It's all about food

My husband just informed me it's been a week since I blogged, so what have I been doing? Mostly I've been busy with final edits on the book, tweaking sentences, writing captions for photos, and double-checking the bibliography.

We've been getting a ridiculous amount of rain lately, so the yard, pastures, and garden are all soggy. Only about 20 percent of the garden is planted -- sweet potatoes, onions, beans, strawberries, rhubarb, and asparagus. I have 50 heirloom tomato and 60 pepper plants sitting around waiting to be transplanted. It is really not a big deal that they're a bit late getting into the garden because they won't start producing anyway until it gets hot enough, which means early August most years. One year I planted tomatoes at the end of June, and they produced fine. We are still harvesting more than enough lettuce, which was planted last fall in low tunnels. We removed the tunnels in April.

Because I've been so busy, we actually ran out of chevré! I can't remember the last time we had no chevré in the house in May -- maybe 2002? Anyway, I'm making chevré today!

Lately we've been talking about how excited we used to be when we had a single meal that was homegrown, but now almost all of our meals are homegrown, even through the winter. It's a pretty surprising accomplishment for someone who was a vegetarian with a brown thumb nine years ago. Tonight's dinner will be salad, grilled lamb chops, corn on the cob, and ice cream. Last night's dinner was queso blanco with pasta and marinara sauce. Saturday's lunch was quiche. We've actually been having a lot of quiches lately. Today's lunch was an odd one -- corn fritters and smoothies -- because no one thought about cooking until we were all starving, and it was after noon.

We're about to open our last jar of canned pears, and we're running low on frozen raspberries. There are only two packages of frozen green beans left, although we still have a lot of corn in the freezer. The chickens are laying a few dozen eggs a day, and if we milk all the goats, we can get seven gallons of milk a day for making buttermilk, yogurt, and cheese, as well as ice cream and cream soups and other good stuff.

And with the garden, the cycle starts again. As we are running out of fruits and vegetables, it's time to plant and nurture and harvest to put up food to last for the next winter. Why do we keep doing this? As my daughter said this morning, "Once you get used to homegrown, you just can't find anything in the store that tastes as good."