Monday, November 9, 2009

Independence Days challenge, week 28



Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

1. Plant something:
Bought a big hanging pot of thyme, sage, and parsley and a big rosemary plant to add to my indoor herb garden.
2. Harvest something: Eggs. Sorrel, Good King Henry, kale, swiss chard.
3. Preserve something: Froze 12 pts. pumpkin puree.
4. Waste not: Am frantically at work on a quilt for Craft Hope, which is made entirely of seen-better-days fabrics, now given new life.
5. Preparation and storage: Added on-sale pasta, olive oil, lentils, beans, and spices to storage. Stored 6 bunches of leeks, 30 lbs of squash, 90 lbs of potatoes, 5 cabbages.
6. Build community food systems: Inspired by this post about a neighborhood garden, we started talking more seriously about where we could find some sunnier land to grow veggies next year. Andi came up with a perfect solution! There's a many-years-abandoned public-housing house across the street from us. Why not plant a garden in the back yard there? If they ever decided to use that house again and take it away from us, oh well. We'll have had use of it for a while. We talked to our friend who lives next door to that property, and she'd like to go in on it with us. So this week we'll lay a tarp to kill a patch of weeds there, as a beginning.
7. Eat the food: We've started to break into this year's stored food: frozen blueberries, some jam, "root cellared" carrots (stored in the shed) and sweet potatoes (stored in the bedroom closet) and apples (stored in the baby's room). We're still eating "green eggs" weekly, and now lots of soups. We've started to get a bit better about using our dried beans from storage: this week, made kidney beans and used dried split peas for soup.

2 comments:

P. J. Grath said...

Congratulations on your pumpkin progress. We had curried pumpkin soup two nights in a row (delicious), but I still have pumpkins giving me baleful stares, silently asking if I'm ever going to do anything with them.

Lise said...

Oh, I know all about those baleful stares! That's what I'm getting from as-yet-to-be-properly-stored apples, and all the pumpkins still adorning our fence!