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Category Archives: garden

Salsa Making

September 23, 2011 – 4:29 pm
Posted in food, garden
Tagged canning, homemade, jars, peppers, salsa, tomatoes
Comments (4)

The garden is doing pretty well producing tomatoes, especially given our late start on everything and slow developing summer. Not enough to make tomato sauce. Ken suggested salsa so I bought a bunch of peppers at the farmers market and figured out a recipe and well, I took a few photos along the way also.

Peppers at the market

Halved garden tomatoes ready to start the process

Juicy Walla Walla onions

Cooking the tomatoes

These are about ready to be put through the food mill

I roasted the peppers on the grill

There’s the pureed tomato sauce

And there it is quite a bit reduced. I like my salsa on the thick side

Chopped peppers, onions, garlic

Spices – cumin, red sea salt, chile powder, chipotle powder

All mixed together in the pot

The finished product

I added a 1/4 teaspoon citric acid to each jar to boost the acidity

Evening in the Garden

With good weather finally happening, the garden is really coming to life with new growth and flowers everywhere. Evening light, just before sunset gives all the foliage and blooms a glow you don’t see during the day and I find it irrisistable. One day this week the constant breeze or gusty winds finally quit and I was able to photograph the sights around my house.

This seems like a lot of images for a blog post. There were many more they didn’t make the cut!

Compost – Brown Gold for Gardeners

The weather still feels like March around here – blustery with a constant threat of snow squalls or rain. Still, it’s time to work on the garden and pretend that Spring will be here before summer. It could be one of those years where the temperatures just get hot and stay there without a Spring reprieve from the extremes of heat and cold.

So despite the weather we we did a garden survey and decided that the raspberries we planted last year will need more room and soon, that is if we want to get lots of raspberries and of course, we do! So, where to put them? They are in the new upper garden next to the house, the one we created out of a barren lawn two years ago. The most logical place to expand seems to be the old lower garden on the hillside below the house. The plan is to sheet mulch the area to be added to the fenced garden this summer, put in the fence posts in the fall and add the fencing next spring, just in time to start the big raspberry move.

But first, there were two big compost bins that I had made out of pallets and baling twine the summer before last and they were in the way. So to begin with, I took out the ‘finished’ compost and spread it on the garden beds. What a lovely sight for a gardener – fresh compost – it just doesn’t get any better than that.

And then, I had to dismantle the bins and move the older compost to wait and continue to rot til next Spring.

The compost for next year looks really good on top of the pile but down inside there is still lots of work for the worms and other composting agents of the soil.

And I’ve already started on the pile for 2013!

The garlic got a good layer of compost and chicken manure and then I pulled last fall’s mulch back over it to help keep it warm for now and also to supress the weeds.

And it looks like we might soon have daffodils in bloom.

Making Lox

Our neighbor shared some homemade lox with us last year and when I expressed interest in learning how to make our own from freshly caught fish, he volunteered to teach me this year. The first step is having an excellent salmon and he generously provided an Alaskan Sockeye. With a deft hand and a sharp knife he had it quickly filleted and ready to be cured.