Brian,

Have you ever heard the Bluebell Ice Cream slogan, "We eat all we can and sell the rest....". Well, here at our house, "We eat all we can, and preserve or give away the rest". LOL

During the months when the garden is producing, we eat entire meals from the garden, with exception of the meat item. Sometimes, I eat tomatoes at every meal for weeks on end....because I love tomatoes. We dry and can a lot, keep a lot of root crops, winter squash and pumpkins in our tornado shelter where they last for months on end, freeze a lot, etc. And, obviously, give away sackfuls of stuff to our extended family, friends, neighbors, etc.

My husband is a police officer, and worked in the detective division of his dept. for about 15 years. During that time, we supplied the entire detective division with tomatoes and peppers throughout the growing season, and sometimes squash, corn, and beans as well. When our surpus was huge, he took the "leftovers" from the detective division to the dispatch division and to old friends from his police academy class who worked in other divisions.

Generally, no one who comes to our home during the growing season goes away empty-handed, unless I have just harvested and canned, frozen or dehydrated a big batch of stuff and don't have anything fresh to give them. Even then, I'll usually send home some frozen corn or something with them.

To me, much of the joy in gardening is sharing whatever comes from the garden. I'd be a terrible market grower because I don't want to sell anything--I want to give it away with a joyful heart. Crazy, huh?

I actually have cut back on how many tomatoes I raise--for a few years, I had 300-400 tomato plants, but that got to be too much for me.....I couldn't keep up with the picking, washing and sorting of that much fruit, much less canning all of it or giving it all away.

Had you walked into my house on a typical late June or early July day, here's what you would have observed: about 600 cherry, grape or currant tomatoes had been cut in half and were dehydrating in my oven, which has a convection oven with a handy-dandy "Dehydrate" feature. An equal amount of small bite-sized tomatoes sat in bowls on the counter, waiting for their turn in the dehydrator on the following day. A row of full-sized tomatoes set on the breakfast room table, ready to be put into a pot on the stove and boiled down into tomato sauce once I was through with the corn. Freshly-dug Irish potatoes in shades of red, white and blue (!) were laid out in rows on a table, allowing the skin to dry before I transferred them to the tornado shelter and pantry for long-term storage. I had a huge pot of water boiling on the stove so I could blanch the ears of corn before packing them into freezer bags to go into the deep freeze. Green beans had been picked and were waiting to be cleaned and cooked for dinner. I was digging onions (several varieties) and laying them out on white tables on my patio to dry. Some of them would go into long-term storage in the cellar, and others would be cut up or sliced using the food processor and packed into freezer bags before being transferred to the extra freezer in the garage (the deep freeze in the house being full of corn and dehydrated tomatoes and beans). When the one batch of tomatoes was through dehydrating, I packed them away for storage and put another batch in the oven to dehydrate overnight. When I was through with the corn, I carried out all the leftover corn husks, ends of the ears with corn earworm damage, etc. to the chickens and then I cleaned up, washed the stockpot and began turning the tomtoes into spaghetti sauce. Around our house, when we say "it's always something", you can bet the something came from the garden and is in the kitchen undergoing one process or another. And, remember, you can pickle not only cucumbers, but many others things as well....beets, beans, squash, etc. Personally, I prefer to freeze most things, but some things have to be canned because the freezers will only hold so much.

Some years I can a lot....you can preserve so many foods by canning them. Some years I don't have the time or patience to do a lot of canning, but I still cook/eat, dehydrate and freeze all I can. I have two refrigerators and one deep freeze in the house, and another two refrigerators in the garage. Think how much smaller the electric bill would be if I wasn't a gardener? (smile)

It gets worse if the fruit trees and blackberries are producing at the same time. And it gets much worse if by old farmer friend is giving me his extra cherries and apricots at the same time.

The eggs are about the only thing I don't preserve. We give them away to our dearest friends. Maybe next year I'll freeze some.....it can be done but I've never tried it.

Right now, I could cook up a big pot of veggie soup and everything, including the herbs used to flavor it, would be from the garden. I could go out to the garden right now and dig up Irish potatoes, onions, garlic or leeks, which keep perfectly well in the ground as long as it isn't excessively wet, which mine is not. (The garlic and chives are actively growing, so I don't harvest and use garlic at this time of year....it is harvested in the spring. But, I do sometimes cut garlic greens and sautee' them with onions and chives.)

All I can say is that it is chaos. It is chaos and I love it. I've gotten a lot better at managing the harvest over the years because at times it can be overwheming. For example, I like to plant a mixture of bush and pole beans. Pole beans tend to be ready to pick all at once and are great for canning or freezing in large batches. On the other hands, bush beans produce smaller amounts over a longer period of time so I use them almost exclusively for fresh eating.

I am careful NOT to plant too much zucchini or crookneck squash, because you don't need too much of them at once and they will overwhelm you. One year, a friend of ours planted only 4 tomato plants and a whole row of zucchini plants......it was his first garden and he didn't know better. It got to where people ran away when they saw him coming with a bag of zucchini. (You can shred and freeze zucchini, though, and use it later for chocolate-zucchini cake or zucchini bread.)

It is the same thing with lettuce and other greens. You only need so much at one time, so I am careful to succession sow greens in small batches so I don't have too much at once.

I try really, really hard to time the planting of everything I plant so that everything doesn't ripen and need to be picked/cleaned/sorted/canned or frozen or dehydrated all at once. Of course, like the best-laid plans, my "schedule" often goes awry and I have too much to do at one time, but that is life. The craziness is all worth it when I can go to one of the freezers in the dead of winter and pull out enough stuff to make a meal "from the garden". Or, when I can go out to the cellar or into the pantry and retrieve onions and potatoes we grew ourselves. Or, when someone comments on the fall decorations of pumpkins and gourds, Indian corn, broom corn and dried flowers, and I can say "we grew all those right here".

In a drought year, like we have here in Love County this year, I feel like the garden doesn't produce enough, even though we still have "too much". I guess I am used to the excess, and I am used to having enough to give away. This year, for the first time in many, many years, someone offered me a 5-gallon bucket of tomatoes on the night before the "first freeze" and I gladly accepted them. Usually, it is me doing the giving, but I'm not shy about taking if my harvest is down, as it was this year.

And, in case you think I am nuts, one of my "old farmer" neighbors has a garden at his house that's three times the size of mine (although he has narrow rows and wide paths, and I have wide rows and narrow paths). In that garden alone, he raises enough for he and his wife, his 4 kids, their grown grandchildren and all the great-grandkids. In spite of that, he grows another THREE ACRES of produce at the old family place on the winter. Why? He loves growing the stuff, and he loves driving around in his pick-up truck (he's 88!) and giving away corn, tomatoes, squash, watermelons, black-eyed peas, etc. to his "friends", which includes half the county.

People always try to tell my I should sell all my excess at the Farmer's Market, but I just won't. I'll give it away, but I won't sell it. I am afraid selling would turn my gardening from a love and a passion into a cold, hard business and would take all the fun out of it for me.

And, in case you didn't know this, you can use tomatoes in anything...including ice cream, pies and cake. (I have a LOT of veggie recipes!) You can dry them and sugar them like figs. There is SO MUCH you can do with the produce from the garden, and it is fun to explore and learn new ways to "use it up".

I need to plant more fruit trees this winter and spring....I'm thinking some pear, apricot, cherry, and a couple more peach trees. Maybe a jujube and some honeyberries. Probably NOT apples because of cedar-apple rust. Now that I have the veggie part down to a fairly running, if sometimes chaotic, system, I'm ready to branch out and do more fruit. Maybe blueberries, which I blame on Scott by the way, because he loves them so that he makes me feel like I ought to grow them for DH and DS even though I don't like them that much.

I hope I answered your question in a satisfactory manner.

Happy Gardening,

Dawn

LOL ... yes, you definitely answered the question satisfactorily.

As far as the zucchini go ... if you have too many you might try giving them to your chickens. My Mom's go nuts over them.

I give my chickens everything, including zucchini. In a really good year when we've had all we can stand, I even cut them up and leave them down by the pond for the deer. My chickens will eat just about anything except strongly flavored stuff like brussels sprouts, cabbage and broccoli.

Yes, chickens do eat everything. My Mom stayed with me for 6 months while looking for a place of her own (she found one down by Tenkiller). Anyway ... patience is not one of her virtues (and she'll kill me if she reads this) so she went ahead and ordered hatching eggs because although I'm within the Tulsa city limits, I'm zoned agricultural. Lots of little chicks ... and some rather pesky hawks (it definitely got ugly for a while). That's when I discovered that chickens are voracious little carnivores. They got my snakes (racer type), toads (no frogs) ... and crayfish. Why I have crayfish in my yard I have no idea ... other than I have a hunch I have a spring under my property. I don't think Mom ever saw me chasing her chickens to wrestle the toads and snakes out of their greedy beaks ... if she did, she didn't say a word.

The chickens, guineas and I have toad and frog wars every year. I, too, have chased chickens in order to pull the toads and frogs out of their throats.

The guineas are pretty good about controlling the snakes, but last year I had a major encounter with a timber rattler, the guineas, the chickens, the cats and me. It ended with the snake dead, but from a shotgun, not the birds. It was an awful experience and one I hope never to repeat again.

I also had to fight big, black rat snakes for my baby guineas and I absolutely hate snakes and can't bear to even look at them. It has taken me years to convince my husband that we have to shoot the rat snakes and chicken snakes because if we let them live, they'll come back day after day until they've eaten all the "babies", even when the babies are half-grown.

This was the first year since we've lived here that we didn't lose a chick or keat to snakes.

It was all I could do to restrain myself until Dawn answered. I wanted to say, "She feeds a whole fire department and half a police department". I see I was wrong, she feeds the entire police department and more. Wouldn't you like to be her neighbor?????

Dawn,
Can you be my neighbor? Or offer classes on to be so self-efficient. lol
I can see you could teach me a whole lot............

Well, I want to live next door to all of you too, and especially next door to George and Jerreth and their new goat herd. I just love goats, as long as they are somebody else's! If I had a neighbor with milk goats, I'd try to barter with them and trade them garden produce for goat's milk because you can make wonderful soap from goat's milk.

We had a neighbor up the road who had goats, and he couldn't keep them contained on his property for anything. They were escape artists. It is hard to be a gardener AND raise goats (isn't it, George), because if your fence fails, the goats will eat their way through the garden in a flash.

"WMD" is how a gardener spells "goat." But we pretty much have the goats under control. We didn't have any catastrophes this year.

Our daughters make goat milk soap. It's great. I use it in my shaving mug, and when traveling it's both my body soap and shampoo. But the ladies wouldn't use it in their hair.

By the way, to freeze eggs, just break about a half dozen into a bowl, add a pinch of salt, beat them, and seal them in a zip lock bag. Lay that zip lock bag on a flat surface in your freezer until it's solid. The zip lock bags stack very nicely. Once thawed the eggs taste just like fresh. I have also frozen individual eggs in ice cube trays (without salt). That works okay, but I find it too time consuming and the "egg cubes" don't come out of the tray easily.

With the kids grown and moving out we're finding we need to UP our production.

George

George,

Love the "WMD" reference. My brother had goats for several years, and I didn't care much for them--his were very destructive to the landscape if they got out of the pen. A friend of ours up the road has a different kind of goats than my brother had and I really like those goats--they were the kids' 4-H project in school, but the kids are all grown up now and the goats are pets.

Thanks for the tip on freezing eggs. I'll probably do it this spring when they are laying heavily again. I don't mind giving away the extra eggs, but would like to freeze some to get us through the brief part of the late falll/winter in which production drops. Our girls have already molted and started laying eggs again, but the guineas stop laying when it gets cold.

Isn't it funny that you're having to UP your production now? It takes a lot more to feed more households though.

Dawn

OK, I missed something, I think. What does WMD mean?

George, I'm glad to know about the egg freezing technique, too. I will freeze egg whites or yolks, depending on what I have. If I'm making angel food cake, it's the yolks. Then there are other recipes that only call for the yolks. I usually have no problem with the whites, as I put them in a straight-sided 8-oz jar with a tight-fitting lid and all's well. But the yolks are another matter. I pierce the yolks, put them in a little jar and cover with a little water, but they always get a little gummy before I'm ready to thaw and use them. I'll try whisking them next time and put them in a bag.

I think he's referring to goats as WMD ... weapons of mass destruction.

Our children had goats when we lived near Norman. For several days, I found them in the yard and could not figure out how they got there. We had white metal pipe fencing and the horizonal pipes were about 9 inches apart and then there was four inch wire mesh inside that. There was just no way to knock it down. But the gate was also pipe and was made the same way. It was high enough from the ground so it would swing easily. One day I watched as they headed for that gate. They got down on the ground and scooted under just like a cat or dog would do. Once they got out that gate they turned and came into the open gate to the yard. Only took a couple of times of finding them on top of DHs Corvette before the problem got solved.

My first experience with goats was one summer when I worked for the American Sunday School Association, in the Appalachians of Southern Ohio. I stayed with a missionary and his family and helped with five day clubs. The missionary's grown son still lived at home and was seeing a young lady who had goats. One day he drove over to her place, in one of those little red sports cars with a black vinyl roof.... While he was sitting with her, in the living room (minding his p's & q's) he looked out the window to see the goats ON TOP of his car, pulling the vinyl off its frame! The "p's & q's" were temporarily forgotten!

Nevertheless I have concluded, after about 3 years raising milking goats, that the goat is one of the most practical homesteading animals, right up there with chickens and rabbits. It's just very important to have GOOD fencing. We have one wether, named Barbacoa (Spanish for BBQ) who keeps jumping fences and even leading the others into our yard. I keep fixing and improving the defenses and Barbacoa keeps finding new ways to get in. Anyway, as his name implies, his destiny is already determined. Probably next weekend he'll be relocated to the freezer.

Yes, "WMD" stands for "weapons of mass destruction." Still, goats are producers of great fertilizer. Their milk is fantastic, and the meat is second to none. They are as large an animal as I would undertake butchering on my own.

Goats, in spite of their mischievousness, are very winsome creatures. I could easily see how someone living alone would get VERY attached to them. The does are incredibly sweet.

George

George,

One day in November, another fire rehab person and I were coming back into town from a very large wildfire northwest of Marietta. We were in a hurry to pick up a few cases of Gatorade and water and traveling down a back road neither of us had ever been down before, thinking it might be a shortcut back to town. Well, it really wasn't short, but it was scenic.

As we drove towards town, we passed a house that almost stopped us in our tracks.....they had goats, goats, goats, goats, goats! There had to have been several dozen, and they were fairly small, about the size of fainting goats. I've never seen that many in one place, except for commercial meat herds. The goats were milling around in the yard around the house, not off in a fenced-in pasture with a barn or anything. Of course, with a wildfire a couple of miles away, there's always a chance the goats had been moved out of an adjoining pasture up closer to the house so the owner could keep an eye on them in case the wind changed direction and caused the fire to head their way.

Clearly, whoever lived there was a goat person. The young lady who was with me is a goat person, but usually only has about 5 to 7 or 8 at any given time. Even she said "That's a lot of goats!"

Dawn

Well if you breed them, as for milking goats, they do multiply very rapidly. Our flock fluctuates between, say 5, and a dozen. Head Country BBQ sauce is a good population control device.

George

Dawn, I'm so glad you mentioned the dehydrate feature on your convection oven. Turns out I have it too. There was nothing mentioned in the owner's manual, but I did some poking around on the internet to find out how to turn it on. Apparently until 2006 there was a conversion kit available too, now discontinued. With more internet research I know to use a stopper and racks I already own.

I am so pleased. I've wanted a dehydrater for a long time. Turns out it was sitting my kitchen the whole time. Thanks for the tip!

Seedmama

Seedmama,

I've had a dehydrator for years and, while it is does a fine job, I can dry huge batches on the three racks in the oven. Ironically, I wasn't sure I'd ever use the convection feature of the stove, but liked the stove "in spite of it" so purchased it anyway. Then, on the ride home, I was reading through the stove's owner's manual and saw a line that said "How To Use the Dehydrate Feature". I turned to DH and said, "Oh, now I can dehydrate big batches of produce" and he said "Oh, OK, whatever". He wasn't nearly as excited as I was. I was even more excited after I used it! The stove is a Bosch and everything is electronic and I am pretty sure this stove has a higher IQ than I do. It is am amazing appliance and, if it is possible to love your stove, then I love my stove. I made Christmas dinner for 30 people and it was amazingly easy.....you know, it's one of those things that sounded harder than it was.

Next summer, we may buy the matching Bosch refrigerator, and then we can move our Whirlpool fridge to the garage/barn so I'll have another extra fridge/freezer out there. I remember visiting my aunt and uncle in east Texas a few years ago after they retired to their lake house there, and they had a refrigerator and freezer in the house, another set in the garage, and yet another set in the barn. I thought they'd kind of gone off the deep end, but they did have a really big garden....several gardens, in fact. Now, I have what they had......and I am fairly sure I haven't gone off the deep end (yet).

Dawn

I have one Bosch dishwasher and 5 Bosch tankless hot water heaters. Love them all. When I was shopping for the dishwasher, I wanted a minimum of features. Assuming that all would clean well, I only wanted quiet, and a delayed start. It turns out the delayed start was an unnecessary feature, because the thing is so quiet we can eat in the kitchen sitting right next to it and never even notice it is on.

When I was growing up we had the multiple frige and freezer set up. We only went to town twice a month, so the quantity of milk, bread and eggs made the bag boys think we were preparing for a natural disaster. Dad wouldn't have chickens, but we raised our own beef and pork.

I have only two fridges and two freezers, but with the grocery store 15 miles away, I find that I, too, only buy groceries about twice a month.

The dehydration thing has me really excited. I think I'll start a new thread.