Gardening, Part 2

Now I have “Oats, Peas, Beans & Barley” stuck in my head.

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Good Lord, i clicked on that! You monster! :grin:

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We are beyond the point of Raspberry saturation.

I picked up a steam juicer and now have 1.5 gallons of raspberry juice. Also raspberry cakes, raspberry syrup, raspberry lemonade, and frozen raspberries. The raspberry pulp leftover from the juicer made an okay filler in an apple crumble and tasted not unlike rhubarb

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Do you have a local food pantry that will accept produce donations?

That all looks delicious

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Oh. I’m sorry to hear this.
But listen, you’re gonna make it through this. It’s just a rough patch, that’s all.

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I can donate fruits and vegetables to the local food bank but not self-canned food. The good Samaritan act doesn’t cover that.

This late in the raspberry season many of the insects have found the raspberry patch so we have to be careful to filter out any critters in the berries, and that is big enough job on top of the time spent picking, hence the move towards juicing instead.

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mmm…
raspberry bug juice! hey, it’s organic!

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“Bug juice” is what campers used to call the result of cheap powdered ‘fruit’ mix stirred into a jug of water to drink with meals at camp. Maybe they still do? Because sweet water with an open top draws bugs.

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Full of trace minerals, look how well swallows, bats and dragonflies do on an insect diet

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Yup, we served “bug juice” at the summer camp I cooked at during college. Mixed it up in clean/new garbage cans :smiley:

I suppose there are probably dozens or more folktales and hypotheticals for why “bug juice” is called that…

The reason I’ve heard is that red food coloring was traditionally made from cochineal insects. (I think that by the time we were kids they were more likely using artificial red dye.)

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That’s a feature: protein juice for the paleo types!

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Goumi berry juice! My favorite use of the berries. I freeze them, thaw them and chuck them in the steam juicer. Works great.

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This year’s crop of solar lamps is coming along rather nicely.

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My wife just found a recipe for transforming zucchini into a pineapple substitute. Given that we have zukes out the wazoo, and my prospects for growing pineapple are slim to none, we shall give it a try. I will let y’all know!

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Is this a roundabout way of saying you’re going to use it as a pizza topping?

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Thins sliced zucchini on a white base is amazing, goes great on focaccia too.

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Blackberries, and a bee on a scabious


Also some blueberries:

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I haven’t been super motivated for gardening for the past week or so. Some crops aren’t doing well and pests have been wrecking others. Squirrels are killing my apples, mice are chewing my beans and slugs are after my cabbages. I don’t have enough time to combat the onslaught.

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My apples and pears are going gangbusters this year, but the damned groundhogs ate my bush beans and sweet potatoes to the ground. Weirdly, they left the pole beans alone. Eliminating them just seems to put up a “thos site available” sign and new ones move in. So, i am going to experiment with making my crops less inviting to whistle pigs next year. Every year is a little different.

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We’ve been battling a mama groundhog for several years. We got a little extreme this year - stapled chicken wire to the raised bed. It worked, we’ve picked more than a bushel of cucumbers already.


[Yes, I’m a bit behind on weeding. Been processing cucumbers the last 3 weeks!]

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