refuse to let them take over the area we cleared last summer.

One of the new chicks developed a scissor beak as it grew and I know a "real" farmer would have given it a good whack and been done with it. However this little girl is as sweet as can be and I am a sucker for a Charlie Brown anything. Because I am concerned that she isn't able to get enough to eat I have been making her a wet mash from chick starter and water three times a day. That seems to be working and now when I come out of the house she comes running across the yard to look up at me and ask "where's the food?" She follows me, hopping up on the table and then on me while I am making her mash. She is fearless. Everyone that sees this comical little bird thinks she is cute.

In the mean time I have 4 other birds that have decided to go broody. Two silkies (of course) a bantam light Brahma and a black astrolorpe. I think I have cured the bantam and I am working on the black one. However both Silkies want desperately to be moms. So I bought 4 more chicks. Two for each hen. The black Silkie is a natural mother and didn't mind being moved from her original nest to a dog carrier on the table and instantly tucked each Buff Orpington chick under her. The white Silkie was a little more difficult. She wasn't about to give up the original nest and had a fit so I moved her to a carrier after dark and let her settle in over night before adding the chicks. She is now a good mother of two silver laced Wyandots. The chicks are giving her a hard time since they want to explore their nest and she wants them under her wing. I don't think I will ever brood chicks under a lamp again. Giving that job to the hens is great.

Now the man thinks I'm nuts and I have too many animals. Isn't he the one that was saying I needed more layers to keep up with the demand for my eggs? Since I still don't have housing for my geese I guess I better not push my luck.

The geese and ducks are now 9 weeks old and fully feathered so they are staying outside at night in a predator resistant enclosure. That makes my job a little easier because I don't have to clean up the coup after them every morning. The fenced pasture is up and usable for now and handy to have during the day when they need to be out but I am anxious to get it finished with a real gate and nest houses built. I love my geese and one in particular seems to like me. My youngest named him Sebastian. He likes to be on my lap and gives be goose hugs around my neck. Ok. So I am nuts.

Our oldest graduates from high school so we have announcements to get out, pictures to pick up, parties to plan and registration for college. She is in running start this year which means she did her high school senior year and college freshman year at the same time so she will be going into college as a sophomore next fall studying marine biology. Right now she is in crunch mode to get everything done.

Our youngest has her sweet 16 coming up first week of June. That is a special birthday so I am trying to decide what to do about it. We have a tradition of giving our girls a real ring on their 16th so I have to go shopping. I hate to shop.

The man also has a birthday. He wants heated riding gear for the bike. That means a trip to Olympia about two hours south of here (after the ferry) to visit the company that makes it. We will be taking the car for that. I am not riding that far on his Harley in what will surely be rain.

How about a recipe? This dessert starts out as one batter and separates during baking into fluffy cake hiding a creamy layer of lemon pudding. Try it!

Lemon Pudding Cake

1 Cup granulated sugar divided (3/4 cup and 1/4 cup)
1/3 cup all purpose flour
1/8 tsp. salt
1 cup milk
2 tsp. fresh lemon zest
1/2 Cup lemon juice
2 Tbls. butter, melted
2 large egg yolks
3 large egg whites (room temperature)
Confectioners sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 350. Coat eight 4-6 ounce oven proof ramekins or custard cups with cooking spray. Place in a baking dish and heat a kettle of water for a water bath.

Whisk 3/4 cup sugar, flour, and salt in a medium bowl. Add milk, lemon juice and zest, butter and egg yolks. Whisk until smooth.

In a clean glass bowl beat egg whites on medium speed until soft peaks form. Gradually add the remaining 1/4 cup sugar and continue beating until stiff and glossy. Fold the egg whites into the batter (it will be thinner than other cake batter and it's okay if a little lumpy). Evenly divide among the prepared ramekins.
Place the roasting pan of ramekins in the oven and carefully pour in enough boiling water to come almost halfway up the sides of the ramekins.

Bake the pudding cakes until golden brown and the cakes have pulled away slightly from the sides of the ramekins, 25 to 30 minutes. Transfer the ramekins to a wire rack to cool for 15 minutes. Dust with confectioners sugar and serve warm or at room temperature.

Garden days

Yesterday we had a day with sun! So I took the opportunity to work in the garden getting one of the 4 sections ready for planting this weekend, we hope. I had two rain showers while working but they were light and I didn't melt. All my birds helped. Including the mom and chicks. The chickens got busy scratching up
bugs and loosening the soil. The geese were just plain cute and wanted to eat every weed I pulled up so they were in my face much of the time. The ducks ate slugs.
 What can I say but thanks. It was fun and it was looking good when we quit but I still have a little work to do before I can plant that section. Today it rained so much and was so cold I had to leave the geese and baby ducks inside. Some places north of here even had snow and the night time temp is suppose to be in the upper 30's.


It's suppose to be warmer and sunnier this weekend so I am still planning to put in lettuce and peas. So much for growing your own food. The only thing growing here is the grass and weeds. Peas are normally planted by March 15 and supposed to be planted when soil temps reach 50 degrees. That's not happening this year so I am doing something else. Emma kitty has her own idea. Maybe I should take the hint. But instead I am determined to prove my brother wrong and get a crop out of that cold garden. I have saved paper towel and toilet paper rolls and I am now cutting them into 2 inch section to plant the peas in. When they sprout and it is warm enough I can plant them in the garden and still get peas before it gets too warm for them. It's a lot of pea plants to have in the house though. I am just doing one package

(about 120 peas) that way. I will start the rest in the garden later and maybe get peas over a longer period. I checked the potatoes that I put in a couple weeks ago and they are sprouting and getting leaves. I'll be mounding soil up around them and building the straw walls in their raised beds before ya know it.(see "Fifteen days and Counting)
The geese are still growing by leaps and bounds. They are starting to get their pretty white feathers but they are still very soft and cuddly. The man named one of them Mimi because she startles easily and screams like a girl. It's cute but I wish she wasn't such a scaredy goose. Sebastian (if he is a boy) is a snuggler. He likes to be picked up and snuggles into the crook of my neck and falls asleep. People that saw them a week ago and then saw them this weekend can't believe how big they are. They are very gentle birds so you can't help but like them.

Guess I better get back to work. Can't sit around all day blogging when I have gardening to do.