Recent garage sale finds

Large fabric remnants, a doorway jumper, 2 dresses, portable toilet seat and games and toys. Found all this for less than $10.
Nice finds for baby girl's birthday and Christmas this year.

Make your own dry minced onions

Many people dry their own bananas or apples, but did you know it is very easy to make your own dry minced onions or dry onion powder? I wait until I find a good sale on onions and buy lots of them. It's even cheaper when you can grow your own! I can only speak from experience with an electric food dehydrator, however I have read where you can dry things outdoors or in your oven. Do a web search and I am sure you can find instructions as to how to do this without spending money on a dryer. I have had mine for many years so it has paid for it's self many times over. This is how I do it...

First, cut the ends off your onions and peel away the dry, papery outer layers. Second, slice your onions to about 3/8" thick. Now lay them onto the dehydrator and turn it on. It takes 12-14 hours in my dryer. Yours may vary. Just follow the instructions that came with your dryer. After they are dry, they should be brittle. You do not want to store them with moisture in them, it will ruin the whole batch.

Next I put them in the blender and whir them to the desired consistency - chopped or powdered.

I store them in old glass jars or chipped canning jars - anything I can't use for canning. I also give used canning lids a second life by using them to seal these jars of dried food. That's all there is to it, it's that easy! Just use as you would normally use the store-bought kind. Only this way they are far cheaper, and if you grow the onions yourself, it is very frugal and self-sufficient!

One tip that I recommend is to place your dryer in your garage or outdoors because it will make your house really stink to dry onions.

I plan on doing this to my garlic this year. I have never done it before, but I am sure it will be the same as the onions. Have fun drying your own onions or garlic!

Not-So-Bountiful Harvest

Well, we dug up the taters from the one stack of tires and here is what we found:

Not what we had hoped for. We haven't tackled the second stack yet. Probably the same results. We think that they probably didn't get enough water. It's been real dry this summer, and with all that dirt, I guess I just didn't water them enough. I did water them every other day. I thought I was doing good. There were lots of roots, just not many taters. We are not going to give up on this method. We plan on trying again next year. We may cut the tires and run a soaker hose through them at the bottom.

The tomatoes are just as pitiful this year. Here is what I have picked to far.

These are supposed to be full sized Roma's. Not so big are they? Note they also have blossom end rot. From what I understand, that comes from a calcium deficiency and water uptake. Again, these were watered ever other day since they are in a raised bed. But it has been dry as I said. Sigh. These poor maters have had a rough year. Fungus (from when we got TOO much rain), tomato horn worms, drought conditions and I'm sure something else will occur yet! To the right of the maters, there is a well-aged over-ripe greenbean. I have let quite a few beans go to seed for saving for next year. I never did this before and I was curious to see how far along they were. Not far enough. They are still quite wet inside.

On the bright side, the carrots look well and I planted peas last week and they are sprouting. Also I have 4 good sized pumpkins. And I have 12 pints and 5 quarts of green beans canned, along with another 6 or so pints to can. So I really can't complain. Except we still need rain.

This is what showed up on my porch today!

I ordered an accessory kit for my Roma strainer, a 1-cup ladle and the catalog was thrown in for free all from Lehman's non-electric hardware store. I love this place. We went there a few years back and I fell in love with it. It is my kind of store! I would much rather shop at Lehman's than Macy's or JCPenneys! I really wanted this kit so I can process berries without all the seeds. Now I can can some blackberry jam! The ladle will help my canning go faster. I've been using a ladle that seems to only hold 1/4 cup. It took forever to fill jars.

Low-Cost Recipes

I'm starting a new topic here that will include my favorite low-cost/easy recipes. Not only will it be helpful to others, but it will help me organize my recipes and see what I make throughout the year. This way it will help me with planning my gardening and canning. That's the plan anyways!


Weekly Menu for August 17-23, 2008:

Sunday - leftover day
Monday - Ham in crockpot, taters, carrots, pears
Tuesday - Italian Macaroni Bake
Wednesday - leftover day
Thursday - Fried Rice with chicken
Friday - Semi-homemade pizza
Saturday - out

You may notice we do alot of leftover days. In my household, there are only 2 adults and 1 child who is almost a year old. DH does eat alot and I am nursing still, so I cook for 4-6 people. This leaves enough for DH to have lunch the next day at the bare minimum. Usually we have enough for all 3 of us to have for lunch, or save for supper on a busy day. Also DH requests that I make at least 1# of meat per meal. I know that this is an expensive way to eat, but that's what he likes so I do it. He grew up on a cattle farm, so he is used to eating that way. Likewise, he does not like alot of beans and rice, so this hampers my quest for inexpensive meals. We eat alot of meat and potato meals as you will see. No we are not over-weight, no heart problems, dh does have slightly elevated cholesterol (so does his entire family - I wonder why!) and we do not go to the gym to burn off all those calories. We just work hard on the farm, in the garden, chop wood and chase our baby girl around the yard!
Hopefully I can help someone cook inexpensive meat and tater meals!

What a beauty!

A little pumpkin peeking through the oregano.

Garden Pictures

As promised, pictures of my Square Foot Gardens...The boxes...sorry about the shadows!

Bell peppers in the foreground at left, onions behind(the winds we've had has blown the tops down) and the pole beans in the back. The empty spaces had broccoli in them. These spaces will hopefully soon be full of carrots!

The tomatoes. This is a mess. I will never do maters like this again! These are all different types of paste tomatoes. I thought they were all vining type and there would be plenty of room, but I was wrong! The good thing is that there are a bunch of green tomatoes right now, some just turning orange. I planted 24 tomatoes here. Can you see why maybe they would be prone to the fungus they had earlier? Live and learn!

Side view of the pole beans. We used a fence-like thing that dh found to trellis them. It worked out ok. Next year we will use string and dowels so they can climb easier. I have gotten quite a few pickings so far despite the many Japanese beetles that infested these a month ago.

View of the carrots.

And the tater tires! As you can see, the right side is dying off. I dug around yesterday and found 3 taters. One was nicely sized, the other two not so much. I'm anxious to take these a part and see how many taters we got! I got the idea from Stephanie at Stop The Ride!

The pumpkin vine is at the base of the tires.

South side of garage lives the tater stacks, pumpkin, sunflowers and herbs. Herbs include garlic, chives, oregano and hyssop. Baby girl likes to check out what she can pull on.

My Gardens

I have always loved gardening. I've gardened my whole life in various different capacities. When I moved to my current house in the country, I was very excited about the idea of having a very large, old-fashion type of garden. I couldn't wait! Well, that year I did have a very large garden. Too large. I was overwhelmed with weeds. I couldn't keep up. My husband was very dissappointed with it's appearance and threatened to spray every bit of it dead. I was not thrilled. He did not spray it, and I never had a garden like that again. I turned to Square Foot Gardening. It has been amazing. This year we expanded. Since we are a little family now and with inflation we thought it was time. Here is the garden at beginning of season.
As you can see they are raised garden beds. The original SFG(square foot gardening) method is a 4x4 square. We modified that to a 4x8 square. I just had one of those for a couple of years. Then this year dh made 3 more. So due to space constraints, we butted them up to each other making four 4x8 raised beds. Looking at the picture, the top left has my paste maters, bottom left has carrot seed and a parsley plant. Top right has 2 bell peppers, 6 broccoli and a bunch of yellow onions. Bottom right has pole snap beans. Current picture will be coming soon.

Not only do we have these boxes, but we have a different way of planting taters. This is what we did this year.

I got the idea from Stephanie at Stop the Ride. We used truck tires, so we were able to use 6 tater seed per stack. Also because we used a bigger tire, we only went 3 high. The stack on the right is already turning brown. So we will soon harvest (hopefully... Stephanie didn't have much luck with hers). Current pics to come! (waiting on weather to clear!)

So far I have harvest green beans, broccoli, and 2 peppers. Not as much as I'd hoped thus far. The maters got a fungus that stunted their growth for awhile (we had alot of wet weather for a while), then the green beans were invaded by a ton of Japanese beetles.

So, I guess I'm not growing that 6 month food supply I have dreamed about doing. Live and learn and do better next year, right?