WEEK #41 & #42:Thanksgiving & No More Garden

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving with their friends and loved ones here in Canada.  We hosted Thanksgiving this year and, of course, our garden took centre stage.  As mentioned in our previous post, we were originally thinking about having one of our chickens instead of the traditional turkey as a meat this year, but with our busy schedules, plus losing four individuals earlier this year, we decided to just have some turkey and ham instead.  Here is a list of what was on the spread on Saturday October 12th. One thing we can't believe we forgot to do was take pictures of the meal for the blog!! ARGHH!!

MADE WITH INGREDIENTS FROM OUR GARDEN:

Pickled Green and Yellow Beans
Pickled Beets
Green beans with garlic and mushrooms (minus the mushrooms and garlic)
Cooked Carrots (minus the butter and salt added)
Chips with salsa and sweet pickled cabbage (minus the chips)
Butternut squash pie (only the butternut squash and eggs were ours)
Garlic Potatoes (minus the garlic)
Sauerkraut for the ham

COMPLETELY NOT MADE FROM OUR GARDEN:

Ham
Turkey
Blueberry Cream Pie (made by Marianne's mom)
Apple sauce (made by Marianne's mom)
Whole wheat Apple Pie (made by Aaron's sister)
Cranberries
Homemade bread
Red and white wine
Beer

There was more than enough food for everyone with a few leftovers to boot!

Our remaining carrots and rutabaga finally got harvested and pressure canned. Our garden is now finished for the year 2013! Yeah!!

Our rutabaga harvest this year.  So many!

Our carrots all picked and pressure canned.

With the garden cleared, it was time to turn in some chicken manure from the local mushroom farm and plant some cover crop (peas, oats and winter rye).  So the chickens wouldn't go out and eat it all, we locked them in the coop for a week.  Needless to say, they were not impressed. One project we are going to have to do before the ground freezes is to raise the fence up higher so they can no longer fly out while we are away at work.  We have been leaving them inside the coop for so long now that we can tell they don't appreciate it and would rather be outside while the weather is still comfortable.

With some spare time on our hands now with the garden completely done, the following weekend after Thanksgiving we went away on a little road trip which included camping a night at The Pinery Provincial Park where we got to meet up with Marianne's sister and brother in law. It was definitely a chilly weekend though with temperatures just hovering a few degrees above freezing at night.  Frost is for sure a reality now as the days are getting shorter with sunrise just before 8:00 am and sunset around 6:30pm.  YIKES!!

Besides the canned jams and pears, everything on these shelves and in the crates are ours from our garden.  Hopefully next year it will be even better!!

Week #38, #39 and #40: Camping and Cleanup

It is finally Fall and everything seems to being slowing down rapidly here on the farm.  During the last three weeks we ripped out the rest of our corn and fed it to the chickens, rototilled and planted a cover crop of peas and oats in another garden plot, and actually managed to get away for a week of backcountry camping and canoeing in Algonquin Provincial Park. 

Campsite at Philip Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park.  We left from the Brent launch onto Cedar Lake on September 22nd and spent the nights on Catfish Lake, Burntroot Lake, Hogan Lake, Philip Lake, Radiant Lake and Cedar Lake. The trip was a lot of fun!

Our chickens are now laying 10 per day no problem.  Aaron knows a few people at his work place that will buy them so hopefully that will cover the cost of their food.

With our last remaining peppers (habaneros and Hungarian Hot Wax) we made hot sauce, along with a hot pepper powder. The habaneros are very very hot!  We also saved the seeds for next year.  Aaron also acquired some ghost peppers complete with seeds for next year.   Ghost peppers are 500% hotter than habeneros!  It will not take much to spice our meals next year if we can grow these crazy ghost peppers.

After skimming the skins and seeds from the top of the pot that we made our hot sauce in, we dehydrated it and used a Mortar and Pestel to crush the habanero/Hungarian wax pepper remains into a fine powder that is in this shaker.



We have a few remaining projects to hopefully get to in the last 12 weeks of the year which includes harvesting our last carrots and rutabaga, finishing the rest of the cover crop, making the fencing around the chicken run higher, and maybe building a cold store in the basement.

Next weekend we are celebrating our harvest by hosting Thanksgiving dinner that will feature many of the delectable delights that we have been blessed with this year from our hard work.  We were thinking about having one of our chickens instead of Turkey, but we decided with our busy schedules there wouldn't be enough time.  We just bought a large precooked ham instead.