Late Summer Update on the Hobby Farm

Everyone seems to be calling our place a farm these days, both sincerely and sarcastically, so I've decided to lean into it.  I'm not serious enough about being self sufficient to call myself a homesteader, but I'm also not trying to make any money like a farmer would.  Why not call ourselves hobby farmers?  We're just doing this for fun.

It's been a busy summer here on the hobby farm.  Most of the pictures I have to share are loads of produce from my garden:

An actual hill of beans, and a tomato the size of a coffee mug.

 

Cherry tomatoes, ground cherries, plus the first wave of slicing and paste tomatoes.

I bought a cool new garden basket from a tiny local hardware store.  It's perfect!  Also, that is the longest Tromboncino zucchinis I got so far.  It was 2.5 feet long.

We had a frost advisory in early September!  So we went out and picked everything we could use, including all of the green peppers and tiny Tromboncino zucchinis.

 My very first Minnesota Midget Musk Melon!  It smelled heavenly, though it wasn't sweet at all because of the ridiculous cold snap we have had.

The garden did surprisingly well, considering it had a very late start because of the cold, wet spring, a drought through the hottest part of the summer, and a sudden cold snap in the late summer.  It was a very challenging year, especially for a first year garden.  Still, my plants were huge.

 My Tromboncino zucchinis grew all the way to the top of the 6 foot trellis...

 

 And my tomatoes got taller than me!  and I'm 5'7!  Some of them actually have fallen over despite the supports, because they were so loaded with tomatoes.

Here's a wider shot of the garden.

 My mom gave me that chair, and it's nice to just sit and spend time in the garden.  Normally I would sit on the ground, but the pine shavings are kind of scratchy and stick to everything they touch.  I drag it into the house all the time.

 Along with the garden, we have been busy with preparing for winter.  Chad got our oil tank topped off so we have plenty of back up heat, and I ordered 3 full cords (that's 9 face cords around these parts) of wood for our main source of heat.  Using wood saves us a lot of money.  The price to heat with wood is just about the same as heating with natural gas cost us in Jamestown (which we can't get out here in the country), whereas heating with oil costs 4 times as much.  That's why we only use oil as a back up, and to run at night so I don't need to be up tending the fire.

 The only downside with wood is that you have to stack it.

 It took us a week to stack all of our wood.  We had to get more pallets and expand our pile to fit it all.  now it has about 4 or maybe 4.5 full cords of wood, which is enough for probably 2 mild winters.

Next year, we are going to work on getting a proper wood shed.  But for now, this stack works just fine.

 Another update this summer is that we have finally decided on how to overcome the canning problem.  Our old electric coil burner stove is too flimsy to can on.  Heck, it seems to have a hard time handling my everyday cooking.  We could get a new stove, but it's hard to find information about which stoves are suitable to can on.  Instead, we decided to buy an electric pressure canner from Presto.  It was kind of expensive for a canner, but a lot cheaper than a new stove.

 

It is also a water bath canner, so I can do all of my canning in it now!  The only problem with it is that it is too tall for my old kitchen.  The distance between the counter and the cupboards is only 16 inches, and this canner is 17 inches.  It would work fine in a more modern kitchen.  However, I have this cute little wheeled cart that I set up in the kitchen when I want to can, and it's very sturdy.  I also lock the cats out because my kitchen actually has a door that closes!  How cool is that?

 The first thing I canned was homemade baked beans!  They are so much better and cheaper than the store bought kind.  The tomatoes have nothing to do with the beans, they're just sitting there until they ripen up.

So many things are happening around the farm this fall.  We have so many visitors coming, and more canning to do, and a garden to expand.  And in just a few minutes, Chad and I are going to a zoning board meeting to have our new shed approved (hopefully)!  So pictures of that to (hopefully) come sometime in October.

Until then, have some kitties.