 But they won't be ready to eat till 8/19/20. I am making sweet garlic dill chips today and they will be ready on the same date as the beets. GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT!
 For the last 4 nights I have had a tree frog on the glass of my kitchen window. He/she comes when it gets dark to hunt bugs as the light over the sink has been on while I have been canning. I wanted to get a better picture of the frog so I took the screen off the window , but realized it hadn't been washed since.........? Anyway as I was washing it the frog became shy and moved away from the middle of the window. I guess the frog didn't like my attempt to clean the window...it disrupted it's feeding strategy.  With a heat wave coming this weekend I decided not to go to the Tuesday farmers and take advantage of the cooler weather to do some canning. I picked up some pickling cukes at local farms as mine are still only the size of my little finger. I made Bread and Butter pickles and a Indian-style cucumber relish with onions, whole cumin seed, black and yellow mustard seeds. My house now smells like a pickle factory..or at least what a pickle factory might smell like. When Brandon and I got married in Merrimack in June of 1991, the wedding was outside under a tent. Once the wedding was over we had a large area covered in sand and decided to put in a garden. Our neighbor had piles of old manure and was willing to bring it over for free. So we constructed raised mounds with a underground watering system and covered the mounds with weed block and put wood chips on the paths between the mounds. The garden was HUGE (the tent's footprint was big enough for 82 people at 10 round tables plus the buffet)....we had pickling cukes, tomatoes, pumpkins ,winter squash and I don't remember what else(oh Broccoli). But we had to can it ,store it or freeze it. We canned kosher dill pickles,stewed tomatoes and made gallons of tomato sauce. I also had trained the raspberry bushes, so there was quite a bit of jam. The oil painting below was done by my mother and given to me for Christmas of 1991 and it is called "The Pickle Factory" . Everyone in my family enjoyed our pickles and we gave them away as fast as we made them or ate them ourselves. The picture has become my logo for the farm and Webster Ridge Locally Grown.  You never know what you will see when you look out the kitchen window while you do the dishes. Sometimes it is loose sheep in a field or in the greenhouse where they don't belong or loose laying hens in the grass. But today it was a hen turkey and 2 poults in the tall grass. The hen flew over the fence and had to come back to the log to find her poults who had to come through the holes in the metal fencing. Last night as I was closing up the laying hens there were many tiny frogs jumping in the long grass. If I had Zorra with me she would have been chasing them!  |
Mary Will Sussman Archives
May 2023
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