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Food For Life Garden Update!

Inspiration "No single sort of garden suits everyone. Shut your eyes and dream of the garden you’d most love then open your eyes and start planting. Loved gardens flourish, boring ones are hard work." Jackie French

It appears we have come to the end of the rainy season here in Missouri and the heat has been turned up a notch. Summer weather is here. Yesterday the thermometer in my yurt read 100 degrees, yikes.

I had bought a small fan from Walmart last year and it broke last week. It only saw about 2 months of use in all. So with the hot weather we've been having, I was in a hurry to get a replacement. Finally got to town, got a new fan, and ran it for 2 hours and it quit. Just so! What a disappointment. It's too far to just go and get another one, so I'm sitting here sweating quite a bit even while I write and sipping on cold coffee, iced mint tea, switchel, and home-brewed soda, and eating fermented foods to recharge my lost minerals. I've got some great new fermented foods to share with you next time, but they need to be written up still!

However, I do have some great new summer recipes to introduce to you that you can make from this season's harvest. Read more about delicious blackberry cobbler and a refreshing creamy cucumber salad below!

In The Garden

Wow, the garden is in full swing. I've got an amazing abundance of peppers growing, yay! There are so many pepper recipes I want to make that I haven't been able to because last year was a bust. My peppers grew in some bad soil that I had purchased locally, which was not fully composted. But this year they are growing in some nice homemade compost with native clay below and seem to love it. I've been fermenting some jalapenos and plan to freeze some and I'll be cooking up some of my grandma's Bessarabia recipes that I love and missed for the past few years. Stay tuned for some old-timey, delicious recipes using home-grown real food!

My potatoes are getting pretty big and the plants are dying back. I've been digging them as I need some. There are huge sunchoke plants growing with promise of an abundant harvest. These are also called Jerusalem artichokes or topinambur. They are an awesome plant to grow for a self-sufficiency garden and they make delicious tubers for roasting. I am hoping to write an article about them later this year. Okras are also starting to produce.

I'm starting to get ripe melons, yay! I love home-grown melons that are vine-ripened and full of sweet flavor that I've been missing in those store-bought, often under-ripe, fruits. If you have extra melons in your garden, you can ferment cantaloupe, make a delicious fermented cantaloupe hot sauce, make vinegar with the peels (just replace the apple scraps in the recipe with melon scraps), and you can freeze chunks of it. No special preparation needed. I like to freeze them spread out on a sheet and once frozen, bag them up. I love to throw those chunks half defrosted into the blender, whirl them into a smoothie and drink that. Super refreshing when it's hot out. No need to add anything else, although you could mix it with other fruits if you like.

In The Kitchen

I did not get to post any canning info yet. Hopefully I'll get to that at some point. Things are so busy right now and time for writing is a bit scarce.

But in any case, my favorite way to preserve veggies is to ferment them. I think it is the very best preservation method for most vegetables that you can eat raw. Not only do your vegetables get preserved for a year or longer, fermenting increases the nutrients in vegetables, makes it easier for your body to absorb those nutrients, improves your digestion, and you'll get gut-healthy probiotics. Wow, fermenting packs a punch when it comes to fringe benefits.

If you want to learn more about fermenting, go to my fermenting vegetables page where you'll also find fermenting 101 basics with tutorial to ferment any vegetables.

Here are a few of my favorite recipes to get you started: You will love incredibly delicious lacto-fermented onions. And if you only get to ferment one thing, you must try making my hugely popular fermented tomato salsa, which is also my personal favorite, followed very closely by fermented sauerkraut.

The hot weather calls for making more homemade, naturally carbonated sodas, and you can find several on my beverages page. You'll also find switchel there, an electrolyte sports drink, to keep you hydrated and well while active in the heat. And do try the lemonade soda it's so refreshing!

Plus, since it's the end of July, I've also started to preserve eggs. Last year I made just enough to get me through my chicken's winter-break from egg-laying, which were 6 half gallons. And so I'm hoping to do the same this year. If you want to learn how to preserve farm-fresh, unwashed eggs in the shell, get the tutorial on my egg-preservation page!

Rerun: What you can still plant in late July: If you're going to plant a fall garden, get your seeds now. Kale, broccoli, chard, cabbage and more can be started now and transplanted early in August for a fall harvest or overwintering if your climate allows it. When your garlic, spinach, and peas are done, use the space for bush beans, cucumbers, carrots, beets, turnips, zucchini, basil, and cilantro for harvesting in a couple of months.

And, speaking of Basil: Preserve your basil and other herbs for the long term! Drying is ok, but the flavor suffers and some of the nutrients get lost. So my favorite ways to preserve basil and other herbs is by freezing or even better by salt-curing, which allows herbs to stay fresh in the refrigerator for at least a year, ready to use anytime you need some.

Reminder: Consider pre-ordering your Garlic now for the best selection: Garlic is planted in the fall. Read more about growing garlic and be prepared to plant your own this fall. If you'll be planting from your homegrown garlic, after curing your garlic bulbs, set aside the largest ones for replanting and eat the smaller ones.

Here are my favorite stores that sell seed garlic. They carry beautiful big ones, which is so important. Keene Garlic and Baker Creek. My favorite garlic are hardneck garlic: Music, Pehoski Purple, Chesnok Red, Georgian Fire, and German Extra Hardy. They make big bulbs and store well and can be grown from the north down to about zone 8. Farther south you'll want to plant softneck garlic varieties.

Cheese Making: I've been making lots of homemade quark for fresh eating, desserts, and cheese cake, but I also have a few new cheese making recipe that I'll be posting soon. Stay tuned.

And, just as a reminder, and if you got my previous newsletters, you already know this, but...

Don't forget to make compost to nourish your soil and plants throughout the year! You can make great compost in just 3 weeks, and use it for side- and top-dressing your planted garden thoughout the season. And if making a huge compost pile isn't your thing, there are lots of other ways to compost!

Don't miss my guide for starting a medicinal herb garden! Not only will you have herbs to use for your herbal home apothecary, but many are great for seasoning your foods, to attract pollinators, and deter pests.

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​GET YOUR SEEDS HERE! True Leaf Market has many vegetable varieties, as well as a big selection on herbs! Plus, they offer Free Shipping over $75.-. So get your seeds before they sell out or it's too late to plant!

​Herb Seed Collection! Here is a great deal I found for a herb seed starter pack from Amazon. A collection of 36 herbs for just over a dollar a packet. I got one for myself and had good success with germination. This contains most of the seeds to grow the herbs I mention in my medicinal herb garden post.

Your source for information about gardening, planting a food forest, permaculture, farming with animals, growing meat, and milking goats. Learn about making cheese and sourdough bread, preserving your harvest, traditional homestead recipes, off-grid living and more! Visit foodforlifegarden.com​

New On The Blog

Healthy Sourdough Blackberry Cobbler - Plain Wholesome Deliciousness

It’s blackberry season and who doesn’t love to snack on these delicious black gems, albeit the plant can give quite a bit of grief to some. But despite its often thorny and invasive nature, blackberries aim to appease with a bounty of delicious edible fruit.

You'll find options to make this cobbler more or less healthy, and with or without sourdough. This healthy blackberry cobbler celebrates blackberry season in the most delicious way, and if you serve it with vanilla ice cream, it will be an awesome treat. So grab yourself some blackberries, head into the kitchen, and bake up some easy and delicious blackberry cobbler!

Delicious Sourdough Blackberry Cobbler

Creamy Cucumber Salad (Gurkensalat) Is Quick, Easy & Refreshing

This, friends, is the ultimate way to enjoy an abundance of cucumbers! Growing up in Germany, we had delicious cucumber salads to go with summer BBQs. And when going out to dinner it was served as a side, and it was a great supper salad alongside hearty German rye bread with cold cut meats and cheese. So this is a super delicious way to use those extra cucumbers after you've had your fill from fresh-eating.

​Creamy cucumber salad is so easy to make and tastes awesome! I could eat this every day of the year, but mostly, I make it when cucumber season is at its peak and I’ve got piles of extra cucumbers.

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This creamy cucumber salad is such a great way to enjoy them with some fresh herbs from the garden and some sour cream or quark, which you can purchase or make at home easily. Kick it up a notch by sprinkling it with feta cheese or homemade salt-brined sirene cheese. So pick yourself some cucumbers and let’s make a super delicious creamy cucumber salad!

Creamy Refreshing Cucumber Salad Recipe