Turkey Woods Farm: Produce totals, rainy July, and making hominy

Some of the summer's harvest

Time flies when summer comes along. I was noticing today that the last time I blogged on here was in April. Geepers! I knew we had been so busy we were meeting ourselves coming and going but I didn't quite realize that we'd been that busy.

Growing a garden, raising birds, and generally keeping up with life is a time consuming task. After the last two years of drought and horrendous heat that killed our garden pretty much before it had a chance to start, we were determined this year to put measures into place to get a good harvest. We planted early, we used a greenhouse, we set up water saving devices, and we've just been seriously devoted to keeping it going. Of course, this year has been COMPLETELY different weather wise. Sigh. We had a dry warm winter with hardly any precipitation we allowed our greenhouse vegies to grow pretty well but then spring came and instead of getting warm and staying warm, it got warm for a few days and then we'd have a freeze ... then it got warm for a few days and then we'd have a freeze. This continued all the way through April and into May so instead of planting out all of the started vegies we grew early, we moved them into and out of the greenhouse every single day, morning and night until all of the freezes subsided.

That was nutso but also explains where a lot of our time went.

Surprisingly, I sat down today and did produce totals for the month of July and we harvested over 300 eggs and more than 32 pounds of vegies. At this point I'm getting a bucket load of these beauties every single day.

I have to laugh at myself over these. Last year I planted 4 eggplant bushes and I got exactly one eggplant from them. So this year I decided that I would plant two different varieties and plant 8 of them and this year they are producing so many eggplant I really have no idea what to do with them all. We make an awesome eggplant parmesan and an eggplants/tomato/basil sauce for pasta plus we make a pizza with them too. But even with all of three dishes at our disposal, I'm still dehydrating most of them to use this winter. I've tried to give them away but it seems like no one wants eggplant. My mom actually took some home with her but I have a feeling that I will be the one going down there and cooking them for her. Lol.

Eggplant and onion pizza with homemade ranch dressing ... yummo

And just to keep in line with the weird weather our state is known for the world over, instead of having 100 plus degree weather like normal for July, it has been cool and rainy. Yes, rainy ... in Oklahoma ... in the middle of summer. I am not complaining because the temperatures have been very modest as well. We've had a few days of upper 90's but most of the month has been in the 80's. I could take more of this month behaving this way. Minus the mosquitos, of course.

So, with all this produce we've been accumulating we have been canning and preserving everything we aren't using right away. This has lead us to some experimentation. Some have been complete successes, like our sauerkraut (which I don't eat, ha), dried basil, and dehydrated potatoes. Others have been a headache ... and backache, foot ache, stomach ache, etc ... Hominy is one of those such projects that I wouldn't recommend trying. It not only took forever to make, I don't think our canning efforts worked very well either, so we probably won't ever get to eat any of it. We only did a small batch luckily, so we didn't waste a bunch of food but I can guarantee we will never be making hominy again.

Boiling the hominy

Using up those eggs

Our little girl silkie we named Hoshi No Hikari

Some of the baby buns enjoying the grass and the sunshine

One of our many many melons - although we aren't sure what kind they are. That's what we get for planting six varieties all in one big raised bed. The vines just grew everywhere. Love the melons though.