The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

August preserving frenzy

Cutting corn off the cob

Farm dishesSometime in early to mid August, the flow of food from garden to table becomes a flood.  Nowadays, my farm chores are often done in the kitchen, blanching beans, cutting corn off the cob, and stewing up a pot of soup.  The garden still needs work, of course, but my priorities have shifted to making sure we have enough bounty preserved to enjoy throughout the winter months.

Poor Mark has to deal with the consequences.  It's not unusual for a preserving endeavor to conclude with both sink basins and the counter stacked over a foot high with dirty pots and pans, so I sometimes take pity on him and recommend that he use some of our "work hours" to deal with the mess.  Cooking and dishes count as a farm chore at this time of year!

Our chicken waterer gives the chickens a refreshing drink after they pick apart the mountains of corn cobs and tomato tops.


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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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I am so jealous of your beautiful corn! Mine is short, unevenly filled out, and full of corn worms. The neighbors keep telling me to use chemical fertilizer, but I just don't want to go down that road, with all the free goat and humanure I have. I just love that corn though....

Comment by Eric in Japan Wed Aug 24 08:32:42 2011
...well, halfway. Corn loves to be fed, but you don't need to use chemicals to get there. This is our best corn year ever, because we finally had enough manure to upgrade from giving each bed half an inch of compost to a full inch of compost. As a result, we've had almost no earworms (maybe 1 in every 15 ears), huge full heads, and two good ears on about half the plants. That's using the exact same seeds as last year, when most of our ears ended up with earworms, we only got one good ear per plant, and the ones we got were seldom so large and beautiful. So -- more compost!
Comment by anna Wed Aug 24 10:06:48 2011





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