Tag Archives: fall gardening

Pumpkin Fry Bread

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Jump to Recipe

This is that time of year when everyone is all about all things pumpkin. And I’m here for it all (except pumpkin spice latte.. not my thing). Pumpkins are basically a superfood. They are packed with antioxidants, Beta Carotene, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Iron, and Folate. This means they can be a super booster for your immune system. I don’t need to get into why THAT’S a good idea this time of year. They also have a lot of fiber and are great for your skin. Pumpkin seeds are a whole other powerhouse of nutrition and can also be used as a dewormer for your livestock. 

Most varieties of pumpkins store reasonably well (a few months) if you have cool dry place to store them. Lucky for you if you have a root cellar. I’ve had some varieties of pumpkins store for a year or longer just in my pantry so fall is a good time to stock up on them.  Jarrahdale pumpkins may be the best storage pumpkins you can get but there are others that also keep well. 

Head to your local farm market and see if they have any marked down after Halloween. Often they are trying to clear things out so they can get set up for Christmas. This is also a good place to ask for “gone bad pumpkins” to bring to your livestock. The farm market likely just throws them away. Your pigs and chickens do not care about a little mushy spot on a pumpkin! 

Pumpkins do keep fairly well but to make it easier on yourself, you may want to go ahead and roast and puree your pumpkin ahead of time. You can store these in the freezer to use throughout the year. Pureed pumpkin is said to be too dense to safely can but you can pressure can them in chunks according to the sciencey people who give us our “safe canning” guidelines. 

The internet has thousands of recipes for pumpkins. Soups, deserts, drinks, biscuits, waffles and pancakes. Pumpkin this, pumpkin that. One of the recipes that my family loves any time of year is Pumpkin Fry bread. I always make it when there’s a crowd for breakfast because it makes a lot. They freeze well so they are nice to pull out on a busy morning. 

Pumpkin Fry Bread

This is a delicious easy way to make a big breakfast using up some of those fall pumpkins.
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Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups pureed pumpkin or 1 15oz can of pumpkin
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/2 tbsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp ground ginger
  • 4 cups flour
  • 4 tsp baking powder
  • oil for frying

Instructions
 

  • A stand mixer is the easiest way to make it but don’t let that stop you. Use your elbow grease and you can still make this yummy treat!
  • Blend together the pumpkin, water, sugar, cinnamon and ginger. 
  • Slowly mix in the flour and baking powder.
  • Mix until dough forms and mix for 2 minutes until the dough is slightly sticky.
  • Heat oil in pan around 350 degrees F about an inch deep. 
  • Here's the messy part. Flour your hands and pull of pieces of dough and flatten with your hands into a patty the size of your palm about 1/4-1/2 inch thick.
  • Drop each patty into the oil and fry until brown and flip to brown the other side. 
  • Let your fluffy brown fry bread drain onto a paper towel and sprinkle with powdered sugar. 
  • Eat! Enjoy!

Fall Leaves are Free Garden Gifts

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Every fall I see neighborhood streets lined with clear trash bags filled with garden GOLD (raked up leaves). They are just sitting there waiting to be picked up and hauled to a landfill. Organic material like leaves (and all those things you ought to be composting) do not break down in the landfill like they would in nature. Instead it decomposes without oxygen, which releases icky methane into the atmosphere.. So if you aren’t composting, START!
Anyway, that was a small tangent. Leaves. That’s what we are talking about. They are free gifts for your garden. The “browns” of the composting world. Don’t send them off to the landfill! Don’t leaf blow them back into the woods. USE THEM!
Have you seen the price of compost these days? (Or the price of ANYTHING?!) Make your own leaf compost with all those leaves in your yard and in your neighbors yard. Drive around and snag all those bags on the curb! 

When I first started researching compost I thought, “well this is too complicated for me! I would need a chemistry degree to understand all this!” The truth is, the basics aren’t all that hard to understand but there are definitely people out there who have WAY more knowledge than I do about the magic of compost. That being said, you got this. Nature does it all the time and Nature doesn’t have a chemistry degree either. If you search the internet for the perfect ratio of “browns” (carbon) and “greens” (nitrogen) for your compost and read more than one source, you will likely get confused pretty quickly. No one can agree. Really you just take those suggestions as a launching point and just jump in. No one is out there weighing and measuring their compost ingredients anyway. We basically eyeball it and keep on truckin. You learn what to look for and how to trouble shoot. What to do if it smells, what to do if it’s too dry, etc.


There are a few ways to make your own leaf compost and I will cover some of them. You just do what works for you.

I’ve seen people simply bag up chopped up leaves (maybe hit them with the mower first) in black trash bags and poke a bunch of holes in the bag to allow moisture to get in. Then store them behind a shed over the winter. The sun heats up the bag and the moisture gets to working to make you some yummy leaf compost for your garden. I personally don’t want a ton of plastic waste so I don’t use this method. 

You can also make a what I like to call a “leaf corral.” You can use some leftover fencing to make an enclosure for the leaves. Now you have a choice to make. You can simply let the leaves sit and they will break down over time. It may be a long time before you have compost to harvest. This may be ok with you. If you are in a hurry and you want to speed things up, you can add nitrogen and turn your compost. This is that “greens and browns” concept of composting. Greens can be veggie scraps, grass clipping etc. Now I’ll tell ya, I keep my composting with veggie scraps to an enclosed compost bin so I don’t attract rodents or other animals. One way you can add “greens” to your leaf compost without attracting rodents is to use coffee grinds. I know it’s not actually green but it counts as a “green” in the composting world. You can ask local coffee shops for their grinds. Turning your compost will speed things up. Compost will become hot. That’s how you know it’s working! 

Like I said before, I have an enclosed compost bin that I use for my veggie scraps. Throughout the year I always have tons of scraps to add but leaves only fall once a year. I like to keep my leaves stored in a “leaf corral” so that they are available when I need them to add to my enclosed compost bin. I also keep this “leaf corral” available so I can use them as mulch here and there. I don’t mulch the whole garden with it but I do use it around my onions and garlic over the winter. Some people use them in Lasagna Gardening which is just a no till method where you create layers on top of the ground. Leaves would be one of these layers. These layers will break down, composting in place, to create lovely soil for you to grow in.

So instead of being annoyed at the fall chore of raking leaves, be happy that these little gifts are just falling from the sky!

Get Composting and …

Happy Homesteading! 

Overwintering Peppers

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If you live in zone 9 or warmer, you may not have to do anything to your pepper plants to enjoy them for several years. Pepper plants can live about 5 years and possibly longer. Many gardeners in colder areas grow them as annuals but you can overwinter them very easily!

Many of you are already passed your first frost date but we aren’t quite there yet. I have been eyeing the 14 day forecast and don’t expect that we have all that much longer before that frost comes to claim what’s left of the summer gardens. This morning I woke up to 39 degrees so I know I better get on overwintering these peppers before its too late.

This part is a little heartbreaking. The plants are so big and beautiful still with only a little cold damage. Their branches are still heavy with peppers. Deep breath. It will be worth it! 

So… This is actually my first time doing this but after watching multiple trusted youtubers assure me that it can easily be done, I decided it was ok to sacrifice some space in the greenhouse to try it. I can not wait to report back in the spring to let you know how it went. 

Since this is an experiment and I found some new pepper varieties I want to try next year (more on that later), I didn’t want to dig them ALL up. I did one of the jalapeños and two of my favorite sweet peppers. 

https://www.rareseeds.com/store/vegetables/new-items-2020/lesya-pepper

I picked the biggest and healthiest of the ones that were growing (and the ones with the straightest trunk. A few of mine were growing wonky and should have had some support.)

So how do you do it? Well, don’t look at me! This is my first time! Just kidding. I will tell you what I did. Often when I watch YouTube or consult various blogs about a gardening topic, I will get several different answers and I end up doing more research to figure out who’s advice I should follow. Overwintering peppers was not one of those things. They each did basically the same thing. This may be a first. It also gave me the confidence that it’s not that hard. 

First find which peppers you want to save for next year. Pick a good healthy one! 

Harvest all the peppers that are on the branches and set out to ripen if they aren’t yet. All of my Lesya peppers were still green but they will turn red on the counter. (You can eat them green but I HATE green peppers. I blame that on my first pregnancy where the smell of them made me sick)

After you have the peppers picked, go ahead and start choppin! You want clean shears as to not introduce disease to the plant and clean between each plant. I know some people aren’t as strict about this advice and I will admit I’m not either but I think I’m supposed to say it anyway. 

You don’t want to chop it all the way down you want to leave available several nodes where new growth will come form next year. The plants do sometimes die back some so make sure you account for a little of that. Make sure you take off all the leaves. You don’t want the plant focussing on that right now. 

I personally was generous with what I left at first and then went back and cut it some more after I got all those leaves out of my way and could see more. If you’ve done this before, you may tell me that I could have cut back even more but… I was scared haha. 

Now dig up your plant and shake off a good bit of dirt back into your garden bed. Im told that peppers don’t mind having their roots trimmed back some and even am assured that they like it. I trimmed the roots some and potted them up in some potting soil I have in the green house and gave it a good soaking.
While I was doing this, I unearthed some lovely hatched reptile eggs. The jury is out on who they belong to. Thoughts?

Stay tuned for the results of this experiment and for a list of all the peppers I want to try next year! I found some very interesting varieties including a COLD HARDY variety!! I am so excited! 

Planting a Gift to the Future

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  • My mother on the tractor and my great grandfather
  • My grandmother and great grandfather
  • My grandmother with her pigs

My great grandfather was a hunter, fisherman, and a farmer and lived in a time where people raised and grew their own food. At least some of it and you were better off if you could grow and raise most of it. They had chickens and a garden of course. There were pigs too. As time went on, those things faded away. They got older and could no longer farm and keep up with chickens and pigs etc. Modern ways snuck into their lives bit by bit.  Now when you walk that property there’s no evidence of many of those things. I couldn’t tell you where the chicken coop was kept or where their garden was. I don’t know where they kept the pigs. (When I was a young child, there were pigs managed my him and my grandfather in a separate location. That I do remember)  What IS left though is the gift he planted for the future. 

When my great grandfather buried 3 pecans in the dirt and nurtured 3 small pecan trees into full grown producing trees, I wonder if he was imagining his great great grandchildren running around in the fall and picking them up off the ground. Could he fathom how special it would be one day when his great great granddaughter would help pick all the pecans out of the shells so her 9 year old brother could make a pecan pie from scratch for Thanksgiving with his family by himself?  When he planted all the blueberry bushes, the apple trees, and the figs, did he picture his great granddaughter in her kitchen furiously canning, and freezing and dehydrating those very fruits he planted? He planted other fruit trees as well but some didn’t make it through various hurricanes etc.

My son with with homemade pecan pie and my daughter with her pumpkin pie from our pumpkins we grew.

This is the time of year, we go up and see how many pecans we can pick up. It normally takes several trips to gather them.  My grandfathers “pecan picker upper” (that’s the technical name isn’t it?) was left in his garage and I just think using it is kind of special. His apple picker was in there too and I grabbed both so nothing would happen to them! 

As a kid I remember the extra freezer in my great grandmothers house was full of blueberries and pecans. My grandfather would sit on the back porch and crack pecans all winter. He would sometimes do it in the kitchen when it was too cold and my grandmother would get frustrated by the mess he’d leave. I’m certain that he would be proud of us and our evolving little homestead. I’m sure that it would touch his heart to know that generations later, his hard work is appreciated.

The one thing I have really dropped the ball on at this property is planting fruit trees, nut trees, and bushes. I just haven’t committed to the spaces to put them. I need to just pull the trigger and do it. “They say” the best time to plant a fruit tree is 5 years ago. As we come up on 4 years here I think, “Man!! How big our trees would already be if I had just done it then!” And then I think about my kids growing up and picking fruit from our trees and bushes that I plant and possibly their children and so on and I know I need to just get them in the ground! You don’t always know who the gift is for down the line but go ahead and plant that tree. It will bring joy on another day.. to you, to your family, and to the unknown. It is said that a planting a garden is faith that tomorrow will come. Planting a tree is putting faith in the long term future.


So for now, this year, we will enjoy what we have and enjoy what was given to us. Appreciating what has been provided by the past. The gift to the future that my great grandfather gave us. These pecans are here because my great grandfather was providing food security to the future. 

What’s stopping you from planting that tree?

Happy Homesteading!

My great grandfather and me.

Egyptian Walking Onions

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Egyptian walking onion bulbils

Who doesn’t love food they only have to plant once? Perennial vegetables and fruit are the gift that keeps on giving. I love planning my annual gardens but I love the security of knowing those plant-once-and-I’m-done varieties are out there year after year, growing, spreading and producing food with little oversight from me. 

Between the perennial herbs, the asparagus that’s finally really gotten going, the rhubarb, the strawberries, the pecans, the blueberries, the figs, grapes, all the forage worthy weeds and whatever else I’m forgetting, I know we have SOMETHING to eat… even before I start planning the annual garden each year. 

The Egyptian walking onion is one that I wouldn’t go without! A perennial onion! I can harvest it here year round. 

Egyptian walking onions

I grew up in a home where onions weren’t preferred by my parents so I didn’t see a lot of them in their cooking. When I moved out and learned to cook, I fell in love with onions! Naturally, I grow them in the garden now. It was amazing discovering a perennial option that I didn’t have to cure and store and baby sit, watching for any going bad, getting frustrated when they would start to sprout before I had another crop ready. Now I still plant “regular” onions, I just don’t stress as much about making sure I have a whole years supply. Variety in a garden is important. Also, can I just say, they are so fun to watch grow! Everyone who has visited the garden has thought their Dr Seuss-like appearance is just so interesting. I find myself out there taking pictures of them because I’m ever amazed at their growing habits.

These perennial onions go by a few names. Egyptian walking onion, top set onions, tree onions, and winter onions.  They are said to have been native originally to Pakistan or India and later brought to Europe by Romans. They are a cross between the cultivated onion and the Welsh onion. Being cold and heat hardy, they grow well in zones 3-10 and grow best in full sun but can tolerate partial shade. 

Typically you would plant these in the fall, though I’ve planted them throughout the spring and summer seasons just fine. They do take a little longer to get going but it’s of course worth it.
All parts of the plant are edible. You can harvest the tops like scallions or chives and there are bulbs below the ground as well as small ones that sprout out of the top.
They produce a top set called bulbils. These are just a cluster of onion bulbs. You can eat these or plant more. Before long, you will be asking your friends and neighbors if they want any of your extra tops sets to plant! 

They get their name from their tendency to “walk.” The cluster of bulbils will become heavy and fall over to the ground where they will root and grow more. To keep them in control, you simply just harvest them. You can replant them where you want or bring them in for dinner. I have a couple growing in my pathways right now I need to go tend to. 

I snagged these in a local gardening group and split the bag wit a friend. Now we both have a lifetime supply of perennial food!

To plant them you just separate the bulbs and plant not more than an inch deep, pointy end up, 4-6 inches apart. 

You can divide up the clumps of established onions to harvest or replant and use the top sets for eating or planting. 

Over the winter they may die back depending on how cold you get but will return with all its glory in the spring.  Here they don’t die back much and I can continue to enjoy them throughout the winter months. 

The bulbils will last in your dark pantry or root cellar stored for a few months after curing. Just watch them and pull out any that are going bad. They aren’t the best for storage but they do ok. Never store potatoes with onions. 

If you’re looking for more perennials to add to your garden, you should definitely consider finding a little corner… or a BIG corner… for the Egyptian Walking Onion!

Having trouble finding them to order? Contact me and I just may be able to set you up with some!

Happy Homesteading!

Planting Onions in the Fall

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Every spring, all the big box stores are loaded up with all you could want for your spring and summer garden. They are over flowing with bulbs and flowers and asparagus crowns and seed potatoes and onion sets. They have overflowing shelves of grape, raspberry, and blackberry vines, blueberry bushes, fruit trees and TONS of veggie and herb starts. After winter, we are more than eager to get out there, get our hands dirty, and feel the warmth of the sun. We dream of counters full of fresh produce from our gardens and fantasize about all the canning we will do.

Summer comes. It’s hot. There’s bugs. There’s weeds. Maybe parts of our gardens didn’t go as planned. Pests, disease, and low yields have us frustrated but we have other huge successes and pantry shelves full of home canned veggies and jams and mason jars filled with ferments and dehydrated goodies. Freezers stocked full of vacuum sealed produce. We’ve spent countless evenings washing and chopping and dicing and preparing canning jars. We’ve worked our butts off ya’ll! We are sunburned and tired.

Fall arrives and you could take a break. You could rip out that summer garden, put it to bed and just sit back. You could and that would be ok. BUT you would be missing out on so much!  Unless you live in some of the coldest regions, there is a huge opportunity to make that garden work for you even longer! Many of those things you planted for your spring garden can be planted again for the fall!

For some reason, those big box stores don’t seem to show the same enthusiasm for fall gardening as they do in the spring. Those same shelves that were overflowing in the spring now look more like an afterthought. A few racks of brassicas and no more seed packets to be found… maybe a little rack with some flower bulbs for spring. They have to make room for those giant Halloween and Christmas inflatables!

So skip those stores and head to a local nursery (that’s where you ought to be spending your dollars anyway!) Yes, they will be full of pumpkins and mums, but you’re going to find all that you need for a great fall garden as well!

I stopped in a local (ok it’s still kind of a hike from where I live) nursery in VA beach the other day and got a truckload of dirt to fill raised beds I just made and am getting ready for spring when I saw tons of onion sets!

Onion sets are just small onion bulbs about the size of a large marble that were grown from seed in the previous season. Onion sets provide the easiest way to grow full sized onions.
Onion sets are easily found in the spring at every nursery including those big box stores but you don’t always see them for fall gardening.
I grabbed a bunch of yellow and red onion sets and headed home to find a row to plant them in!

Planting Onions

You can plant onions just about any time of year especially if you are growing for green onions but I plant mine around the same time as the garlic.
Prepare your soil by making sure its loose and weed free. Amend your soil with compost and/or your fertilizer of choice. I sprinkle in some blood and bone meal just like I do the garlic and plant 4-6 inches apart to give them room to grow into big onions. This takes about 14 weeks for spring planting but will take a bit longer for fall planting. Bury them only 1-2 inches deep, pointy end up, and mulch them lightly with straw, pine straw, fallen leaves, etc. This will help them hold in moisture, insulate them from the cold, and help prevent weeds.
Now you can sit back and wait. Onions are on their way.

Long Day and Short Day Onions
You may have heard the term ‘long day’ and ‘short day’ onions before. Which do I get? Onions are sensitive to the amount of daylight they get. Different varieties of onions have been bred for different parts of the country. The farther north you live, the longer the days are in the summer. If you draw an imaginary line between North and South Carolina across the country to San Francisco and you fall above that line, go ahead and plant long day onions. Plant short day onions if you fall below that line. If you’re right on that line, you may be able to get away with either. Experiment and see what works best for you.

Day-Neutral Did you know there was such thing?

There are also varieties that grow well regardless of the day length. These varieties are sometimes referred to as Indeterminate.

Which Onions varieties keep well?

Yellow, white, and Red Onions are your best keeper varieties. They have a lower water content than sweeter varieties and a higher sulfur content (that’s the stuff that gets you cryin’ when you’re cuttin’)
These varieties store well long term but don’t limit yourself to only these varieties! If you choose to grow onions that don’t store well long term, simply use those first before using your keeper onions or don’t plant as many. 

Most storage onions can keep at least 8 months but can last up to a year in the right conditions. Keep them dry, out of light, and away from potatoes. Potatoes and onions each emit a gas that makes the other go bad faster. Also keep the onions out of the fridge. Inspect the onions regularly and pull out any that are starting to get soft or go bad. One bad onion will start to spoil the rest pretty quickly.

Now go plant some onions and…
Happy Homesteading! 

What to do with that Abundance of Fall Peppers!

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One of the shining stars of fall is the pepper. They love the heat and have a hard time in early spring getting going. They do start to shine in summer but there is something special that happens in the fall for peppers. They explode with fruit! Our jalapeño plants are DRIPPING with peppers!  Actually to be more factual, my uncle’s pepper plants are, not mine haha. He plants several jalapeño plants along with some flowers in his one and only little edible garden. He grows them for my aunt who could NEVER eat as many as they produce. He doesn’t even LIKE spicy things. That’s love I tell ya.

I stick to growing other varieties of peppers and just walk next door to pick as many peppers as I can haul back home. That’s the wonderful thing about gardening friends. Someone is bound to have a better crop of something than you and sharing is the best!
So what in the world do we do with all these peppers? Other than giving away many to friends and stuffing our selves with jalapeño poppers and salsa, we have discovered some delicious and creative ways to use up and preserve this abundance:

***Word of caution! When handling hot peppers, it’s not a bad idea to use gloves. The oils in peppers are difficult to completely wash away and you don’t want to make the mistake of rubbing your eyes after processing a bucket of hot peppers!

-“Cowboy Candy.” It’s candied. Sweet and Spicy! It’s so delicious on a sandwich, a salad, a baked potato, tacos, or just standing at the fridge scooping them out with a fork! Don’t toss out that extra brine! It can be used to make a glaze or a marinade for meat, add to a Bloody Mary, etc.

-Pickled Peppers Water bath canning them is the way to go and super easy to do

-Canned Salsa. Better make sure you get this done before all those tomatoes disappear for the year!

-Dehydrated Either in a dehydrator, oven dried, or air dried. Store in a mason jar with tight fitting lid. We use the dehydrator and set it on the back porch. Otherwise it runs the kids out of the house coughing haha!

-Powdered. Once you have your dehydrated peppers, you can pulverize them into powder to use as a seasoning.

-Freeze. Cut into slices and freeze. You can remove the seeds or leave them. Remember, if you’re freezing hot peppers, the seeds and the membranes will make it spicer. Add the frozen jalapeños to various dishes throughout the year. Freeze in small batches. 

-Frozen for Jalapeno poppers. Pick the biggest of the peppers to cut in half length ways, scoop out seeds, and freeze to whip up some quick jalapeño poppers later. 

-Hot Pepper Jelly. This is nice on a cracker with some cream cheese.

-Hot Pepper/Fruit Jelly. There are also recipes out there that add fruit such as peaches or figs to the hot pepper jelly. I haven’t tried one yet but it sounds delicious and is on the list! 

-Hot Sauce. There are tons of hot sauce recipes using so many kinds of peppers and some have various fruits added. I will recommend that the spicer the pepper, the more careful handling you should pay attention to. Trying to do preparations outside is also helpful to disperse some of the capsaicin molecules in the air. 

-Fermented. Fermenting sounds scary at first but I promise you is just a few simple steps to preserving your harvest and providing amazing probiotics in this delicious LIVING FOOD! 

Now if you would excuse me, I have about a 5 gal bucket full of jalapeños that need my attention! Preserving is hard work but I never said it wasn’t worth it!
So get to preserving and …

Happy Homesteading!