When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and lemon juice, and lemon curd and.....

I bought my daughter a Meyer lemon tree a few years ago and planted it in the front yard.  Last year was the first year we got a few lemons, but they didn't last long.  This year it has been loaded, and from friends and other locals it sounds like that is pretty common this year.

This was the remaining 30+ lemons after we had already juiced at least ten.

My kids and I went out to pick the lemons today and we must have gotten over 40 off a 7 foot tall tree (I forgot to count until we already started juicing, so this is an estimation).  We made a big pitcher of lemonade and froze two ice cube trays of juice for future use.

Then I started looking for recipes to use.  I found a pretty simple one for a lemon curd and had the other ingredients on hand (eggs from my backyard chickens, sugar, and some butter).  It took two lemons to get the rind and juice needed and took about ten minutes to cook.

Lemon curd in a Pyrex fridgie

I found these recipes that we might try this week.  

Pork Meatballs with Lemon and Thyme

Lemon Braised Chicken and Beans with Mint Pesto

I am sure we will share with coworkers and neighbors as well.

Dinner from the Backyard

This summer I have been lazy about gardening (again) but had a large squash vine volunteer plant growing in my garden area.  I figured out it was a Seminole pumpkin (I have grown them in the past, it must have come from the compost).  I grabbed a couple of ripe pumpkins off of it a few weeks ago and there are more growing. 

Today I was thinking about the pumpkin and how I was going to cook it and I started thinking about stuffed acorn squash.  I have some chanterelles that grow in my backyard (as well as the neighborhood green spaces) so I checked the area to see if any were growing with all our recent rain.  Sure enough, there they were. 

It ended up being easier to cook each separately.  I make a creamy sauce out of the chanterelles (with onion) and put it over orzo pasta.  I cooked the squash separately in the microwave with a little butter.  We mixed the two together and it was pretty good.  I would like to come up with a stuffed Seminole pumpkin recipe for smaller pumpkins in the future.

Figs!

Several years ago we got an Alma fig from Just Fruits and Exotics.  I chose it because the fruits are a greenish color (with light purple tint) when ripe, fooling the birds into thinking they are unripe.  Since I am not very good at protecting my garden, I thought it was a good choice for us.  They started producing fruit a couple of years ago, and this year was looking to be a good crop.  I had been checking the fruits daily and the ones I was looking at were unripe.  Until today, all of a sudden I noticed several ripe figs, some were even starting to leak fluid, ready to burst at the seams.

My Alma Figs

I found this recipe for Roasted Figs with Honey and Rosemary.  I was in luck, we had recently extracted honey from our bees and my rosemary plant could use a nice trim.  You could probably be really local and use a cheese from Sweet Grass Dairy or another local cheese producer but all I had on hand was a feta and some whole wheat ritz crackers.  It still tasted delicious.

 

Magical Beauty Berry Jelly

We have long had beauty berry bushes in our yard.  They are a native species to Florida and pretty easy to grow.  Callicarpa americana is their scientific name.

 I knew they were not poisonous and a year or so ago I saw friends mentioning on facebook that they were making jelly from them.  This year lots of people on my Florida Urban Homesteading facebook group were making jelly from them so I decided to give it a try.

  

It is pretty easy to spot the clusters of bright purple berries.

My chickens love to eat them so as I was gathering them they followed me around, catching the berries I dropped.  I have also observed them jumping up to get the berries from the lower branches themselves.

I used one of the recipes from this book:  Florida's Incredible Edibles by Richard Deuerling that I had purchased for my daughter last summer.  She took a wilderness survival camp at the Tallahassee Natural History Museum and wanted to learn more about wild edible plants.

The recipe called for one and half quart of washed berries.  I was able to gather that quickly from just three of our bushes.

 Here are the beauty berries ready to be boiled down to make the extraction for the jam.

But as you boil them something happens, they turn this brown color.

The extraction looks like tea when you are done with it and you really wonder how this jelly will turn out.

Then something magical starts to happen when you mix in the sugar and pectin.

It turns a pinkish purple color.

And you end up with a very attractive jelly.

It tastes pretty good too (it does remind me of Mayhaw Jelly).  Looking forward to enjoying my beauty berry jelly.

Honey Extraction

 

The first time we tried beekeeping we had the hive for about a year and a half and got no honey.  We tried again this year and purchased two nucleus colonies in April.  As luck would have it this is a great year for honey and we have already extracted honey twice (for a total of 47 pounds) and are expecting to be extracting more soon.

Here is a photo of our two hives, the bottom super holds the queen and larvae and the top medium supers hold the honey.  We got the bees out of the honey supers by placing a fume board on the top to drive them out.  My husband then collected the frames of capped honey and brought them into our garage.

Here is a frame that is greater than 90% capped honey.  This is important because it ensures that the honey will be of the right moisture content (around 17-18%) that won't ferment.  The bees know when it is dry enough and cap it off.

 

We then uncapped the honey using an uncapping tool over a bucket.  These can be purchased at Full Moon Apiary at their store in Tupelo's Bakery in Monticello (every time I go there to get new bee supplies I also get a treat from the bakery, yum).

The frames are then placed into the extractor.  We rented this extractor from the Apalachee Beekeeping Association .  Members can rent it for only $10 a day (with a $25 cleaning deposit).  This is perfect for a small operation like ours.

 

When that honey started to drip then pour out of the extractor it was so exciting!  Below it we have a second bucket with filters to filter out dead hive beetles and bees along with any wax (I am trying to figure out what to do with all my wax now!)

 And eventually the bucket had over 20 pounds of honey.

 

This is from our first batch.  Our second batch had even more.  My husband is hoping to make some mead (he is a home brewer) with the large quart jar holding three pounds of honey.

Pickles!

My cucumbers have been doing pretty well and I wanted to try canning pickles instead of just the fridge pickles I have been making.  I like the instructions on the Pick Your Own site.

They suggest to use a canning mix.  The recipes all call for 8-11 pounds of pickles.  That canner used to belong to my late Grandma Anna, it makes me happy to be able to use it and think of her.

I had been collecting pickles for a few days though and only had about three pounds.  So I had to do some math and hope that it works.

My husband wanted some dill pickles so I started with those.

 

I cut off the ends (the blossom ends contain an enzyme that make the pickles mushy) and cut them into spears.  Apparently putting grape leaves in with them make them more crunchy.  Luckily I have four muscadine grape vines in my garden.

 

And here they are waiting to go into the water bath for processing.  Can't wait to try them.

My bees have been very busy (we are planning to do a honey extraction next week) and I am hoping to have some more cucumbers to pickle in the near future.

Pick Your Own Blueberries

Today we took the kids to Green Meadows Farm in Monticello to pick blueberries.

We have done this several years now but the last few years they had been picked out.  Not this year, they have a ton of berries and they told us that the day before they had had 1200 people there. 

We were able to find plenty of berries.  They kids seemed to enjoy it.

You had to keep an eye on the three year old and remind him to pick the purple berries, not the green.

 

 

We picked three pounds.  I don't have enough for jam so I think we will make some blueberry ice cream.  The owner of the farm, Delores Green, has the best recipe and she sells a cook book for $10 at the farm.  They also sell the ice cream, but they were all out.