Fall is coming

While Kate’s busy making jam and pickles I’ve been reorganizing the porch garden. I removed another of the potato plants that wasn’t doing well. We got a few fingerlings from it but not much. I took out the blue curled scotch kale which had gone to seed and then emptied and cleaned out the Earthbox. I replanted the box with a Fall crop of blue scotch kale. 🙂

We’re going to clean all of the boxes out as much as possible. We started planting in the boxes four years ago and the soil has picked up some problems along the way. I also turned the boxes so that more will fit across the porch.
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We’d like to pick up a couple more boxes and something smaller to fit at the end of the row in front of the porch. One box will be used for the strawberries currently growing in containers in the Radio Flyer Wagon. I’d also like to plant some more garlic.

Walking

We’re planning to start walking more. We had been walking with a plan of participating in the Capital City Marathon a couple years ago. While training I developed a problem with plantar fasciitis in both feet. It ended up squashing our plans and eventually led to buying a car and lots of different shoes as I tried to get over the problem.

My feet slowly got better but the right foot was still a problem some of the time. I kept noticing how much better it felt without shoes, but I kept hearing the doctor saying I had to wear shoes all the time. Then one day I was looking at Masai Barefoot Technology shoes and realized something interesting. These $$$ shoes were designed to mimic walking barefoot. So why not just go barefoot? I joined the Barefoot Running group and my feet have never felt better. I posted about hiking barefoot previously. As I’ve aged I’ve put on weight and have gotten out of shape. Although I have been riding a bike more and walking a bit more I thought it might be good to work on getting in better shape.

Recently I’ve been reading Chi Walking: The Five Mindful Steps for Lifelong Health and Energy.

I want to work up to 10,000 steps per day at least. Maybe by next year we could be ready to walk the half-marathon. To help keep track we have new pedometers.

Omron HJ-112

These sensitive pedometers track steps, aerobic steps, aerobic time, distance, and calories. I wrote a WordPress plugin to let us record our information and measure progress. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Jam Packed Birthday Weekend!

Last weekend was a busy one. On Saturday we went down to the Farmer’s Market and bought lots and lots of fruit. I had ordered a water bath canning kit from Lehman’s and it arrived last week, now it was time to make jam! We decided to start with two strawberry recipes from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving: 400 Delicious and Creative Recipes for Today.

Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving: 400 Delicious and Creative Recipes for Today

First I made Strawberry Rhubarb Jam. It is a “traditional” jam recipe that calls for sugar and added pectin. It was really, really easy. Just mash up the berries, add chopped rhubarb, lemon juice. Mix in the powdered pectin and boil, then add the sugar all at once and abracadabra you have jam! Quick and easy.

The second recipe I tried was Cherry-Berries. It is a “spreadable fieldberries” type recipe. It used no added sugar or pectin but was sweetened with apple juice concentrate and got the pectin from apples. It called for apple juice concentrate, chopped cooking apples, raspberries, strawberries, and cherries! It was a lot of prep work and then a long cooking time while you’re constantly stirring and mashing the fruit. After 45 minutes, or what felt like FOREVER in the hot kitchen, you test to see if it has gelled. Then you can it.

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The water bath canning was the same for both recipes and pretty easy. You heat the jars up in the canner, and the lids in a separate pan. Pour the jam into the hot jars, put the lid on, then the ring, and put back in the canner. Once all the jars are back in the canner you bring it to a full rolling boil, boil for 10 minutes, remove lid and let it cool for 5 minutes and then remove the jars. After 12-24 hours you check the seal. Every single jar had a good seal!!! It really wasn’t difficult. The worse part for me was the hot steam when you take jars in and out but if you are patient and wait a sec after removing the lid for most of the steam to blow away it’s not too bad.

So far we’ve tried the Strawberry Rhubarb jam and it is really, really yummy! I definitely will make it again next year and a lot more of it. The Cherry-Berries better be darn yummy cause it was so much work. Lol! I like the idea of not using sugar or pectin but it took so LONG and it was so HOT! Hopefully it will be so good that it was worth it, we’ll find out in about a week.

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We also celebrated Ryan’s Birthday on Sunday! We had German Chocolate Cake for breakfast and pizza for dinner. What? You don’t eat cake for breakfast? That’s so sad.

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Cake, it’s what’s for breakfast.

State of the Porch

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The porch garden is doing fine. The marigolds continue to put on a good show. The strawberries have grown to fill their containers and now are blooming. We’re thinking of relocating them to one of the Earthboxes. The potatoes have gotten pestered by some sort of bug and possibly some other leaf problem. I think it’s something from the tomatoes last year. They all stopped growing taller, pretty much. Although this has been interesting I want to try something built better than cardboard boxes the next time. We let the kale go to seed and now the plants are covered with seed pods. The pods weighed down the plant so much that I looped a piece of twine around them and the potato-cage to hold them up.

Our squash plants have been growing. I think they’re the yellow squash that came up. I didn’t label the pots so I’m not sure which was the zucchini and which was the yellow squash but the plants look more like the yellow squash.

We’ve been figuring out how to fit more containers in the space. If we turn the containers we should be able to fit a couple more at least. We’ve also talked about growing tomatoes upside down hanging from the porch above. Later this year we’ll figure out what we’re going to do when we clean things out for the Fall/Winter.

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Bread Baking

With the sun out today it’s a perfect day for baking bread. Kate got the bread dough ready last night so this afternoon we put loaves out in the sun ovens to bake.

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Barefoot Hiking

Today we went out to Woodard Bay and walked the trails barefoot.
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As we started up the trail there was a couple with a young boy. As we walked ahead of them you could overhear the boy.

“He doesn’t have shoes!”

“No.”

“But why? What happened to his shoes?”

It was very cute. You could just hear in his voice that going barefoot looked like much more fun. Of course he didn’t get to walk since he was being carried anyway. We stopped to take pictures and they passed us as if in a hurry to get away from the crazy man walking bare foot through the forest.

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The trail is nice to walk on. The last time we stuck to the paved trail but this one gets out into the woods more. We didn’t see as much wildlife this time other than birds but there were lots of interesting plants that we couldn’t identify.

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It was a nice morning walk, just a short distance from our place. We finished and headed home before it got too hot.

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