I can’t believe how quickly time passes at Seven Oaks Farm these days! We have had so many activities in February and March…it seems we are endlessly busy! I’m touched that so many readers have reached out to ask if all is well since they seem to LIKE the updates and are looking for the next episode at the farm. I hope to be more regular with blog posts in the future but the busier I am, the less time there is to write!

Let me go back to February for a few updates. One reader asked how we could possibly top the His and Hers Machete purchases when Valentines Day came around?!? Well, of course, we had an answer, but this time we gave ourselves something just a little less pointy and sharp as Valentines Day brought about a mutual gift of everlasting fruits! Yes, Dave and I decided to expand the orchard (have mercy!) with the addition of more fruit trees and some grape vines, all from Stark Brothers Nursery in Louisiana, Missouri. We made an order for Stanley Plum trees which are a free stone and self pollinating variety. Of course the yield is better if pollinated by another tree of the same variety, so we bought 2 but also know the bees will help us out on effectively ensuring pollination.  We also decided to put our toe in the water with some grapevines. We bought 3 each of two seedless varieties – Concord and Marquis – both of which are recommended for our area. They were purchased as bare root specimens so they are currently in a dormant stage in one of our refrigerators until it is time to plant. Here are the Concords…  And here are the Marquis….

February was also the regular orchard pruning month since this needs to be done while the trees are still dormant. The majority of the trees are on their fourth year of pruning and the good news this year was that the trees are much more developed than they were in the past which meant it took a lot longer to actually do this work since there are many more cuts to make. We once again benefited from the expertise of our arborist friend, Jon Lanaghan, and picked a day that was supposed to have relatively moderate temps. Well, the weather predictions were wickedly incorrect and we found ourselves pruning in freezing temps that felt much worse due to brutally cold winds. It was one of those days when all the layers of sweaters and coats, topped by our long jump suits, did not keep the cold at bay. My teeth rattled for hours after we finally retreated inside, but we did get the job done and the orchard is off to a promising year! Each variety of fruit tree demands a different shaping which is why it is so helpful to have Jon’s guidance. I think he secretly enjoys coming to help us since he doesn’t have many other clients with an urban orchard of this sort. Many of the trees are now so tall that we had to reach up and pull branches down to us to make the cuts. We were encouraged by the evidence of a glut of fruit buds – which are different from leaf buds – particularly on the north side of the orchard which is where the stone fruit is located.  I attended another daylong bee workshop in early February that was presented by the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association. Last year I went to the beginners sessions so when it was time to register this year, Jurgen told me that I was qualified to attend the advanced sessions. That was terrific news! The speakers were impressive and I learned a lot but not unlike last year, after 8+ hours of intense listening and learning, I drove home overwhelmed with new and technical information but also inspired by this new knowledge. I purchased some new bee equipment (there were vendors there selling their bee related wares) and also a blue bird house that was hand crafted by one of the expert beekeepers in our group, John Pasha. He actually boils each piece of cedar in beeswax from his apiary before assembling the pieces so to better protect the house from the elements. My favorite parts about this house are the decorative, brass hinges he uses on the door to allow the clean-out of the interior and the copper around the opening which keeps squirrels from gnawing at the entrance. I’m crossing my fingers that we will manage to attract some blue birds in the future! John also brought his display of antique smokers for an exhibit. Beekeepers use smoke to calm the bees when they are working with them and it was amazing to see so many vintage smokers, many custom made by beekeepers around the world. I think my grandfather, Irvin Telligman who was a blacksmith, would have enjoyed seeing these but I imagine as someone who knew how to use a bellows he would also have had an opinion about some of their effectiveness too! February was a month of visitors to the farm as well since Kate and Jason flew in for a long weekend of house hunting and celebrating with a baby shower. We hosted the Walsh family – Chris, Jessica, Abigail and Lucy – from Kansas City for the weekend. Many of you may remember that Chris was Jason’s best man and Abigail did her best to sprinkle the seeds of love down the aisle at the wedding. They brought bundles of freshly baked goodness from their home to ours as well as fresh eggs from Jessica’s family farm. We devoured all these goodies with relish!  February quickly turned into March but spring weather was slow to arrive. While Dave drove to Stark Brothers in early March to pick up the new plant material, I managed to get out into the orchard to apply the once a year dormant oil spray. This is an organic way to smother any future insects while they are still in their egg stage by coating the entire tree from top to bottom with an oily mixture. It is best to do this on a calm, windless day, but the window of time for applying this is very narrow…after the last frost and before the leaves and buds pop out…so that day chose me this year rather than the other way around. Again, the increased size of the trees meant that I worked at this much longer than previous years and found that even the slightest puff of wind was rather messy as one must circle the tree while spraying and some oily blow back was inevitable. After half a day of spraying, I too, was sufficiently covered in dormant oil spray!

Despite being itchy to get out into the fields to plant the early, cold loving veggies like peas and potatoes, we must wait for the weather to cooperate by stringing together enough dry days to get the tractor into the fields to plow. That day finally happened this week but not without the threat of rain to keep us motivated. Although it would have been nice to have a bit dryer conditions, Dave managed to plow up both fields in one afternoon and finished within hours of more rain. You can see how muddy his tires are! The peaches, nectarines and cherries are now beginning to blossom and the bees are delighted to finally find some pollen.    The strawberries are peaking out from their straw…. and the blueberries have impressive, swelling buds that are the promise for a healthy crop again this year… The trees are not the only thing swelling in the Sauerhoff family!!! Kate and Jason are awaiting the arrival of Baby Ward who is due to arrive April 12th. I’ve done a bit of knitting for him since Kate wanted something special to cover his little head. Here is his hospital hat…(it says ‘Baby’ on the front and ‘Ward’ on the back) as well as a little sweater for next winter…

I managed to knit up another sweater for me as well, a Nordic design, that will keep me warm in the future.  Here’s hoping that the next posting from the farm will be about the newest family member and that we will finally have a name instead of the popular A. Ward appellation he has been carrying around now for months! Stay tuned!

Yikes, how quickly time has elapsed since my last post! I spent the tail end of the summer season and most of the fall helping my mother deal with some health issues as well as a move to a new apartment. All of that is difficult at any age but I think she is settling in at her new digs and is doing well now. I’m thankful that I have had the time and flexibility to help her with this transition.

Life at the farm continued a pace despite my lack of a regular or detailed reporting. The evidence is found in my photos (since I constantly whip out my phone to capture the moment at all times of day) but first, let me share Dave’s current Farm Report, which speaks volumes. As I’ve mentioned earlier, a copy of the report is deposited on my office chair nearly every day of the growing season and today was no exception despite the small degree of incremental changes at this time of year.

The report is condensed to one page, but it certainly gives a snap shot of the current production year with a quick comparison of last year’s numbers. (We are still harvesting 2014 cold season crops with the aid of cold frames and plastic sheeting – despite several really hard freezes! – so the year end totals are just about final but not quite!)
Drum roll: 2014 Cumulative YTD  Harvest = 2,309 lbs  vs. 1,644 in 2013!  Again, thanks to the hardworking honey bees?!?

Here are the 2014 top 10 producers in terms of weight (in pounds):

1. Tomatoes                 573.8
2. Cucumbers              369.9
3. Eggplant                   199.3
4. Potatoes                    197.5
5. Strawberries            122.5
6. Watermelon            106.6
7. Cantaloupe              105.3
8. Summer Squash       85.6
9. Blueberries                66.6
10. Green Beans              61.4

The actual list details 25 specific items but these totals do not yet include the slim orchard produce nor the honey from the first year of hive production!

For the most part, we experienced a mild fall and then all the sudden we had frosty temps and snow on the ground. The season changed so quickly that the trees and shrubs didn’t have a chance to doff their leaves or even their blooms! Case in point, our roses were blooming one day and were covered with snow the next! Many of our trees are still clinging to their leaves but where they have not, it is fun to spot all of the birds’ nests! Here is my favorite one…a humming bird nest in one of the new Trident Maples. I wish I could give this some scale, but I took the photo with my zoom lens and you will have to trust me, it is so tiny that a golf ball would surely fill the nest and stick out above!Our owl population seems to be quite healthy. I spotted a family of them hunting in the berry patches nearly every evening this fall. They have a unique bird call other than hooting which alerted me to their regular presence. They sometimes made themselves available for a photo op. They are heavy enough to have broken some of our netting posts! I continue to be concerned for the smaller feathered friends and how they will find food and shelter this winter. On my daily walks from the farm into the nearby town of Kirkwood, I regularly pass a home where the front yard is filled with lovely bird houses. They are of all sizes and styles so I always think that the people who live in this home are bird enthusiasts too. One day, I saw a woman come from the house and since I was staring intently at her home, I felt the need to explain myself and I shouted out how much I admired their birdhouses. This led us to a nice conversation, followed by more conversations as we crossed paths again and now to a new friendship! It turns out that the woman, Tina, is married to a wonderfully talented carpenter, Vio, who is responsible for building the extraordinary birdhouses. We have since visited several more times and I am encouraging Vio that he might be able to sell his lovely birdhouses. In the meantime, I have received one as a gift and will hang it from the ginkgo tree outside of my office! Tina and Vio also have very prolific fruit trees on their property, so we have lots in common! Although cold temps have set in and the outdoor pace has slowed up a bit, we still have daily winter chores. Dave has a chance to catch up with maintenance on the essential tools and equipment that are used all season long. The tractor has been out and back for its yearly check up and other tools are in line for sharpening! We are forever trying to keep the edges of the fencing and property boundaries cleared, and so we recently splurged on His and Hers machetes!!! Yes, another tool to practice with since it has a sharp edge (careful!) as well as a serrated edge (ouch!) The fresh harvest from 2014 that was not consumed or shared with friends and family this year, was preserved  in many ways (dehydrated, canned and frozen) and we are steadily digging into the stockpile for our daily meals. Besides daily pickle and jam consumption, I can’t help but smile every morning as I fill a large bowl with blueberries and strawberries to thaw for a bit before adding my yogurt to the dish. Yum!

But this is the first year that we are reconstituting our dried harvest (tomatoes, zucchini, turnips, etc.) and adding it back into our meals. We have two full sized freezers (at their max capacity) with the frozen goods that we are pulling from at this juncture for our meals but our pantry also contains bags of the dehydrated veggies. Last night’s meal was one example of a combination of frozen, dehydrated and home canned goods all coming together in one meal. I started by putting a layer of dehydrated zucchini (yellow as well as green) in the bottom of a large casserole dish. I think of them as the pasta ingredient.Then I added a pint of our “jarred” or canned tomato sauce which will help to reconstitute the squash. On top of that I added roasted veggies that I had frozen in quart sized bags. This mixture includes cherry tomatoes, eggplant, green peppers and onions. I had some leftover ricotta in the fridge so I dolloped a bit of that into the mix before adding some mozzarella cheese and a bit of raw chicken breast that I cut into small pieces.  I topped this with the other half bag of the roasted veggies and the rest of the mozzarella and popped it all into the oven to cook for 45 minutes. This “Lasagne” fills our tummies with scrumptious summer veggies on a cold winter night. I hope this will answer some of the questions we get when people cannot imagine how we manage to eat all the veggies we grow! I’m so glad that we only ate half of this dish and so tonight’s meal is in the bag, so to speak!

I managed to continue to preserve several other items in the last months since these veggies waited their turn in the fridge. We love the carrots we harvested and although they are at #20 in the list of harvested produce, we were able to put 20+ pounds away in the freezer! Here they are after a good cleaning and trimming.  Then sliced. And blanched before bagging for the freezer. Much to Dave’s delight, I also processed the banana peppers into a pickled version that he loves to put on sandwiches. Although the Farm Report says that we only harvested 12 or so pounds of these, that was quite enough for me! I made about 20 jars and Dave is plowing through them quickly! And now for the bee report! In August, Jurgen entered his honey in the Missouri State Fair and won 4th place in one of many categories that were judged! Of course I thought this was terrific since it was his first time entering, but he seems to have his eye on a blue ribbon in the future! He also made a ‘creamed’ or ‘whipped’ honey out of his raw honey and sold it with great success at the local farmer’s market. The neat thing about this type of honey is that it is very spreadable and easy to handle. I was able to watch him make it but won’t disclose his secret recipe since I liked being on the receiving end of this product! He still has honey for sale if anyone is interested. As most of you already know, I’m most proud of the honey from Seven Oaks. Here are my jars with front and back labels….ready for holiday gift giving!

The farm and the farm kitchen are both busy around the clock this time of year. My efforts are almost entirely spent indoors at this juncture while Dave is trying to keep ahead of things in the fields. It is a nice division of labor, but I feel pretty lucky to be in the air conditioning (it is now really hot and humid!) while working over hot stoves and ovens during the day…an advantage I know my farming ancestors didn’t have. I also spend a huge amount of time cleaning up the mess I make…both dishwashers run each day and often more than once in addition to the pile of pots and pans I wash by hand. Here is a shout out to my friend Jill whose mother knitted some dish cloths for me as a kind gesture in return for some veggies. They are quite special since they also represent my kitchen colors and are so useful! Thanks for the clean up help, Jill! So why is it so busy? Ask the fruit flies…by the way, are they a protein? They are certainly annoying us in all our spaces right now! UGH! Perhaps one reason is because we have already far surpassed the 2013 harvest in terms of pounds of produce (yes, if you didn’t know it before this, take note, we weigh everything and record each item’s weight each day) and it is significant to also note that the last harvest recorded for 2013 was on December 28th and it was 2 pounds worth of cool season items including carrots, kale, kohlrabi, Swiss chard, lettuce and radishes.

As of this morning, we have harvested 1710 pounds of fruits and vegetables vs. 1654 for all of last year! Of course, if December is our cut off date, we have more than 4 more months of harvesting to do, so watch out! You might ask, “Did we plant more crops or were they just more productive?” The answer is mixed and may need some analysis from Dave but I would like to give some credit to the bees and their help with pollination. We put in the same number of tomato plants as last year but used slightly different varieties and already have (at 462lbs) more than 120 pounds over last year with the season not finished yet. I would venture to say that with the unusual cool temps the last month or so, this hasn’t been a spectacular summer for tomatoes, so go figure!  We eat fresh tomatoes morning, noon and night and give them to friends and family but I also process them by roasting, freezing and canning in a variety of forms which are currently represented by 94 pint jars in the pantry as well as dozens of dried and frozen bags of red fruits that will keep us thru the winter!

There are several new items to report on this year. One is the sauerkraut from our cabbages which was in progress the last time I posted. The brined cabbage fermented for nearly 5 weeks in one of the big crocks until it was time to pull the plug and process it. As per the instructions from the UMN website, I put all the kraut in a large pot with its brine and brought it to a boil and cooked it before loading it into jars for processing. I put these into 8 wide mouth pint jars and hope this will satisfy our need for sauerkraut for the year!   The melons are also coming in now and they look wonderful but we do not anticipate the numbers we had from last year. The fruits are smaller so far but taste simply wonderful. I started cutting up the cantaloupes today and have many watermelons as well.  The fruity smell of ripe melons has invaded the kitchen in the last couple of days. But that wonderful aroma was king for a short time…until we harvested the cauliflower this morning and started to process it. Cauliflower is actually a cool season vegetable, normally demanding about a 60 degree growing environment, but it has thrived this summer so far in our fields until now…when the current heat prompted us to get them out of the fields pronto. Darn, we should have done a better job of tying up the outer leaves over the heads to keep them from the sun, but once you do this you have to keep the water from the tops in order to keep the rot away. So, we do not have perfectly bleached, white heads but they are still nicely formed and look pretty good. We harvested over 37 pounds of them this morning and I got to work processing them right away. (Why wait…that is what you get with grocery store items that have been waiting around forever!) One practically needs a machete to harvest this plant since the stem that supports the head is about 2 inches in diameter and is about as sturdy as a copper pipe. I took a razor sharp knife that Kate gave me when I went out to harvest and needed it the rest of the day while whittling away the outer core from the heads as I processed.  First stop was a good soaking in the galvanized tub.  My research said this is helpful to get the insects to crawl out of the nooks and crannies. Oh, boy, did they ever start to crawl out! Ugh, but that is what you get when you don’t use pesticides!The best way to keep cauliflower is to use it immediately or to freeze it and so that was my focus today. After several soakings in the tub outdoors, I brought it into the prep kitchen sink and put it into a salt solution to brine. No need to really brine this veggie, but again, the books said this helps to get the inner critters out! It seemed to work. I then cut it up into pieces and blanched it in batches. After blanching, it goes into an ice water bath and then onto towels to dry before storing in the freezer in zip lock bags. This is about 1/4 of the 37 pound harvest since I ran out of ice and will have to resume the processing later today and again tomorrow! My question after all this is done, how much cauliflower do we need for next year?Call me the pickle lady, but I’m still pursuing new ways to make good pickle recipes. I think I have a pretty wonderful sweet pickle recipe already in hand since everyone’s remarks about it have been more than positive, but I recently decided to try the fermented sweet pickle recipe that I found while researching the sauerkraut, etc. This process has been a royal pain in the A. I hope it produces something undeniably wonderful since it has caused me days and days of crazy, sticky work which I DO  NOT think my smart ancestors would have tolerated! This is how it has been going….

I started with 12 pounds of cukes and put them in the 3 gallon crock with a little bit of prep…i.e. washing and cutting the blossom end off. Then I had added the recommended boiling brine solution and then changed it out every other day for several days. After this, I’ve followed the process of adding a boiling vinegar/sugar syrup solution and exchanging it every day which has been the real challenge. To be a bit more clear, the first day of the vinegar sugar routine, you simply boil the ingredients along with a spice package (here is my pickling spices which I added to a mesh bag).Here is the sticky mess boiling away on the stove top before adding it to the sliced cukes.  The part of this that is a pain is that the cukes are extracted each day from the syrup and rinsed while the syrup is RE-BOILED, along with the spice bag and some additional sugar before being reunited in the crock. Think of this as a boiling hot, sticky mess and you will understand why I’m not too happy to deal with this recipe as this process is repeated for 7 of the 14 days. This recipe better produce some superior sweet pickles! I’ll let you know soon!

In the meantime, we are enjoying the other fermented crock pickles and I started a second batch of those in order to use some of the 300+ pounds of cukes! These are pleasing to nosh on next to our lunch sandwiches. I wish I had some news to report on the bees, but this is a quiet time for them…and thankfully for us. There is not much interaction at this time of year since they do their thing on an independent basis but Jurgen and I will get back to supervising them this weekend.

No, we didn’t fall into the abyss as many are starting to wonder. We have just been busy, busy, busy with all sorts of activities here at Seven Oaks. I even had to re-read the last post or so to see where I had left off with the summer narrative. Although I was complaining about the cool summer and the lack of tomato ripening, the tables have turned and we are now in the lovely state of being inundated with beautiful tomatoes and other summer crops!  The rain situation has been sparse for more than a month. We had a small amount of rain yesterday and are now experiencing a measurable downpour, the results of which I will report later but thank goodness for this much needed rain! Our gauge said we had over an inch by noon and since it continued raining most of the afternoon, I’m hoping we had twice that amount!

Just about every day is a 20lb processing day for tomatoes and my goal is to stay just ahead of Dave’s harvesting. When he brings in nearly 40lbs a day (which he did at least one day last week) that means I have to double my efforts to keep on track. Of the nearly 1380 lbs of produce we have harvested YTD, the tomato crop (at 333lbs as of yesterday)  is daunting but we are delighted with this volume so I’m doing everything I can to (no pun) to deal with these precious fruits.

Although I’m canning much of this volume, I must admit that I’ve joined the hordes of folks who are dehydrating their tomatoes these days. Here is what I did recently to keep up with the volume. I quartered and cored a bunch of beauties and sprinkled the tops with a slight shake of sea salt.  I can’t get as many trays into the dehydrator since these pieces are taller than slices of other items I’ve dried so far.

These lovelies turn out like this and just make you want to gush with joy! My sources, printed and on line, tell me this method of preserving tomatoes is far out pacing the canning process. I can see why since this was relatively easy to do. But, I’m a bit old fashioned and I also have the equipment and the know how to process tomatoes in a variety of ways so I continue to do so. I have been canning our harvest into diced tomatoes, tomato sauce and pasta sauce with really great success this summer. I am pleased to have the equipment to do this as well as ample space but it is time consuming to do so. I start in the morning with 20 lbs of tomatoes like this.  I wash, quarter and core them and dump them into a very large pot to cook down on the stove. They boil for 15 minutes before I put them through my food mill to separate them from the skin and seeds.  Then I put the results back on the stove to cook down to a thickened sauce. This takes hours and hours of stirring to keep the mixture at a fast simmer/boil without scorching the bottom. Last weekend, my friend Joan came over and we produced TWO batches which required 3 large sauce pots to stir at once! We did this as well as bottled the honey…more on that later. The outcome of approximately 20 lbs of lovely, ripe tomatoes is only 6 pints of nice, thick sauce. But oh, how wonderful it is to open a jar during the winter months and use it in one of our savory dishes! Besides drying and canning the tomatoes, I’m also roasting them at every chance I get.  I do this most often with the cherry tomatoes and sometimes in conjunction with other veggies or just by themselves. I’ve invested in multiple half sheets in order to do this in my convection oven simultaneously. The results are lovely and get frozen, flat in gallon bags or eaten for dinners over rice or pasta.

Tomatoes aren’t our only game this time of year. I’m also trying to keep up with the green bean harvesting. This I do mostly with freezing. Dave harvests pounds and pounds of these and brings them to me in these trays. So far we are just under 40 lbs. I stem them and blanch them in boiling water for 3 minutes before cooling them fast in an ice bath. Then I let them dry a bit on towels. Before bagging them up for the freezer. I use a straw to suck out the air of each bag before putting them away. These are wonderful all winter long when the ghost of anything green is a faint memory! We are pretty excited to have lots of cucumbers again this year to turn into our favorite pickles. It was really fun to have the pickle tasting bar at the wedding but I’ve gotten serious admirers since then who think the sweets are pretty special. That encouragement is just what I need to continue to experiment and so I have! I’ve made spears this year with great success! They are pretty darn easy to do. You cut them as such… proceed with the initial brining….play the Tetris game with them to load them into the waiting jars just so (really, this is a hot potato game since the spears at this stage are piping hot!)And then process them as normal! Yeah, spears!So what, you might ask, is happening with the fermented pickles of 2014? Remember, oh so long ago when I was loading up the crocks with whole pickles to turn into sour pickles?  Well, thanks for asking…they just came into their own recently! I’ve been tending them for about 4 weeks and the aroma when I lifted the crock lid was something I wish I could share with you! There is an intense dilly-ness about them! Part of the process tho, is to skim the surface of any scum every couple of days. I don’t think I could have been any happier to do this since it was a sign that everything was on course! These have been worth the babysitting time! I decided this week that they were ready and tasted one with great fan fare and approval. I took them from their crock and washed them thoroughly. Then I loaded them into the quart jars. These can be kept for 4-6 months in the refrigerator just as is, or processed in a hot water bath to be kept longer in the pantry. I decided to do a bit of both but I changed the instructions just slightly. The UMN instructions at this point said after packing the pickles into their jars, to take their brine and boil it and then then cover the pickles with the hot brine and process. This I did, but found the brine to be just way too salty for our modern tastes. So I re-rinsed the pickles and added boiling water to their jars to process. The pickles now have plenty of their brine-y flavoring to hold their own in the sour pickle world! In other news, we are eating the few peaches that we kept on our trees and although smallish, they are delightful! These are Red Havens. These are not our only fruits to be harvested. Strawberries are a recent memory but the blueberries continue to surprise me and are still producing in two of the varieties as we are now over 65lbs for the year. We plucked the first watermelon from the fields and it looks like a wonderful specimen with more to come as well as cantaloupes which will be plentiful in the next month or so! There are so many things to be excited about this year but before I get to the bees, let me just report on our two newest crops that we are gaga about! Here is our first ever cauliflower! One in a long row of them! The industry is a bit better about blanching the heads and we are working on that but I feel a little photosynthesis won’t ruin the taste!And Brusselss sprouts! These are not going to be ready until the fall, but oh, how exciting it is to see these little buds forming on the branches! I will research ways to preserve both of these cruciferous vegetables!So, we take and we take from the earth, all these lovely fruits of our labors. But it is so important to give back which is what we are doing now with our composting. Our two barrel composting unit has been overloaded with goodies in the past month or so and it was time to unload it and re-distribute the wealth. It is relatively easy to do with this composting model to open the mouth of it and crank it out and over a wheel barrow. The  smell of it was invigorating!  Here is Dave distributing in the rich compost into the plot where were just harvested 200 lbs of potatoes. Its like a little thank you note to the field.

As always, last but not least, is the bee report. Thank goodness this is a relatively quiet time for the bees. We harvested and extracted the mid summer honey and then gave the bees some space. At my last posting, I was pretty darn excited to report that the very first bees at Seven Oaks had produced 36 pounds of honey which I extracted at Jurgen and Helen’s house one day. The thrill of getting your own honey from bees you have been caring for is unmeasurable! So, it is natural that bottling this same honey was pretty exciting as well! I have been researching jars for this purpose and ordered up some candidates from a company outside of Chicago. Think about the process of getting a 36 pound bucket of honey into little 7oz jars!!! There is a method for this and it is done with a bucket that has a spigot for this purpose. I borrowed one from Jurgen while he was out of town and proceeded last weekend to transfer the bucketful of honey to my little jars. It wasn’t nearly as much of a sticky of a mess as I anticipated. And I’m now the proud mama of 59  jars of beautiful honey from Seven Oaks Farm! Creating labels for these will be my next project!  And finally, just a note here to remember my dear mother-in-law, Margaret Sauerhoff who passed away last week. She was an amazing woman who I enjoyed knowing through the last 37 years. I can’t begin to list all of her  wonderful traits here since there are too many but I must say she was a wonderful person and I’m so honored to have been so welcomed by her into the Sauerhoff family!

Here is a wonderful addendum to the last post from my dear friend, Mary Ann Segal who is also a recent MOB as her daughter was married July 12 in NYC! Thanks for the wonderful link! I’ve watched/listened to it several times and will continue to enjoy! Hope you all do too!

Everyone in the Saint Louis area is enjoying the mild weather we have had lately but it isn’t really good for the farmers. For one, we need the hot sunshine for the more typical summer crops to multiply and ripen. We love cool weather as much as anyone else but we prefer to have it when our spring crops are in the midst of growing. Instead, our tomatoes, green beans, cukes, zukes, eggplants, okra and melons are begging for the heat and aren’t getting it. Sure, you can grow tomatoes in Michigan in the summer, but you can’t get the volume we are interested in producing in order to make sauces and ketchup and the like! Those types of endeavors are best made using 15-20lbs of ripened fruit per batch which means nearly that many per day! Ripen, darn it, ripen!Besides the lack of heat, we are horribly dry here with nary a rain shower since the infamous wedding weekend (4 weeks ago now!) when we had rain galore! I mention this very shyly since we would be about the only Saint Louis-ans who are currently complaining about the weather! We are watering steadily and watching the weather reports with not much precipitation predicted for another week at least. This seems so contrary to the national reports of flooding in our area, but do remember that the flooding is from all the rains and snow melts from up river, and not so much of what we have experienced here.

Despite the Debbie Downer report, we are still ahead of the game since a recent farm report from Dave tells me that at 840+ pounds of harvest YTD, we are 263% above last year at this date. No wonder we are running out of refrigerator and freezer space! But the fact that blueberries are outweighing tomatoes by 6 pounds at this juncture is quite telling! Uh oh, the broccoli is also still making bundles of edibles. And the birds are all on their second batch of hatch-lings! These three wee robins took off  from their nest a couple of days ago and the barn swallows are not far behind with their second batch of the year. Dave is nearly finished digging potatoes but with one more row to go, he is just shy of 200 pounds. They are gorgeous and tasty as we can attest from our recent first tasting of the year. It will be nice to clear the potato patch since it was getting weedy and we will gladly till that area under so as to plant another fall crop in its place at the end of next month. (The potato patch also seems to be the source of some of our recent chigger bites- ugh!)

We have enjoyed many veggie filled dinners and hope the friends who have picked up the fruits of our labors feel the same. Our onions aren’t as sweet or large as the ones in the grocery, but they caramelize nicely and compliment our other dishes.Here is one of our faves. A simple zucchini/onion sautee on very, very low heat in the pan with quality olive oil and fresh pepper and salt. A little thyme at the end of cooking finishes this dish nicely with extra flavor from the herb garden. We will fix this again tonight!  The peach crop in our area was devastated by the winter cold and a late snap. We aren’t affected to the same degree as the big orchards since our trees are so young and frankly, it isn’t our bread and butter crop. But, here are some of our ripening peaches. The norm for picking in our area is usually the third week of July…but we will not hit this mark this year. Also indicative of the cooler weather, we have apples that are turning red already! Understand, this shouldn’t be read as a complaint, but this isn’t the normal, seasonal order of things!But when all else is wacky with the world, take a moment and look at what the bees are doing! Here is another interesting article in the NYTimes editorial section last week.

Our area has had an exceptional honey harvest this year, (despite all of the negative reports about bee health) Jurgen and Helen’s bee yards are productive to the point of being overwhelmed. For me, this translates into a great first year as an apprentice. I feel as if I’ve had quite the education so far and last week was no exception. Jurgen and I spent Thursday and Friday evenings pulling off the second, mid-season honey harvest in terms of 22 honey supers from 3 bee yards. This is an energy and time consuming thing to do but we got into a rhythm and were able to deposit 22 honey supers into their garage after two days…ready for extraction this past weekend. When we pull the honey supers away from the hives, the bees are rather curious as to where their hard work is going. Here are some of the honey supers in the back of our truck, under the towels, waiting to be carted away for extraction. The bees continue to cling to the sweet boxes of honey. We have to make a mad dash away with the honey, trying to keep the bees from following us. Jurgen and Helen extracted all day Saturday and took away 12.5 buckets full of honey which hasn’t been weighed yet but should be the most of the season yet. Bravo! They are marketing at several locations in town but would probably send some off in your direction if you want some of the best honey around!

Despite the fact that the bee report is usually last, I’m interrupting this tradition to report on a little thank you luncheon that I hosted last Friday for the gals from Garden Savvy (with Mary Ellen Hetenyi at the helm) who helped with so many of the landscape details and beyond during the wedding preparation time. It was really good for me to stop my daily chores and prepare a special thank you lunch with fun treats and lots of wicked laughter. I learned from my dear mother how to set a pretty table and enjoyed using some of the dishes from my grandmother. We feasted on Seven Oaks fruits and vegetables in the form of Roasted Cherry Tomato Pizza, Bibb Lettuce Salad with radish, green pepper, blueberries and my home made vinaigrette, followed by a fresh blueberry fruit cup dessert.  One of the guests, Tammy, brought flowers from her garden in a lovely arrangement that she showcased when returning one of the vases from the wedding tables. These made the table all the more special!After a wonderful champagne toast to a successful endeavor, we all agreed we need to stop more often and gather to enjoy the moments like these!

Making sauerkraut isn’t exactly a conversation magnet for most folks. Nor are any of the details of fermentation that go along with it, but I won’t let that stop me from giving you all the information I have about my recent experiment with making Sauerhoff Sauerkraut at Seven Oaks Farm.  As you know, I had my first experiment with fermentation when I started sour pickles a couple of days ago. These are doing quite well and look and smell just like they should despite the fact that they need several more weeks to come into their own. So with several more crocks waiting their turn and plenty of cabbage (or so I thought) needing to processed, I did my research and set about this task last Tuesday morning after blueberry picking. What joy, 4.5 more pounds of nice large berries!

It turns out that kraut making is really simple. The hardest part of this is to cut up the cabbage in what the books say is quarter thin slices. I can’t tell you how many people have told me about the box cutters their grandparents used for this. Hmmm. I bet they were all wishing they had my Cuisinart, since I wasn’t really relishing spending hours and hours with a box cutter and bloody knuckles! I put the slicing blade on my machine and made wedges out of my cabbages before putting them thru the feed tube. Again, the ‘recipe’ I decided to use was from the University of Minnesota Extension Services since they seem to know what they are talking about when it comes to fermenting. The recipe said to use 25 pounds of cabbages which luckily I didn’t have. I only had 10 pounds, but it seemed like a lot at the time. Sure, a cabbage head is a heavy thing, but once you shred it to pieces, the volume is unreal!

Luckily the recipe had instructions that were for 5 pound batches which was easy for me to follow. For every 5lbs, you mix in 3 tablespoons of canning salt. I was going to do this in my 3 gallon container but that only held the first 2.5 pounds I had! So I looked around for something the size of a kiddie pool to mix the rest of this in and found instead the white elephant in the room, our umbrella holder which is in reality a crock. I bought this thing at an antique store years ago since I was attracted to the large “S” on the front of it. That “S” was undoubtedly for Sauerkraut and not for Sauerhoff, but it came in very handy that day. For purposes of scale, here is Dave wrestling with it. I used it to mix the ten pounds of sliced cabbage with the salt. I was amazed at how fast the salt went to work on the cabbage structure, wilting it down in volume to fit into the 3 gallon crock not long afterwards. One day later, I transferred it to the two gallon crock. There was so much brine at that point that I have three quart jar filled with water weighting it down. Since then, I used another 12lbs of cukes to make a 3 gallon batch of the sour pickles since the 4 gallon crock is turning out some delightfully dilly smells. The fermentation of all of these crocks will take several weeks of patience before the next steps, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I turned another 9 pounds of cukes into traditional sweet pickles that we so love.

I’m still working on additional ways to preserve the harvest and have discovered that one of the best ways to keep zucchini is to dehydrate it. Lucky me, I have a new dehydrator to use. But even if you don’t there are lots of other ways to do this. My favorite finds were these two web pages about the Italian way to do this.

http://honest-food.net/2013/08/08/dried-zucchini-recipe/    and    http://christinascucina.com/2012/07/dried-zucchini-save-some-for-winter.html

So I attacked about 8 pounds of zucchini and yellow summer squash yesterday. How simple it was to slice them up and put them into my dehydrator. I must say I hesitated on how to slice up the Siamese triplet here. Isn’t Mother Nature curious? This belongs in the annals along with Quasimodo’s Lips Strawberry. I set the temperature for 135 degrees and the timer for 6 hours and woke up this morning to these beautiful specimens that fit nicely into a zip lock gallon bag. I’ll store them next to the dried turnips and will gladly look forward to more squashes from the garden soon and also to using these in winter meals. Besides all the pickle making I’ve also been busy dispatching with hordes of eggplants. In two days time, I processed 37 of them into either roasted vegetables or Parmesan eggplant patties which freeze nicely for delightful meals all winter long. Here they are before baking.

Here they are afterwards. This is less than half of what I put into freezer bags. As always, the bee report is last. Although it has not been a week since I put the empty honey supers on the hives for a bit of a clean up, Jurgen decided that 3 days was sufficient and advised me to remove them today. With exceptionally cool weather to work in, I jumped at the chance this morning to do this. I set about opening the hives to discover that the bees had indeed cleaned up the combs. It was slightly unnerving that they were still pretty interested in the empty space and I had to forge ahead and displace them from the frames before I could remove them, first with a sharp thwack and then with my hive brush. As you can see, I brought the leaf blower just in case but did not have to use it.  I carried all four empty frames away for winter storage.

I’ll pop them into the basement freezer for a day or two first to kill off any stray mites, but not before observing one frame that had several young bees emerging from their cells into the world. It isn’t easy to activate your cell phone wearing a bee suit but I managed this video despite not being able to clearly see where the camera was pointed. Forgive the amateur file. The bees take so long to emerge that I don’t have their final flight from the cell, but this should be an indication. Also, I just upgraded this blog to enable videos and I’m experimenting with the format, so be patient.