a thrifty start to the day

In a recent post I mentioned that I have lately started hitting the thrift stores.  I started going with my daughter when we were together.  She is putting together a vintage collection for a rental/event styling business that she will have in addition to her day job.  We had so much fun that now my sister and I, and sometimes my mom and I, have been hitting the shops even when Caitlin isn't along.  It is kind of addicting. 

A few weeks ago I picked up a set of dishes for Caitlin and sitting right next to them on the shelf were these cute cups and saucers.  No place settings, just eight cups and saucers. Blue on the outside, white on the inside with these funky shaped handles. Caitlin is a fan of mid century modern and I thought that the cute handles had a retro feel.  They reminded me of the cups that Italian lattes are served in.  They were five dollars for the set.  I sent them down to Cait with the understanding that she didn't need to keep them, she could just send them back if they weren't something that she loved.  I was secretly pleased when they came back to me.  :).

Our next thrifting adventure happened this past weekend when Cait went to pick up a chair that she had purchased on an online auction.  It was a ways away so I rode along so that she wouldn't have to go alone.  In the car I mentioned that I was looking for a moka pot and that if she happened upon one in her thrifting I was interested.  It turns out that the place that had the chair was also an antique dealer and we checked out her inventory and she had a moka pot!  It looked like it was brand new.  Another five dollar purchase.

So after a couple of batches of coffee using the coffee that I had at home to break in the pot I selected an Italian dark roast espresso coffee yesterday at the local grocery store and today I made my first latte.  I don't own equipment to make a steamed frothed milk but I used my immersion blender to froth milk that I heated on the stove.  I added a sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg on top of the foam.  And then while I was enjoying my latte I watched a couple of short videos made by baristas on you tube doing coffee art.  That could be my winter project. 

I am glad for the little burst of caffeine as I have a few projects today and that little bit of extra oomph should come in handy.  My moka pot makes enough espresso for 2-3 lattes and I made two and drank both of them.  The little bit of leftover espresso that would have made the third latte would have been good over ice cream, a treat that Caitlin says they have occasionally at her day job, but alas, no ice cream in my freezer.



 

miscalculated :(

It is a bit after 5 a.m. and my plan that seemed reasonable last night appears to have been unsuccessful.  Frost was predicted and I covered the tomatoes up near the house (as best I could with the staking) but the ones in the cornfield garden I was hoping that since it was only supposed to get to 33 and only that low close to morning that if I let the sprinklers come on as usual at 5 a.m. that it might protect the tomatoes from potential frost damage.  But when the alarm went off at 5 a quick check of the weather showed the temp already at 31.  I headed out with a flashlight to take a look and the tomatoes look to be done for.  Sigh.

what a difference a couple of days makes

The weather this time of year can be pretty varied in Minnesota.  On Sunday it was 91 degrees, just a degree or two shy of the record.  The next day, Monday it was cool and overcast.  A great day for soup.

Caitlin and Robb shared with me some of their soup that they made on the weekend.  She borrowed my largest stockpot because they were making two big batches of soup for the freezer.  I enjoyed it for lunch today.  Hamburger in a tomato-y broth with onions, peas, corn, carrots, green beans, cabbage, kale, potatoes and egg noodles.  It was lovely, very flavorful, and just the right thing on this cloudy, cooler day.

Today is Thursday and the low the next couple of nights, or early  mornings, could get to freezing so I am getting ready just in case.  I moved all of the wedding celebration herbs into the greenhouse that were in the pots.  I will cover the ones in the herb garden until I can get them dug up and relocated.  I picked the ripening tomatoes and all of the peppers of any size.  I picked the green beans and eggplants.  I will water everything and then unhook the hoses.  We are predicted to have a warmer rest of the month so the plan is to get thru the next couple of nights and then a bit of Indian Summer.

I still have a bunch of end of the season stuff to do in the gardens.  I am going to tarp part of the garden and am trying to get the more weeding done.  My sister donated her two big tarps so I am planning to spread them over some of the rows with the intended outcome that the tarps will smother the weeds, and if any weed seeds germinate they will not have sunlight to grow.  Not sure how it will affect snow melt in the spring but I am so hoping that the weeds will be less.  

Happy Fall!  



 

Autumn on the farm

It is autumn on the farm.  I am putting the garden to bed and 'putting up' a few jars of apple butter and tomatoes.  I still have tomatoes coming so I am hesitant to pull the plants.  I am still getting a few pole beans and peppers as well.  I am planting cover crops in the empty rows and trying to get straw spread on the walking spaces between the rows.  The garden was overtaken with weeds this year and so the rows and the walking spaces need to be weeded and I am hoping to get a bunch of it done before the snow flies. 

The greenhouse season is also starting up and I have been planting seeds for most of a month.  I started seeding in the house and putting the seedlings under lights because the greenhouse was still getting too hot on sunny days.  But now all of the winter plantings have been moved to the greenhouse.  On sunny days the fans have been able to keep it below 100 degrees in there and so far I have been able to not cook the new seedlings.  I am including a few pictures but it is hard to get a representative picture of plants that are only two inches tall.  There is more seeding to do and a lot of transplanting from the seed starting trays to the tubs.  In the past I have started all the seedlings in trays and then transplanted the baby plants into the gutter planters and the tubs.  This year I have tried seeding the gutters directly instead of transplanting and so far it seems to be working well.  All of our seeds are started on the warm mat and once they have germinated they are moved under lights and new seeds take their places on the mat.  Our mat holds four gutters or four trays at a time so it is a good way to spread out the seeding.  

The wedding party herbs are all in bigger pots and ready to move into the greenhouse once we run out of summer weather.  That is an experiment that I hope to be writing about in blog posts over the winter.

A lot of people rave about the colors of autumn and they are great but equally impressive are the smells of autumn.  Transplanting the sage and rosemary was heavenly.  Just brush up against them and they share their fragrance.  And then to come in the house from outside and smell the apples and spices cooking away in the crock pot making apple butter is great.  Of course there are some not so wonderful smells that happen on the farm in the fall too.  This time of year the goat buck is a little more stinky and one of the neighboring fields must have a new layer of turkey manure since my yard had that distinctive odor for a couple of days.

A little fall at the front door.

 A sampling of the baby crops in the greenhouse.  There are ten gutters hanging up in the chains and another three on the heat mat and a few more to plant once those germinate.

mizuna

scarlet frill

romaine

 The arugula is one of five or six trays of seedlings that will eventually be transplanted into the tubs.  Some trays like the arugula are all the same variety.  Others like the one to the left just barely in the picture has two or four different varieties. 

arugula

 Just starting to transplant into the tubs. 

oops, blurry kale

   Happy fall!

Do you thrift?

Is thrift a verb?  Lately I seem to have been bitten by the thrifting bug and it is pretty fun.

It started out innocently enough with a couple of trips to my sister in law's occasional sales.  She lives a little better than an hour away and once a month or so she has an 'occasional sale' in a little building that she moved onto her yard.  The building that houses her antique shop used to be a small country garage.  She has made it so cute.  It  has a loft and a spiral staircase that leads up to it.  She removed the doors that you would drive through to park and installed a beautiful vintage door and put on a little front porch.  It is filled to overflowing with treasures that she has collected at garage sales, auctions and online auctions.  Once a month or so in the summer she opens up her cute shop on a weekend and sells her vintage finds.  The last time that I was there I bought a stack of small plates that match my mother's pattern of Fostoria that she has had since her wedding.   Mom has quite a few pieces but not these little plates.  They look to be saucers but  I am thinking desserts or appetizers. There is a little variety in size so I think that they were collected over time by the original owner. 

Check out Hollyhock Cottage on facebook to see pictures of her darling shop. 

Then my younger daughter Caitlin introduced me to K-bid.  K-bid is an online auction.  My first successful purchase there was at an auction of restaurant supply equipment.  I didn't have an account yet so my daughter was doing the bidding and we were consulting over the phone.  We ended up with the winning bid on a rack of cutting boards and a set of four of these nifty thingies.

I don't know for sure what they are called or what their intended purpose was in the restaurant kitchen.  I surmised that they were for cooking and then straining smaller amounts of different foods,  Perhaps different pastas or different vegetables.  My hope was to use them for blanching vegetables when I can.  I recently canned a few jars of tomatoes and I had a chance to use them and they worked great.  Since they are pie shaped I think that in the right stock pot the four of them could sit adjacent to each other but I filled them all but only had one in the boiling water at a time.

Caitlin has started collecting treasures of her own and we have hit a few spots when we have been together.  A co-worker of my sister had a garage sale and we checked it out.  I ended up getting a food mill and some cute salt cellars.

One of the things about thrifting is that sometimes you can get stuff that is priced cheaply but you also can get stuff that is no longer available to purchase new in stores.  I am sure that the hardware store in the small town that is closest to the farm sells food mills but not for the couple of bucks that I spent.  I don't know that there is any store in town that sells new salt cellars.  :)  I love dishes and it was fun to find 12 salt cellars for a dollar. They come in many shapes--many are round--but mine are tiny rectangular footed glass cellars.  I am now on the lookout for the tiny glass spoons that are used with them.

Our little town is able to support two second hand stores and the bigger town that is a little farther away has a Goodwill store.  We have found treasures at all of them.

Cait has a full time job in her field but is starting a side business that is a decor rental and event styling company.  She is slowly building an inventory and a website but if you want to check out a few of her pieces before the website is ready she is on Instagram at @sundaybeststyling.

Since this is a mostly a garden blog and there has been a dearth of garden posts lately I will have to get caught up.  It was a disappointing garden season but I am ever optimistic that next year will be better.  And the seeding has started for the winter greenhouse.

Happy autumn.    

A few garden pictures

Still no major garden update.  Oops.   My garden has been disappointing this year.  The weeds and the lawn are growing like crazy.  I have a lawn that takes at least eight hours to mow and I usually mow it is sections and it takes a couple of days, sometimes three.  Lately, it seems to be loving the heat and it is needing mowing twice a week. By the time I get the last section done the first is needing mowing again.

I haven't been noticing any new deer damage, but maybe it is hidden by the weeds.  I do have some more baby veggie pictures.  I know that there are some folks getting lots of full size produce.  My garden is not that far along yet.

A couple weeks ago I noticed some of my green unripe plums were on the ground below the tree.  I did a bit of reading about plum fruit dropping and there was lots of discussion about stressed trees dropping their fruit.  My tree is a young tree and last year it got its first fruits, but just a couple and they didn't get any size to them and were gone before they got ripe.  I assumed a bird ate them but maybe they dropped as well.  I was excited to see one of my plums appears to be ripening as it is red and getting softer.  The rest remain rock-hard and green.

The edamame is starting to come.

And some eggplant.

The kohlrabi is getting some size to them.

The sage and rosemary that we are growing for the party next summer are doing well also.

These are all things that are growing closer to the house and our three big dogs--the herbs are next to the house and the edamame, kohlrabi and eggplant are behind fencing.  So, so far they have not been nibbled on.  I have been looking for fencing ideas and pinned everything that I have seen so far.

Our weather has been hot and humid, miserable to be outside.  We have not had much for rain so I have been doing a lot of watering.   Rain is predicted again tonight.  I hope that it comes.  Mother Nature is much more proficient with watering than me, she gets it all done at once.  I have a water timer that works great for the big garden where it is set up but there is still a bunch of hand watering and moving the sprinklers for the rest.  I guess it is job security.   

some recipes using produce that will soon be available in the garden

A garden update is coming soon but in the meantime here is a link to several great, healthy recipes that my daughter Nikole cooked for us and they are great.  Easy and quick with fresh ingredients.  Definitely keepers.  Check it out here.