Grown in the Mountains ;)

Hello blogland! Sorry for the haitus- it's been a busy summer! I have indeed been crafting, but most of our free time lately has been spent working on our little mountain homestead. Now more than ever we are trying to be as self-sustaining as we can be, with what we have. This year we've expanded our gardening areas by a lot, and even simple tasks like watering take up a very significant portion of our day every day (our water pressure is crap, so we can only have one sprinkler on at a time, and most sprinklers don't work for us (again due to lack of pressure) so it is a lot of moving the one sprinkler all over the gardens and the yard, which is doing the best it's ever been this year!). We've already been preserving foods this year as well! We have a food dehydrator, but the heating element is broken so only the fan works, but this suits us much better than a fully functioning dehydrator, since instead we just put it out in the sun! We've dehydrated a huge batch of green onions, which we made into dried (pseudo)chives (excellent on baked potatos!) and a very flavorful green onion powder! We also dehydrated a batch of grape tomatoes (not our own, purchased from the grocery store in bulk, it was a great deal!), and some basil that I had forgotten about in the fridge. We also took advantage of a 10 for 10 deal at the grocery store on organic blackberries, and so we put away 9 cups of pureed blackberries in the freezer to make preserves with in the fall, when the weather is cool enough to make preserves and can all day. We're also in the process of making two batches of cherry wine, made with the sour cherries from our tree that we had frozen from last summer's bumper crop. We just transferred the first batch yesterday into the secondary fermenter, and with the dregs and fruit from that batch, we made a second batch, adding more cherries from the freezer. In total, it will be about 4 gallons of cherry wine! Yum!!! We also had a gallon baggie of frozen green tomatoes from last year's frost-killed tomato crop, which we finally thawed and made into a very tasty green tomato salsa, with some green onions and three Siberian hot peppers from our garden as well! For still being June, we've had a very productive food-preserving summer!

As for crops in the ground, this summer our biggest crop (we're hoping!) is potatoes! We have about 54 organic Russian Banana Fingerling potatos planted, many of which have multiple plants coming up from them, so we're hoping we get to put away lots of potatoes in our soon-to-be root cellar we're going to build! Potatoes are probably our most-often-consumed produce, and therefore our biggest crop this year. We're also growing= many varieties of lettuce, spinach, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, tomatoes, green onions, Siberian hot peppers, elephant garlic, arugula, parsley, mint, cilantro, cabbage, pole beans, sugar snap peas, and broccoli (at least we think we're growing broccoli, we have the broc and cabbage planted in the same bed, and one of them is coming up, the other one doesn't seem to, but we can't really tell what is what... they look so similar! But we're pretty sure what is coming up is cabbage... Only time will tell!), and of course the cherry trees! I think that's the extent of our edibles crop, but I could be forgetting something! Who knows what of all this will actually make it to harvest, at 7800 feet above sea level nothing is a given in gardening, even in the greenhouse, so knock on wood we have a productive season this year!!!