Saturday Farm Journal :: Green Tomato Relish

The batteries in the camera died right before I could show you the two gallons of relish I made Friday night. All the green tomatoes are from our garden. The peppers in the photo are from our garden, but the onion is from the store. I ended up purchasing onions and peppers from the store, but maybe the last batch of relish will have some from our garden. The story is the same with the garden, many weeds, few things to report. We are fairly certain we are not going to get the 5lbs of seed potatoes back in produce. We are hoping to break even. The good news is that the ducks are now taking care of the potato bugs for us, check out  this post for the all the waddling fun!

The tomatoes are doing awesome, regardless of their floppy, bushy state. Jason did manage to stake a few. He tossed some branches into the horses paddock, which is beside the garden, believing that the horse didn't like tomatoes. Wrong! The next day the horse helped himself to some plants and ruined some tomatoes! Gah! Luckily, there are tons of tomatoes so the horse can have a few.

Mom did manage to weed one row of potatoes in the last week. We have picked green beans twice, but haven't been able to put any up for winter because we're eating them. We have stored up four gallons of blueberries in the freezer. My sister in law picked about a gallon of blueberries yesterday and we have probably have eaten a gallon. That's six gallons of blueberries from three bushes! God is good! 

Last weeks list:

• weed: cabbage and tomatoes
• stake tomatoes
• pick tomatoes
• make relish
• pick blueberries

This weeks list:

• pick blueberries
• pick green beans
• weed something
• stake tomatoes

Rusty the Lawn Mower

Most of the time he just hangs around munching grass, eating scraps of tasty bits the daycare kiddos toss at him, and rolling around in the mud. This past week, when it was rainy, he moonlighted as a lawn mower in the daycare yard. It spurred an idea in us, well hey, he could mow other parts of the lawn where the dandelions are taking over by the gardens: where it is too wet to bring a mower. We asked Little Sister to move the electric tape to put him near the gardens. Mom and Dad suggested that she use some of the daycare yard fence to keep him contained.

On Saturday Little Sister decided to give him a bit of a work out and made him run around in his yard for a few minutes. I walked through the gate (see photo below of the closed gate) and left the gate open (because we were walking in and out of it a lot). It was open wide enough that he could fit through, but it'd be a bit scary for him (I thought) and so he'd stay in his yard when she let him into his new munching spot. He loves the yellow demon flowers! 

She opened his fence and a very happy Rusty zipped in, slowed down just enough to get through the gate, and started munching in the freshly mowed daycare yard. The yard strewn with daycare toys that I felt certain that he'd either a) break a toy or b) hurt himself on. "Quick!" I yelled to Little Sister, "See if you can get him out of there before he gets hurt."

Well, he had different plans. He wanted to play, to prance, to dance, to run in the other direction, to leave divots in the hard, to place hoof marks everywhere (have I mentioned the rain?), but not to obey. She tried everything she could, even tempted him with tasty grain. Finally we had to give up and let him be. "He'll leave, once he realizes there's nothing left to eat."

About an hour later we peeked outside and sure enough and he was munching on dandilions right where he was supposed to be.

Foolish Horse.