Theft, September Is Preparedness Month/ Covid Style, Harvest/ Food Preservation Time! Extra Office Heat Solution

Theft- 

Just when you think life is going pretty smooth you see something and her left scratching your head thinking is that really what happened? I was going into my home office/bedroom yesterday.  When I looked out through the window I saw four people that looked familiar. One of the adults was carrying five or six pears in their arms. I did a double-take because they walked right by our pear tree and those look like our pears-

It took me a minute or two to register that they probably took them. There is an easement between our lot and the duplexes next to us. They look like they were out for a walk, walking slow and just decided to take some. I was so shocked it took a few minutes for me to register what probably happened. I went out a few minutes later and they were gone. I don't know that I would have asked them or confronted them since I don't really know them. I went out on my lunch break and picked as many pears as I could reach and brought them inside. I mentioned this to Dave when he got home and he said "oh that's odd, the next door neighbor yesterday said "you guys have a lot of nice pears". " Dave harvested the rest of the pears last night and brought them in-

I kept thinking about how to deal with this without getting into a hostile engagement with a neighbor. Finally late in the evening I came up with the idea to put the sign out on the fence facing their property. I basically put it on the other side of the pear tree where they would see it walking by. I was surprised by all this, even though I have read on some Permaculture Facebook groups, about people having their produce stolen out of their yards. There is a chance that they simply picked up some pears that were on the ground in the easement. The karma for them is they were still pretty green, so probably not that great tasting. These pears are ripe when they turn yellow/blush. I was going to process them this weekend anyway and they're ripening inside a little bit faster. What can you do and the sad thing they had two young children with them so how is that modeling integrity, making the right choice when no one is looking? If they would have asked I'd have given them some... I'll be canning these for the winter, should be great!

September Is Preparedness Month/ Covid Style-

Yes it's that time of year! National Preparedness Month. With all of the weather disasters, fires, snow, hurricanes, electrical outages now there's also Covid. Another reason to think about being prepared. When Covid first hit I brought in my emergency medical kit. I had bought a cheap plastic tool box and filled it with of different kinds of bandages, OTC meds, including surgical masks. Those masks were really cheap when I bought them, not so much now. I've always told myself as a reminder-  we're one highway away from empty grocery stores. In other words there's only one main highway in or out of Boise. If there is a major snow problem, summer fires, etc it would be pretty scary with stores emptying. Good time to remind yourself to have extra foods that don't require any preparation (bonus) as well as lots of water on hand. I bought some extra batteries recently and realized that most of my oil lamps were pretty low. I brought my bottles of oil in and will refill. I'd rather have those kinds of things done and not need them than the opposite. And it's so easy to do a little at a time! There's tons of resources online so feel free to check all that out or you can search this blog for my previous posts under the topic preparedness. You can store all kinds of things easliy, in closets, under your beds, garages. Lots of info here Ready.gov  And don't forget your pets! 

Harvest/ Food Preservation Time!
We've been having a really great harvest the last week or so of tomatoes, lemon cucumbers and several peppers-

We bought some peaches from a local orchard and I processed all of those this last weekend. I froze a small amount to keep through the winter. The rest I froze until this coming Labor Day weekend. I have 5 days off!!! They will be thawed and I will be making jams and chutneys. It was pretty tough in Boise to find any low sugar pectin, anywhere! I finally decided to try the local natural grocery store and found lots of Pomona's pectin, talk about happy! I bought five boxes and that should be plenty-

This weekend I also cleaned out our freezer and found some of last Summer's peaches buried. I thawed those and made a really big peach and blueberry cobbler, wow was it good! Here it is going in-

Yummy!

I like to use this recipe for the topping- Topping For Crisp

My fermented pickles are coming along great after one week. I decided they weren't quite sour enough, so I'm giving them another week. They'll store for months in the fridge. I'm using my Vegetable Master fermenting jar with an airlock for one recipe and 2 Masontops for another recipe. 

Making lots of salsa with are dead ripe tomatoes, peppers from the garden and lots of fresh cilantro and purple onion. I just a little bit of red wine vinegar and salt and it's good to go. I make this tonight to use up some tomatoes, it's Fried Catfish BLTS, it's delish!!! I used Tilapia since I couldn't find any catfish.  

For other foods-

I have a couple gallon bags of Rhubarb in the freezer, will make Rhubarb sauce and a new recipe I saw recently Newfoundland Rhubarb Relish. I found another one that's a bit different. I think I'll make a couple of small batches and I will report back! 

I have a gallon of corn to make Corn Relish, will can this time. 

Will be canning pears too. 

I may thaw some frozen apples, since we're about out of Apple Butter. Homemade is so GOOD!!! With 5 days off I will be focusing on food storage/processing as you can see!

Extra Office Heat Solution-
With Autumn-like weather starting in a bit (50 this morning) winter is around the corner. Last month I decided to buy a heater for my home office. Instead of running the furnace all day while I'm working I thought about buying this heater, closing the door and saving some $$$- 

We had similar ones before and they worked great! Very safe. I got it from Ace, since I like to support local stores! It's on wheels, is oil-filled for radiant heat, 3 settings and a thermostat. Warms up gradually and Anya loves it! Should easily pay for itself, only $65.00. 

Smoky Skies, Rural Farmer's Market Haul, Easy/ Cheap Old Monitor To Laptop Fix! Thrifted Galileo Barometer, Chick Update

Smoky Skies-

I've seen the fires in California on the national news and it's just absolutely horrendous. I really feel for all the loss of lives, both human and animal, loss of housing, businesses, wilderness, etc. The smoke has been so bad it's been drifting from California into Nevada and Idaho the last several days. It makes for gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, but is pretty bad otherwise. Early morning yesterday I saw a bright orange red ball in the sky. I wish I could have got a better picture-

It's really exacerbated people who have underlying respiratory issues, like me, with asthma and allergies. But it could be worse at least Idaho isn't on fire the way California is! I hope they get some rain soon.

Rural Farmer's Market Haul-

A few years ago we got some amazing peaches from one of Dave's co-workers. They were from a local farm/orchard and I started thinking about that the other day. They're about a 40-minute drive from here so I called ahead and they had those peaches! They're different because they're a smaller farm so they can really tree-ripen their fruits. We may go back soon for some plums. We drove out today and I bought two crates of peaches. Sorry I don't remember the variety but they're like an Elberta Peach, but much bigger, the size of a SOFTBALL!

Chilling in the bedroom

Beauties!

The peaches I'm going to freeze soon, then over Labor Day weekend (five days off with PTO) I'm going to make some big batches of peach jam. I may also can some peaches. Our poor Peach tree kind of fizzled out this year, so I was happy to buy some local peaches. Sadly none of the fruit I bought today was organic, but what can you do. Hopefully next year will be better. Our pears are ripening so I may have enough to can as well!!!

At the second farm stand we hit on the way back we got several pounds of amazingly fresh pickling cucumbers. Whenever I found them at a grocery store they tend to be mushy and bruised. This time I found some great fresh ones and I'll use these for some fermented pickles. They were muddy when I got them home, so they got a bath and a chill! 

Also got some Gaston's bread, local and amazing! Freezes great and got an apple Danish too, yummy!

We also got several pounds of fresh Gala apples, super crunchy. I've noticed this last year in the winter fall and spring that almost all the apples I had bought in grocery stores were mushy. I tried different stores, I tried different varieties and just didn't have much luck. So when I bought these I bought enough to fill up our crisper probably about five or six pounds. Will keep these for eating apples-

I bought a bag of a dozen ears of sweet corn and some Blackberry pancake syrup. All in all it was a great haul!

Easy/ Cheap Old Monitor To Laptop Fix!

I thought I'd share this in case some of you may be using older computers and need to retro-fit them. My computer I've been using in the kitchen (mostly for blogging) was an older Windows 7. I had a nice size older monitor on it. *** Updated Info*** Here's the basics on the technology redo- there's basically two kinds of monitors, old analog ones with a giant blue plug and pins with screws-

That was what I had. The newer monitors are digital and do not need an adapter. Because my monitor was older and analog there was no way to run it to the laptop without using an adapter. I hope that makes sense? Please post more questions if you need. We bought a Windows 10 laptop this last spring, it was a great deal. We wanted something more secure for banking, etc. I finally decided that I had enough of Windows 7 since it was getting SO SLOW. We thought about what our options were, maybe buying a new digital monitor that would work with the laptop?  We finally realized for $8 we could buy an adapter to use with the analog monitor. A cheap and easy fix!

Basically I backed everything up on our external hard drive first from the old Windows 7 hard drive-

Old hard drive, We're keeping it for now just to make sure I didn't miss anything. 

External hard drive-

Next I went ahead and backed up the external hard drive to the laptop. You could use a thumb drive if you don't have many files or email them to yourself. Then we plugged in the old monitor into the laptop using a HDMI to VGA adapter seen below. The blue analog monitor plug goes into the adapter, and then it plugs into the side of the laptop-

Basically this creates the laptop as your hard drive. You can go into the display/ power settings and set up the laptop so that it "does nothing when you close the screen". This set up gives you lots of flexibility, since we can still use the laptop in other parts of the house. When I work out in the kitchen I can just plug my monitor into the side of the laptop, it's ready to go. Here's the HDMI to VGA adapter-

Plugged in- 

Close the laptop, less distracting for me-

Good tech fix for $8.00!

Thrifted Galileo Barometer-

We stopped at a thrift store the other night and out of the corner of my eye I spotted a Galileo barometer! For five bucks I squealed with delight and practically ran out of there with it. I had one years ago but it got broken and I never replaced it. As soon as I got at home I cleaned all the glass and put it in a safe place and it works! He was invented by Galileo in the 1600 and basically has little balls that are all calibrated to rise or sink depending on me ear temperature. This afternoon said 72° which was about spot-on! Each glass ball has a temperature on it on a metal tag-

More info here Galileo Thermometer

Chick Update-

I'm happy to report all of our "chicks" are doing well and are almost half-size. They're all very healthy and the flock seems to have settled in pretty well with each other. I don't see a whole lot of squabbles anymore. We did have to trim their flight feathers today again because they were flying up on top of our 4-foot fence. If they got over the 4-foot fence into the yard wouldn't really be a huge problem. The problem would be if they got from the 4-foot fence to the 6-foot fence and went over into our neighbor's backyard. They have about four dogs that would kill them. So Dave and I trimmed them again. Later in the day I got some nice photos. I really like having a mixed flock so you can tell all the birds apart. Our older hen Rosie is now molting. Neither of my two older birds have been laying anything for about the last four to six weeks. The good news is with the three younger hens will hopefully start laying around October or November. So here's a look at the girls! You can really see all there individual markings pretty well on these photos. It is hard to get pictures of chickens since they won't stand still!

Luna, the Silver Laced Wyandotte-

Debbie, a Golden Sexlink- 

Sunny, a Brown Leghorn-

Removing Tomato Foliage For Ripening, Going Back To A DSLR Camera, Sandi's Blackberry Crumb Cake, A Greek Dinner

Removing Tomato Foliage For Ripening-

It's been HOT here, triple digits! 103 yesterday, 101 today, but a storm blew in this evening. It dropped 20+ degrees in three hours. We just water, water. It 's been a tough year for our tomatoes, they're about a month behind. I had the idea last week to cut back the excess foliage to help them ripen faster. We usually do this in Sept/Oct! There's tons of tomatoes, just mostly green. The good news is it's still August so they should ripen soon! These are the "after" shots, visualize green leaves exploding out of the cages!!! 

Anya

Going Back To A DSLR Camera-

I started using an SLR (Single Lense Reflex) camera when I was young. The last 10 + years I switched to a point and shoot and it works great for a lot of things. Many people use their phone cameras, but I prefer the real thing. There's so much more you can get right, without having to alter the photos later. Dave gave me his 10 + year old D (Digital) SLR recently and I'm getting reacquainted with it. The photos are much more crisp, work SO much better in mixed, natural lighting. Here's a few samples, some with a macro lense- 

Lovely Anya, faster shutter speed helps here

The shot above is a great example, clear with a blurred background! Natural lighting

Grandson River, great in low lighting

Another example, crisp, great detail, low lighting

I'm still using my point and shoot, but will be migrating away from it. You'll be seeing better photos!

Blackberry Crumb Cake-

Our blackberries really loved our wet May/June! Picking lots, freezing some and did some baking this weekend-

More coming

Since we had so many berries I made my favorite Sandi's Blackberry Crumb Cake  FYI, I don't use a food processor, a pastry cutter works fine. Less clean up time! I subbed WW Pastry flour and walnuts instead of pecans. It's moist and slightly crunchy from the topping! You could use raspberries too, the tartness makes the cake-

A Greek Dinner
I stumbled on some recipes lately and thought I'd try these! Nice for summer time, just wish I'd had fresh tomatoes from the garden. Video here - Diane Kochilas Greek Odyssey Video PBS Eggplant recipe- Garlicky Eggplant  Polenta recipe- Ionian Polenta  The sauce was a bit chunkier than hers but still delish! I made an 11" x 13" pan, leftovers were even better! Next time I think I'd roast the eggplant slices to cut down on the olive oil. Just brush with oil til slightly soft. I also reduced the oil in the polenta. I served with Feta cheese, nice, fresh tasting summer meal! It's a keeper!