Harvest Time

Well this week I started to harvest most of my herbs, some spinach and corn. Its the greatest feeling seeing the reward for all of your hard work.

In this picture I have four fresh sprigs of herbs; parsley, oregano, basil and thyme. This is the easiest and my most successful way of keeping some new dried herbs on hand. I started out by bundling them at the bottom while they were still in the ground then i cut, cleaned and hung them upside down on my pasta dryer with some twine. After they dried out and became nice and crunchy i de-stemmed the leaves and stored them in an airtight spice jar. I love doing this because herbs and spices can be pricey and they are fresher than store bought. Although nothing can beat fresh cut or frozen, its the next best thing.

Our family really loves rasberries, and right now my mom has been working on making fresh jam from our home grown and wild berries. The biggest problem has been getting enough fresh berries accumulated to make a full batch of jam, so we started freezing them in ziploc baggies

. -- this turned out to be a bit of a blunder because they would freeze into a huge brick and just a pain to defrost. So we started to spread them out on a half cookie sheet lined with some parchment paper/wax paper/silpat and froze them.

Problem solved, individually frozen berries, after a day or so, dump them in a food sealer or ziploc. We still have a good stash from last season and its easy to open up a bag and grab a few, instead of chizzling them off a huge frozen brick. And yes, thats Moose and Alaskan Salmon fillets!

Last but not least, Im not quite sure if anyone else has ever harvested full plants like spinach before but I had a bunch of scrap left over -- Roots, stems, rotted plants, etc.

And I had nothing to do with it since we dont have a composter set up yet. So I thought to myself, why not just stir it into the dirt?

So i did, and its worked just fine since i wont be using that section till next summer. Easy way to compost a small amount of scraps without making a composter, i also did this when i initially made this growbox, i just tilled the grass and buried it with more gardening dirt. We got a truckload for about $50 by the way.