Came home one day earlier this week to a gift of garlic from one of our customers! I had spoken with her awhile ago of how we’d love to grow garlic again “someday”, but just haven’t gotten around to it. She mentioned she’d probably have extra & wondered if we’d like some… Isn’t it funny how an unexpected gift can be just-the-thing to get us to turn a thought into an action? 🙂

So remember the raised beds that got blogged about last year? Click here or here or here to see a few… Well, other than Paul’s strawberries that were strong enough to push through the weeds this spring, we never got around to preparing or planting the other two this year. And then Paul kept getting stung by hornets each time he push mowed in that area, so that corner of the yard ended up growing up into a jungle, lol…

The promise of fresh garlic next year prompted Mike & I to dig-in & prepare one raised bed! 🙂

(Oh – and we did find the hornets’ hole in the ground, too. Fortunately they didn’t bother us, but Mike will take care of them this weekend.)

We’ll cover them with a bunch of leaves in the next week or two. And we’ll be excited to see how they do next year! THANK YOU, HEATHER, FOR YOUR GIFT – AND FOR BEING OUR MOTIVATOR!! 🙂

We take our harvests and try to stretch it to feed us for one year. Rather than work to a certain “number”, we take whatever our harvest is & divide it by 12. Saves us a lot of stress – that fear of “not having enough”… It encourages us to be more content with what we have and plan our meals accordingly. 🙂

I do keep a record of each year’s total on the pantry shelves with a piece of masking tape – just so I have a ballpark idea of what we had the previous couple of years. Helps with knowing how many canning supplies I should invest in for the next season, too. And quite honestly, once we finish processing, I stop thinking about it & my brain can’t recall those numbers when someone asks. (This blog is actually helping to document tallies as well…) 🙂

Once the monthly breakdown is calculated, I mark each jar with the month it can be used in. It helps me to see at a glance what items I have “available” to use & plan our meals accordingly. Since we all cook here, it allows the current chef to assess his options from our pantry “grocery store”… And it keeps my boys from eating 22 quarts of dilly beans in 2 months, lol! 🙂

I have yet to remember to weigh our potato harvests. While the kennebec potatoes we grow don’t last us a full year, we can usually go 6 months or so. Last season we started with 3 milk-crates of taters, and are now into our last crate. They are sprouting, but not soft.

And Grandma’s special sweet potatoes are wrapped in newspapers & stored in a crate as well. I forgot to weigh these, too – but I do know we had 2 crates full. These taters last longer – I bet we go 9 months or so… 🙂

After touring a friend’s garden a few years ago, we were introduced to these soup beans.  LOVE THEM!  We normally grow Black Turtles, Vermont Cranberries, and Jacob’s Cattle.  Their colors are beautiful and look so pretty in a glass jar! The seeds are planted just like you would green bean seeds, only instead of harvesting them to eat like you would green beans (which you CAN do…), we leave them on the plants until the pods are dried and the plants are yellow/brown – early fall.  Once we harvest the dried pods, we simply remove the seeds from the pods. If they are really dry, the pods can “paper-cut” your fingers, so we try to not wait too long. [I was unable to find any pictures of them in this state, so perhaps this season I can take some & update this post…]

This is a GREAT chore that forces you to S-L-O-W down… I think that’s why I enjoy these beans so much.  They force me to SIT and “listen”…  Good therapy after a busy season of harvesting. 🙂

We do the best we can to sort out the imperfect seeds – ones that have sprouted or are cracked.  Usually, they are in the minority. (One year we did grow one type of seed: Painted Ponies, that had a lot of imperfect seeds, so we haven’t grown it again.)

Just to make sure there is no moisture in the beans before storing them in glass jars in our pantry, we dry them in our dehydrator overnight.

To hydrate the beans, the best thing to do is soak them overnight.  We like to use a mixture of water & whey. This actually makes the beans more digestible.  That being said, in reality, I don’t always have the forethought to do that.  Most of the time I want to use them in a recipe the same day.  So below is the method we use that is quicker and works for us.

My formula for determining how many beans to hydrate is:

1/2 pound of dried beans = 1 cup of dried beans = 3 cups of finished, hydrated beans

Place dried beans in a large pot and cover with water by at least 2 inches. Bring to a boil. Boil for 1 minute. Remove pot from the heat, add a lid, and allow it to sit for 1 hour. Drain and rinse the beans. Add fresh water to cover the beans for at least 2 inches.  Bring to a boil. Add a lid & lower the heat.  Allow the beans to simmer for about 10-15 minutes. (…taste testing the crunchiness of a bean every so often…) Also need to remove the lid & stir occasionally – will keep the foamy water from overflowing onto your stove-top.:)

**This procedure is about half the time most cookbooks say to prepare dried beans.  We learned that the age of the beans determines how long the hydrating will take…when we followed the cookbooks, our beans were MUSH, lol. (Kinda makes you wonder just how old the beans are that are on the store shelves! Not a big deal, though – it is a nice attribute that this is a food with a long shelf-life.) After experimenting with less & less boiling times, we came up with our above procedure.  I say all this so that it is understood that it may take longer to get older dried beans to desired softness. 🙂

Last season we had 21 quarts of beans for our pantry, 11 quarts for next door, and many smaller jars we filled & gave away as Christmas gifts with our bean soup recipe. 🙂