So I’m really trying hard to be a farmer, but I’m just not sure how those pioneer women did it with little ones at home. People always say it’s because the older kids looked after the little kids… but seriously, they had their eras where everyone was small, too. How the heck did they do that? Ah well, even with my strapping nearly-nine-year-old, I find it hard to so much as weed the garden without all the tomatoes and squash being trampled. So I didn’t weed much this year. We’ve had a fair amount of insect consumption going on out there via the chickens, yet we’ve still had a fair bit of damage by tomato worms and Japanese beetles. Consequently we haven’t had an exactly bountiful harvest. We do have some lovely personal-sized cantaloupes (yes, they are supposed to be that small!) that have been producing quite well. The children adore them, especially Eva!

Yes, she is eating straight through the rind. The ones that are a little over-ripe in my opinion have nearly no skin at all and Eva just loves them!

Here’s our one meal (so far) that was all either from the garden or the pantry:

Yes, that is homemade artisan bread there on the table as well (more on that and other birthday gifts in another post!) and lovely fresh green beans in the skillet. *sigh* How I love fresh garden produce!

I have also been participating in the Gleaning Project with the Lansing Area Food Bank. It’s brilliant. Primarily MSU’s agriculture department, but also local area farms as well donate all (MSU) or a part of their produce to the local food bank. They still need people to come harvest the food, so we volunteers do that, and in exchange we get 10-20 pounds of the harvest that day. So far the efforts have ranged from green beans, to corn, to apples and occasionally peaches. This is great news for me as I am learning to can and am in need of vast quantities to make the effort at all worth it!

So far we’ve made these lovely green bean dill pickles, as well as 17 quarts and 9 pints of canned green beans.

And I really struggled to use up all these lovely fallen apples we gleaned from an MSU orchard. Since it was the first harvest we wanted to be sure as much as possible went to the banks, so the only take-homes were what we could pick up off the ground or fell as we were picking. Despite the enormous batch of apple butter that I burned and the fact that several jars of apple pie filling didn’t seal properly and one jar even broke in the process, we got lots of yummy use out of that produce that would have just been wasted on the orchard floor. My favorites: 1 pie already eaten, 1 huge batch of apple crisp currently being enjoyed, and 1 in the freezer.