First let me apologize for not blogging for over a month. As many of you may know, Matt was in Peru for 3 weeks, so I was on "vacation" in Salt Lake. We both had a great time. I loved being in Salt Lake with my family, swimming, hiking, etc, and Matt loved farming in Peru, making friends, eating watermelons that tasted like Jolly Ranchers, etc. Although we were both sad to leave, going back to Logan has never felt so good.
Let me tell you how crazy it was to come home to our garden and chickens! Our chickens doubled in size and the garden was a jungle, thanks to our friends the Cliffords and Knuckles for watching over everything for us. Every year we learn something new about gardening. This year we tried so many new things like lettuce, carrots, beets, radishes, swiss chard, arugula, mustard greens and onions. They all have turned out so well!! There really is something very satisfying about picking and eating something you have grown.
Down in front with the colorful stems is Swiss Chard, then Spinach top left, Mustard Greens in basket, and then Arugula. So tasty!
The next awesome thing is, just a few days ago I picked 82 beets from our garden!! It is seriously amazing that you can put a few seeds in the ground and get so much in return! So thanks to my Grandma Allen, I have a love for pickled beets, and an idea of how to do them. So yesterday I did a whole batch of beets and I got 13 pints of beets! Don't knock beets unless you have tried mine on salad. Heavenly!
Pickling beets isn't pretty. Did I mention it looked like a murder scene?
It's easy to do if you want to try it. All you need is:
About 10 lbs of beets scrubbed
7 cups beets juice (which you get after you boil them)
1 cup cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 Tbsp. salt
Jars, Lids, and a big pot to cook them in
All you do is wash and boil beets until tender. Save the juice. Put boiled beets into cold water and then the skins come off super easy. Cut beets into desired portions. Add all the ingredients back into the beet juice (including cut beets) and boil. You want the beets and juice to be hot so they easily seal. Then put beets and cover with juice into the jars and seal. Sealing was always a concern for me but as long as you have hot jars (you can boil and carefully get out with tongs), hot lids (put lids in boiling water but do not boil lids) and then my grandmas trick is to flip upside down when you are done, when they start to cool they seal.
So fun and so tasty, so try them!!
Oh and of course for my cute mother-in-law:
Baby Lillie on our picnic
Eating the Ottor Pop she stole from Daddy
