I hate buying eggs

Fall vacation is over, so it's time to come back to reality and tidy up the urban farm for winter. My compost bins are full, so a lot of the plant material has been worked back into the garden beds (burying it under soil, where it can break down over time). The tomato plants, however, always go to the municipal yard waste composting facility. My home compost piles just aren't hot enough to kill all of the disease-causing microorganisms that hang out on tomatoes. And those nasties can survive over the winter in soil, only to infect next year's crop.

Interesting how our city's compost facility is now owned by Purple Cow. (In the past I spent a lot of money buying compost from them.) So it does pay-- except for tomatoes and any diseased material-- to compost as much as possible at home.

All that's left outside are these few kale plants and some leeks that need to be harvested soon. Leek soup anyone?

The hens are also going through their first molt and they have many missing feathers and are very grumpy (and likely a little concerned with so much skin showing and next week's temperatures going down into the 20s). But once their molt is finished, they will look better than before and should have their best year of production ahead of them, which is good, because I haven't gotten an egg from them in well over two weeks.

Looks like I'll be supporting the local egg produces for a few more weeks.

This high protein food should help the hens grow feathers faster. Without added protein, chickens have been knows to eat feathers to add protein to their diet (and losing more feathers is not at all what we're going for!). 

And with the cooler, short days, baking is on my mind...

In Sweden my favorite fika treat were the kardemummabullar, which are cinnamon rolls with an almond and cardamom filling. They are the best things I've had in a long time! With all the cool weather, this is the perfect time of year to practice my indoor homesteading skills and bake my own breads and treats.

Have a great weekend!

I heart my chest freezer

Until the last few days, the warm weather has been hanging on, and we've all been outside wearing shorts and riding bikes. But all that nice weather keeps the tomatoes ripening, and without intervention all the ones my family cannot eat (and that would be most of them) would go bad.

I know people love their iPhones, giant televisions, and salted caramel lattes, but to love a chest freezer is a special kind of love. This humble, quiet, out-of-the-way appliance allows me to enjoy the end of summer.

In the past, canning was done on a hot day in a hot kitchen. (If you haven't canned before, the house can heat up to a sweltering temperature if it's still warm outside.) Canning would be an ideal cold weather activity, like baking bread or making a hearty soup. A friend let me in on a secret a few years ago that changed my canning forever. She told me that you can freeze tomatoes whole in plastic bags and then take them out whenever you're ready to can. And if you let them warm up at room temperature, the skins come off without having to boil them, which is amazing when you are making a chunky tomato sauce or salsa!

My newest spaghetti sauce method is to core each tomato, squeeze out some of the seeds, and then freeze them all in gallon sized bags. When I'm ready to can, I make the sauce with the skins on (which adds additional nutrients) and then zip the sauce in the high speed blender to pulverize the skins and any remaining seeds before canning.

Many fruits and veggies are easy to freeze and use right from the freezer: sliced peppers and any kind of berry are two of my favorites.

This week at the urban farm

Now that soup weather is upon us, I've started harvesting the leeks. A lot of soup recipes call for leeks, but they are also good in many recipes in place of onions or roasted in the oven with other fall vegetables.

The chickens are just starting their first molt, and because of this egg production is almost nil. Hopefully I will have more to report on this soon! They have had a good summer of romping around the yard and have appreciated the vegetable scraps this season.

The tomatoes and flowers are the last summer plants I will pull out of the garden. The tomatoes will go when they stop ripening on the vine (I'll put the pink ones in the window and ripen them indoors). The flowers will go once they die or we get a hard freeze and the butterflies are gone for the year, whichever comes first.

A note on fall eating and cooking: it's almost time to celebrate the harvest with fall meals: butternut squash soup, spaghetti and lasagna feasts, vegetables caramelized over time in warm ovens, stuffed and roasted acorn squash! Enjoy eating these warm and cozy foods; I hope you are all having a fantastic end of season!

Payoffs of the urban farm

The harvest continues but is winding down quickly. My last boxes of veggies have been delivered to my land partners and I'm starting to take down fences and compost plants as they start to die back. With fall comes amazing food, though, and I wanted to take a few minutes today to realize some of the tangible values of urban farming other than beauty, enjoyment, the great outdoors, butterflies, and a feeling of living closer to the land. Fall is a time of thanksgiving, of reflection of the growing season, of preparing for winter... and it's lovely weather, too!

I know it's fall when the popcorn is ready to harvest. (Must also be time to store the summer clothes and dig out the mittens and wool socks!) Popcorn is so cheap to buy that people sometimes wonder why I bother. I grow it because I love to harvest it and it saves well all winter. Nothing beats a big bowl of fresh, hot, homegrown, heirloom popcorn in the middle of a snowstorm!

Carmen peppers are my absolute favorite variety! They are super sweet and a beautiful red! We've harvested a lot of them this year, so at $4.99 a pound we've come out ahead. They also freeze well, so we'll be eating them for months to come.

Tomatoes are ripening more slowly now, but we're still enjoying them daily (a money saver, but more importantly, nothing beats a ripe, garden tomato--and as you can see in this grocery store photo, home-grown, vine-ripened, heirloom tomatoes have superior quality--transportation issues are the main reason why modern, commercial varieties are pretty but tasteless!). Since we have so many, I'm canning again this year (see below).

This was almost a perfect year for tomatoes in the southern half of Wisconsin. I only irrigated one time and disease pressure at the urban farm was minimal. 

There were so many tomatoes this year, even the yellow, heirloom slicers got to go into the spaghetti sauce!

I'm still a novice canner and always looking to perfect my technique and recipes, but my sauce is pretty tasty!

Until our maple tree decides to turn red, I'm enjoying the leaves on my walks. Happy fall, y'all!

**Side note about composting from my walk last evening:

Greens and browns, people, greens and browns...not sticks. Just sayin'.