Vintage Home and Farm

Finding time to harvest and preserve every day is challenging, but during this time of year it's our goal to carve out a bit of time in the schedule each day to do so.  In order to take advantage of all the food growing in the garden, as well as to make sure we have home grown food to last us all year, diligence is required. Doing a little bit each day helps ensure we don't become overwhelmed.   When we first started preserving food, we didn't know what we were doing.  Canning initially seemed to be the thing to do, however, canning is very time consuming. We've come to realize how much easier it is to freeze food and how more nutrients are saved by freezing rather than canning. We still enjoy having a portion of our preserved food as canned for the sake of convenience and because we have limited freezer space.  But at least half of what we save nowadays is either frozen, fermented or dehydrated. I wanted to share with you the ways in which we have been preservi...

As the cherries have been ripening over the past few weeks, we've periodically picked a big bowl full from the old sour cherry tree in our pasture. Sour cherries need to be pitted right away and placed in lemon juice to keep them from turning brown.  We've found it best to go ahead and freeze the cherries once they're cleaned and pitted, placing them in gallon-sized freezer bags and tucking them away into our upright freezer.  This also makes the chore easier by breaking it down into multiple segments; we don't have to worry about canning the cherries until later.  Yesterday, as I was going through the freezer, I realized we had squirreled away 4 gallon-sized bags of cherries. Since we're harvesting more vegetables and need freezer space, it was time to take all the frozen cherries out and make cherry pie filling.   The beautiful, enormous jars of sour cherry pie filling are one of my favorite pantry foods. Cherry pie filling comes in handy when we need to make ...

The zucchini is going gangbusters and so it's time get out my favorite zucchini relish recipe. Quite a few years ago, my amazing sister, Cathy, introduced me to the wonders of zucchini relish and I have been making it every summer since then. Zucchini relish is one of the best ways to use up extra zucchini and it's as easy to make as jam.  If you regularly enjoy water bath canning homemade jams, then you will want to add this easy, versatile relish to your pantry as well.   While homemade zucchini relish is wonderful as a spread on sandwiches and hot dogs, it is also the secret ingredient that enhances many other recipes.  For example, we use our homemade zucchini relish when we make thousand island dressing, tarter sauce, potato salad, egg salad sandwiches and tuna sandwiches. Once you experience the sweet and zesty flavor of homemade zucchini relish, you will be spoiled forever and won't be able to tolerate commercial relish.  My favorite zucchini relish recip...

Flowers in a riot of colors are growing everywhere in the garden.  Most of the flowers are donors that took root on their own. I've never seen flowers grow so tall.  We had an enormous patch of cilantro that was all donor plants, growing in among the asparagus and potatoes.  Now the cilantro has produced lacy white flowers that tower over us at 7 feet tall.  Eventually these will give us coriander seeds and I suppose this year I'd better harvest all of it before it sends an even greater proliferation of seeds into the ground for next year. Six foot tall blue cornflower (below) is helping to stake up the tomato bushes on one side. I'm not sure how we're going to pick tomatoes since the cornflowers have bushed out into the aisle.  Once spiders begin making their home here, it will be dicey trying to pick tomatoes every day. We finally harvested the rest of the peas and tore out all the pea plants, exposing nasturtiums growing underneath. Below is the fencing the p...

My daughter made the most luscious, from-scratch birthday cake for me the other day. It was a white cake with lemon filling and lemon frosting. She even made a decoration for the top: the word "love" which she wrote on waxed paper with melted carob, and then refrigerated until it was hard. We enjoyed the cake so much that we thought we would share our alteration of the vintage Betty Crocker recipes.  We've altered the ingredients so that the cake would be dairy free. Dairy-Free Snowflake Cake Originally from the 1961 Betty Crocker Cookbook, altered to be lactose free 2 cups plus 2 Tbsp. all purpose flour 1 1/2 cups sugar 3 1/2 tsp. baking powder 1 tsp. salt 1/2 cup shortening 1 cup soy milk 1 tsp. vanilla 4 egg whites (1/2 to 2/3 cup) Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 9-inch layer pans. Using a whisk, thoroughly blend flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a large bowl.  Add shortening, soy milk, and vanilla, and beat for 2 minutes, scraping bowl.  Add egg...

There is so much to harvest and preserve! Yesterday and today we spent some time in the garden, picking peas, cauliflower, cabbage, zucchini, broccoli, onions, herbs, and blueberries.  We also dug out one big area of potatoes and harvested cherries from the sour cherry tree.  In the evenings we shell peas. This kind of chore is more enjoyable with a glass of wine and the TV. Thank you for joining us as we shared 30 days of photos from our little farm.

We were looking back through photos of the house and property from when we first bought this place 3 years ago to now, and it's amazing how far we've come during that time.  There have been both major updates to the house and many small improvements as well.  One small change we made was simply cleaning up the flowerbed at the front of the house. Below is a photo of the flowerbed in 2017 before we did anything to it. As you can see, the little flowerbed had been neglected for years and it showed.  It had multiple problems, the first of which being that the flowerbed had been lined with landscape fabric and then covered with rocks.  As time marched by, grass then grew over the rocks.  Because of this, weeding was going to take a lot of effort.  Additionally, hornets and wasps had built nests in the ground and on the  siding of the house.  Needless to say, the flowerbed was not an inviting spot. We finally cleaned up the flowerbed this past April. A...