What'll Cool You off on a 95 Degree Day?

On Sundays, Tricia always cooks an extra-special meal.  After church, the boys come over to the house and we set the table in the formal dining room with the nice china and silverware and sit down for an old fashioned Sunday lunch.  We take time enjoying the food and each others' company.  After we've cleaned our plates, I put the coffee on and we enjoy a cup or three of good coffee with a nice piece of chocolate or a cookie to go along with it.  Simple pleasures.  

I walked out the back door for a minute.  It's hotter than a two dollar pistol outside.  I walked back in and thought, "Let's make some homemade ice cream!"  Nothing cools you off like a delicious bowl of ice cream.  I heard on the radio this week that the #1 flavor of ice cream sold in the US is vanilla.  #2 is chocolate.  Either of those would be good.  But, then the little flywheels and gears in my head started turning.  How about some homemade BLACKBERRY ice cream?  Our two blackberry canes are producing now.  We've been eating them right off the bush.

The bushes are thornless and they produce really nice berries.

After a short hop, skip and a jump out the back patio to the blackberry bushes, I filled a coffee mug with berries.

I crushed up the berries with a spoon in the bottom of my mug.  Sun-heated blackberry juice and pulp filled the bottom of the cup.  After pouring the ice cream mixer in our little ice cream maker, I emptied the muddled berries into there as well.  We flipped the switch and the maker came to life, paddles turning through Clarabelle's cream.  Fresh cow's milk and fresh berries.  Can it get any better?

We continued to visit until we heard the ice cream maker struggle to churn through the thickened ice cream.  Yep, it's done!  Homemade blackberry ice cream.

Cold, smooth, and creamy...

What a delicious way to cool off on a hot summer day.

The Berry Best

It is peak berry time around here.  The are producing and require picking every single day.  We are in a race against our adversaries - Mockingbirds, Blue Jays, and Cardinals.  They all like picking berries, too.  I don't know what it is about this year, but there are tons of birds!  We noticed them loudly singing all spring in the backyard.  At first we thought it was nice, now we know they were calling their friends to partake of the blueberries.  Their friends arrived and they told their family members.   

Now, I don't mind sharing, but they are taking more than their fair share.  Not nice.  Next year I will buy nets to put over the bushes.  One year I hung rubber snakes from the branches.  I'll look for some of those too.  For now, we will continue picking.  We still come away with some nice blueberries.  They are at all different stages of ripeness.  We still have gallons of blueberries frozen from last year, so my wife has encouraged me (and I've obliged) to eat plenty while I am picking each afternoon.

Some are hard and green, but each day they ripen.  Others are blue, plump, and sweet as candy.

Some years they are smaller, harder, and more tart.  My theory is that all the rain we have had has resulted in more H2O uptake, making the berries plumper and juicier.

On normal years, we pick between a pint and a quart of berries each day.  This year, not near that much, although the birds may be getting that much, doggonit!

When we are done with the blueberries, we mosey over to the thornless blackberry bushes.  We have two of them and they produce well.

These are not ripe yet.  They turn black when they are ripe.  Hence, the name blackberries...

They ripen quickly, turning from red to burgundy to black in merely a day or two.

The size is bigger than that of the dewberries that grow in the wild.  Russ got some cuttings off of these canes and will try to propagate some of these on his own to get more coming.

These are good to snack on.  Sweet.  Juicy.  They are also delicious to put on top of homemade ice cream!

Time to head to bed.  I'm berry tired.

Dewberries By the Fenceline

 

A week ago I showed you some photos of our thornless blackberries.  They are blooming like there's no tomorrow and there are tiny unripe berries all over the bushes.  It will be a couple weeks, I imagine, before they are ripe.  Russ took a few cuttings off of them and has them successfully rooted.  He is going to start a berry patch at his house.  That gives me an idea to do the same at our place.  It would spread the patch and give us more yield.

While we are waiting for them to ripen, we have other berries to choose from that God has propagated along the fencelines and ditches.  Dewberries.  They are similar to blackberries, except they ripen a little earlier, run along the ground instead of bushes/canes, and they are plumper and sweeter.  I stumbled across a patch of dewberries on Saturday.  What I didn't eat right off the vine, I picked and brought inside.  Tricia skimmed some heavy cream off of Clarabelle's milk and mixed the fresh-picked berries with the cream.  What a treat!

Dewberries and blackberries remind me of my great-grandmother.  I remember she would make homemade blackberry pie with a sweet-dough crust.  She made a sweet white sauce that she would ladle on top of the pie.  Good golly!  I miss her.  She made a mean pie.  I think we could solve most of the world's problems over a slice of homemade pie and a good cup of coffee.

Soaking Okra and Checking out the Side Yard

My wife and I often talk about how strange it is that some years certain garden crops just absolutely produce so much that we can't eat or store it all.  We share the bounty with family and friends.  And then other years, when we do everything exactly the same, we experience crop failure or the crop may produce, but not very much.  It is very odd.  We try to examine the inputs to see what happened so that we don't repeat the error.  Oftentimes, we can't find what went wrong.

Last year our okra crop was lackluster at best.  The year before, we discovered a recipe for "Oven fried Okra" and this was a game-changer.  Previously, we ate okra primarily in gumbos or cooked down with tomatoes and onions or we had an okra curry recipe that we enjoyed.  The oven fried okra with panko bread crumbs was a favorite of ours and we ate it often.  

Okra is normally a big producer.  You have to pick it every day as it grows faster than kudzu.  Last year, our okra failed - big time.  We have no okra in the freezer.  This year things will be different.  This weekend I readied the seed.  I'm planting three of our favorite varieties: Clemson Spineless Okra - this is our old standby.  Dependable.  Hardy.  Prolific producer.  Next, we have Burgundy Okra - this variety is burgundy in color.  We like things with color.  It doesn't produce as much as Clemson and when you cook it, the color fades, but it it a nice variety.  Finally, we have Beck's Big Okra - a short, fat, variety with a number of ridges on the pods.

When I say 'readied the seed,' here's what I mean:  Okra seed is tough.  It is hard as a ball bearing.  If you would just put it in the ground, it would take a while for the seed coat to soften and germination to occur.  I began soaking my okra seed in warm water 24 hours in advance of planting:

By soaking the okra seed, you are jump-starting the germination process.  It speeds up the process and allows you to see sprouts in a couple of days after putting them in the ground.  After 24 hours, the seed is soft and the hard coating is swollen and coming off.  I dropped them in the ground.  In no time at all, okra sprouts are popping up out of the ground!

We will check back in on the okra later.  For now, let's mosey over into the side yard.  Right next to the Irish Potato patch, I have some Thornless blackberries planted.  The two varieties I have came out of Arkansas and are named after Native American tribes - Navajo and Arapahoe.  We've been pleased with these plants.  They produce berries almost as big as a man's thumb!

As you can witness from the photo above and below, they are full of flowers.  It won't be long before we'll be picking the sweet berries to eat!  One thing on my 'to - do list,' is to take some cuttings and plant more blackberry bushes to expand our berry territory.

Finally, the muscadine vines have put on lots of leaves, displaying a hopeful start to another good producing season.  

My camera wasn't focusing in right, but I believe you can still make out the tiny clusters of muscadines in the photo below.

We are hopeful for a good crop this year.  Regardless, we'll have a good time in the outdoors soaking up vitamin D and enjoying nature.

Diggin' and Pickin' in June

With everything going on lately, we haven't shown a lot going on in the garden.  I did some work in the garden planting on Saturday.  I planted 3 additional rows of green beans.  The green beans that I planted in early spring didn't do well.  It was the first year in many, many years in which we didn't put up any beans in the freezer for later.  Things don't always work out.  Hopefully in this planting, we will see success.  I also planted another row of sweet corn, a row of black-eyed peas, a row of cantaloupe, watermelon, butternut squash, birdhouse gourds, louffa gourds, and sunflowers. 

But let's back up.  We planted more things, and while we have many things still growing, we are harvesting, too.  Here is a basket full of some of the last of the beets.

We planted Red Mangel Beets for the cows, and chioggia beets and bull's blood beets for us.

We oven-roast most of the beets in the oven.  That's our favorite way of eating them.  Tricia also made a couple batches of beet kvass.  Back in 2014, we showed how we do that in this post:
Making Beet Kvass

We also picked some lima beans.  These limas over-wintered in the garden and are bearing again.  I wait until the pods are brown, but you can't wait too late as they'll pop open and you'll lose the beans. 

Finally, each year in May and June, it is prime blueberry and blackberry season.  Each day we (but mainly Russ before he moved out) go to the bushes with quart-sized containers and pick all the berries that have ripened since the day before.  We eat some while we're picking, of course!  We put the berries in a colander and wash them up.

We put some in the fridge to snack on fresh, but we also like to freeze some to use throughout the year.  An interesting way to freeze them is to lay them out on a single layer on a stoneware tray.  Pop 'em in the freezer and the next morning we pull them out and loosen them from the tray with a spatula. 

When the are all loose, we pour them into a zip loc bag and put them in the freezer for storage.

With the berries individually frozen, it is very easy to pour them into a measuring cup for baking muffins and blueberry pancakes with chocolate chips.  My favorite!

Up next in the garden:  harvesting sweet corn, more cukes, tomatoes (although it is a bad year), squash and zucchini.  In a few days, we'll be planting pumpkins.

Plan B for Blackberries

After milking chores were done Saturday morning, Tricia and I had a good cup of coffee on the front porch.  There was a thunderstorm blowing in from west to east and we watched while the rain fell against the newly plowed field.  It was peaceful and relaxing to watch the much-needed rain and wind blow through.  We sat and watched it until the rain started getting us all wet.  Then we went inside.

In the photo you can see the field on the other side of the road.  That outside levee was our wild dewberry patch.  They would come up every year and we'd go out to the ditch with buckets and pick them.  We would come back and make Dewberry Jelly.  We've posted about it HERE.  With the field being plowed up, we waved farewell to our wild dewberry patch.  Well, it wasn't really "OURS," was it?

But we weren't giving up without a fight.  I called Russ and it just so happens that his Horticulture Club at LSU was having a plant sale.  Wouldn't you know it?  In addition to vegetables, herbs, and trees on sale, they were selling berries - blackberries, in particular.  The specific variety he selected for us to try was the Arapaho Thornless Blackberry.  These were developed by the University of Arkansas.  If they produce, even though I'm an LSU Tiger, you may hear me "Call the hogs!"

Russ purchased two for us to try.  The directions said to dig a hole twice as big as the root ball, place it in the hole, backfilling with compost and watering to remove air pockets.

Benjamin and our nephew, Mike, helped plant them and then mulched with hay. The cows provided moral support.

We watered them in good and now we'll just watch them grow.  They are planted right by the muscadine vine trellis.  The Arapaho thornless blackberry can be grown on a trellis, but don't have to be.  I read where they produce berries on second year canes.  If that means what I think it means, we won't have blackberries until next year.  That's okay as we still have a good inventory of blackberry jelly in the pantry.

The other interesting thing I read about them is that cuttings can be taken off of them and rooted very easily.  We may need to do exactly that to get enough blackberries to make jelly.  We'll see how things go.  After thinking about it, it looks like we have a good blueberry crop coming along this year.  Perhaps we can make some Blueberry Jelly this year instead of Blackberry Jelly?

We had a BERRY good day

The boys and I made plans to drive Russ' truck to Oberlin to pick up the cattle trailer.  We need it to bring Stryker to the sale.  I'll talk more about that escapade tomorrow.  We loaded up fishing poles, drinking water, and a sack of fresh dug potatoes to bring to my Mom and Dad and we hit the road.

We arrived in Oberlin at the farm in about 30 minutes and Mom & Dad were there with five of my sister's six boys.  I got out a sling blade and cleaned up an area on the bank of the pond and the boys fished for a while.  They didn't get any bites, but had a great time with a BB gun shooting snakes and turtles swimming in the pond.  I remember doing the exact same thing 35 years ago or so in the same exact spot.  Whoa, is my math right?  I think it is - unfortunately.

After the boys were out of BBs, we got a bucket and all went blackberry picking.  What a sight to see.  Seven boys picking blackberries, depositing most of them in little mouths stained black from eating them.  The few that weren't eaten on the spot were collected in a Sonic cup, hands, and baseball caps turned upside down and then were poured into the community bucket, which happened to be a cat food container.  (We make do with what we've got.)


Blackberries

When I was a little boy we foraged around the same fence rows picking blackberries.  The blackberry bushes have stickers that will tear you up if you're not careful.  You also have to keep a watchful eye out for wasp nests and snakes.  I remember getting stung by wasps and there was a man named Joe that worked for my dad that would spit out his chewing tobacco and put it on the wasp sting as a remedy to take away the stinging sensation.  I'm assuming the nicotine acts as a local anesthetic, maybe?  It seemed to work.  Anyway, the reward of the bounty of blackberry picking was that my great grandmother would make delicious blackberry pies with sweetdough crusts.  She'd make a 'white sauce' to pour on top of the pie that was absolutely delicious.  Any blackberries left over would be frozen, except my great grandmother didn't us ziploc bags.  She would freeze them in Evangeline Maid bread bags.

One other thing about this treat that I recall is that me, my brother, my sister and my cousin would all eat a slice or two of homemade blackberry pie with white sauce and chase it down with a cold drink.  My grandmother always had "Shasta" drinks in assorted flavors like lemon-lime, cola, grape, orange, black cherry, ginger ale, root beer, or my favorite, strawberry - we called it Pop Rouge.  On a hot summer day the drinks would be sooo cold because of these aluminum drinking glasses that my grandmother had:

You would drop a few ice cubes in those bad boys and they would make the drink so cold that your lips would practically stick to the aluminum cup when you tried to drink from it.  Did any of you have these cups?  Man I remember those things.  After eating a piece of pie and drinking an ice cold Pop Rouge, you were good to go again and could go back outside and run around until you were good and sweaty and tired. We didn't need 'Energy Drinks' back in those days.  Well, I guess the sugar in the sodas effectively gave us the same rush.  

Here is a good shot of my sister's little boy (We'll call him Huck Finn) after a big day of blackberry picking and eating.  He was a very dedicated picker and eater.  If he's smile, his purple tongue would attest to this.



Huck Finn with a bucket of fresh picked blackberries

We got the cattle trailer home and as I was walking in I saw a red ripe strawberry on one of our strawberry plants.  I picked it to bring inside to wash it and eat it.

Strawberry

Good thing I turned it over before popping it in my mouth.  A slug was enjoying my strawberry.



Someone beat me to it!

You gotta act fast around here.  If you aren't on your toes, there are numerous birds, slugs, bugs and other critters that will gladly eat the fruits of your labors.


Where's that salt shaker?

All in all though, it was a BERRY good day!