Homesteading: Eat Your Vegetables

Late June in the garden: The squash is at a stage where the little fruits are the most succulent, and the plant resembles an ornamental. Just give it a week, and the plant will have overtaken an acre, and the squash will be a foot long and hard as a rock.

But for now, so pretty!

Jill has been processing basil leaves and making the base for pesto to be placed into the freezer. Doing this is a lot of work, but then we will have pesto all year round.

A couple of weeks ago, she harvested the red onions, which were starting to rot from all the rain. She made pickled onions, which we started eating this week. They are absolutely fantastic. Pickled onions (with malt vinegar brine) are a very British condiment, and homemade ones are out of this world. She uses a recipe handed down by her mother, but notes that this online recipe is quite similar to what she uses. A note for anyone wanting to make pickled onions, organic red onions work just fine. Just find smaller ones and then cut into quarters or eighths. A high-quality pickling spice, commonly found in many markets, works just as well as adding all the spices individually.

The thing about homemade pesto and pickled onions is that the quality of the product is far superior to what can be bought. The taste is so superior, and one doesn’t have to worry about cheap seed oils, weird preservatives, etc. being added.

We are now harvesting the first tomatoes, and yes! A cucumber from the garden was used in our gazpacho yesterday.

We have an outrageous gazpacho recipe – which has been a summer staple of ours for many years. I admit bias and conflict of interest, but in my opinion this is the best I have ever had.

As follows:

Gazpacho (2 person recipe).

This recipe is designed to be flexible, as it utilizes a variety of garden vegetables.

• ½ onion (less if strong, more if sweet) –chopped finely

• 1 cucumber, peeled and chopped

• 3 to 4 ripe tomatoes –chopped

• 1 green or red pepper

• 1 cup V-8 or tomato juice

• 1 to 2 tsp chili powder (to taste)

• 1/8 cup vinegar (to taste- don’t add too much)

• 1/8 cup olive oil

• Worcestershire sauce to taste (1 to 2 TBS)

Mix all the ingredients and refrigerate until cold. If the soup is too thick, add more tomato or V-8 juice.

Double or triple for more people or if you wish to eat it at multiple meals. It keeps for 2 or 3 days.

This is one of my absolute favorite foods, and I consider it better on the second day than the first.

Apart from the vegetable plants and the crape myrtle trees, absolutely no one around here is enjoying the humidity and heat.

However, it has continued to rain and rain and rain. No one is complaining about that! Other than the amount of mowing needed, which is an excessive amount of work.

Most days, the emu and peacocks spend their time in the shade, with much panting to cool off.

The fruit trees are enjoying all the rain, although the peaches are being attacked by ants, who drill little holes in the fruit- to get at the liquid inside. Somewhere between that and all the rain, some of the fruit is already rotting on the tree. But the apple crop actually looks decent, and we have some nice asian pears.

Blueberries – our plants are a dwarf variety and as such, seem to produce a smaller fruit. That means a lot more time picking, which is tedious. But the harvest has been enough for a couple of weeks of blueberries and a few quarts of berries in mason jars – in the freezer. Jill has switched most of her freezer preservation to mason jars due to the microplastics issue. She just has to leave room at the top for expansion of the liquid, or in this case, berries.

We intend to plant more blueberries, but we will be getting plants that yield larger berries. Our blackberries and the wild wineberries have yet to ripen.

We have been eating a lot of meat from Dr. Brooke Miller’s black Angus (Ginger Hill Angus), as we have a quarter cow in the freezer. This time, we had them grind as much as possible into hamburger- as that seems to be our go-to for cooking simple and complex dishes, such as chili, casseroles, Italian, or Mexican dishes

As this year’s produce has been constant, using both beef and vegetables has been a blessing. Whole foods are the way to go! Jill says that our food bill is way down, too. Notably, most restaurants do not prepare their dishes from scratch. They use canned, frozen, dried, mixes, commercially bought breads, rolls, muffins, etc. So, if you’re trying to remove ultraprocessed foods, avoid eating out.

Of course, eating well is vital to both short-term well-being and long-term health.

Itay Shechter does a great job dissecting the “American diet.” Worth a watch (kind of funny too).

To that end, he also has a message about making your very own Doritos!

Notably, Itay Shechter (@gfbeef) is quite amusing on X. He’s definitely worth following – he also has a YouTube channel.

Horse Breeding season:

Spring and summer are breeding season for us on the farm. We have been immersed in helping the horses produce next year’s baby crop. As the two “mean” mares and Jade, our stallion, had issues this year getting along, Jade had to be removed from the herd. So “pasture breeding” had to stop. Which means we have been doing what is known as “live-cover.” Basically, we “tease” the mare for heat, using Jade, who is in a stall for safety reasons. When he makes “come hither” stallion vocalizations, if she is in heat, she will “squat” and pee. Trust me – this all sounds like a calm and collected exercise, but when Jade gets excited, if he could, he would tear the barn apart to get to said mare.

Then we just have to get the mare and stallion into the same paddock for all of five minutes. Luckily, Jade is a gentleman, and although excited, he will nicely walk into the small pen and allow us to take the lead off. Once breeding has commenced, things quiet down and the horses can be put back in their respective paddocks.

As the mares are kept in a pasture far from the main barn, each mare has to be individually hand walked down to the barn and then back to the pasture in the hot, summer heat. This all takes time and preparation and a lot of patience.

The final tally at the day ends up being two very hot, sweaty humans and a very satisfied stallion… I will spare you photos on all of this.

After 18 days, the mare can be ultrasounded (checked) for pregnancy.

So, far- one confirmed pregnancy and five more to go!

We have one filly, named Urielle, from last year’s crop left to sell. We held her back, as she was a little shy, but she has come into her own recently, and so she is now ready to find her dancing partner.

Other news on the farm, the mockingbird (?) babies have now hatched and are just starting to feather out.

Well, I have a lot of work to do researching and writing today. So signing off for now! There is a lot of information and traffic related to ACIP, but no $250 honorarium for the time spent on this type of work.

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