What's Up In YOUR Land Base?

Blessings Darlings!

 

Here in my land base, the fireflies are long gone. Night are LOUD now, with cicadas and crickets having meet and greets. I can count on seeing some shooting stars every night that is clear enough ... but I can also count on late day thunderstorms often enough that at least half the nights aren't clear enough.

And it is so very much butterfly and moth season! Monarch and swallowtail, lovely moths I don't know the name of, and the ubiquitous cabbage moths are everywhere.   Night features other moths, plus visiting bats (I'm guessing that they share barn space with the barn swallows).

The local peaches are ripe - and a local church is having their Peach Festival tomorrow.  My tomatoes are nowhere near ripe since I planted them late, but the cucs and peppers and occasional zucchini (I only started one plant) are producing.

The rivers are high due to all the rain over the past month.  Water practically pours out of cracks in the cliffs of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  The humidity is high.  Every day the forecast is "Today will be much cooler than yesterday was," but that's just wishful thinking.  The temperature has been pretty constant.  

This is when county fairs should be.  Before school starts, in the gap between when farmers harvest stuff.  Everyone should be eating funnel cakes with diced fresh peaches and powdered sugar.

Frondly, Fern

Can It.

Blessings, Darlings!

It's canning season again!  I've been doing fruit so far, but tomatoes (okay, technically a berry) and corn and beans are going to be canned soon.

It's hot and time consuming work, but not exactly intellectually demanding.  Which means I have time to do magic and to ponder things.  I'll talk about the magic in this post.

Back in the day, when I was a kid, one of the stories we were told about Benjamin Franklin was that he and his father were putting up barrels of pork (no doubt layered with salt).  Ben, who was NOT impressed by the long time spent at each meal saying grace, reported said something along the lines of "Dude, why don't we do the grace thing now, over the whole barrel, and get it over with?  We'd get our eat on faster at dinner..."

Well, I'm not taking quite that approach to the canning, but I AM invoking the blessings of the Gods on each batch I can.  Working for health. For wholeness.  For it to feed us body and soul. 

I layer flavors in my cooking (even the peaches I just canned had added cinnamon), it's time I started layering blessings in all I do.

Frondly, Fern

We Shop

Blessings, Darlings!

My name is Fern, and I'm a farmer's market addict.

Today the Chubby Hubby and I went to the Bowie Farmers Market, a producer-only market.  Oh, could we have bought!

Our favorite vendor there is Unger Farm.  Their early and late season peaches are wonderful, but their midseason peaches are the most amazing peaches we have ever eaten.  Bursting with flavor, often huge, always deeply colored, there are peaches you have to eat with a bib.  You will eat them even without one, and the trails of peach juice they will leave on your shirt is a minor price to pay.

[Fern's hubby here: the thing that's really special about an Unger peach is that it has this deep flavor that is so far above any other peach we have ever eaten.   The flavor doesn't just say "peach," it says "PEACH!!!"  It's like the difference in sound between a cheap fiddle, vs a Stradivarius played by a master. The cheap fiddle sounds tinny and tentative, but a Strad has a rich full-throated sound that is as smooth as velvet. Yeah, Unger mid season peaches are THAT good. ]

Alas, it is too late in the year for ANY MORE peaches from their farm.  We 'settled' for apples:  a half-peck bag of Golden Delicious for both eating out of hand and for a pie I plan to make this week, and small box of Smokehouse, a heritage apple..

I've never run into anyone selling Smokehouse apples before.  Firm but not rock hard, they have an intriguing sweet/tart/apple flavor.  To me, they cry out to be eaten with slices of a sharp cheddar.  No one else in the family feels they need to be paired with anything.  Unfortunately, the Ungers have few boxes of them to sell, as they have had to remove many of their Smokehouse trees.  The variety is not resistant to black spot.  It's a shame, so, sadly, to allow more shoppers can enjoy the variety I limited myself to one box.

Our next spot is Barbie's Breads, who sells breads and pastries from Uptown Bakers http://www.uptownbakers.com/.  Yes, long-time readers know that I bake most of my own bread, even grind much of my own grain for my own breads.  However, Uptown Bakery makes better artisan bread than I do. Way better. Way, way better.  So, for the 6 months or so that Barbie sells them at farmers markets, I buy one loaf a week.  This week we bought a seeded rye.  We somehow managed to resist the pastries ... this time.  However, I can assure you that even their oatmeal cookies are special, their wonderbars ARE a wonder, and their unique tea cakes are the well-blessed result of a culinary ad lib.

There were no leeks to be had yet (I'm hoping that the drought hasn't toasted them, but booths were so busy I didn't have a chance to ask).  We settled, after a survey of all stands, for adding beets, sweet potatoes, spinach, peaches from a different provider, and hard squash to our haul.  CH and I had a spirited debate over getting some fresh unpasteurized cider, but ultimately had to admit we didn't have room in the fridge for the gallon jug. We also deferred buying asian pears, more peppers, hubbard squash (excellent for strudel!), and a whole host of other enticing produce.

And I do believe I'll also get some leeks at the grocer, as I feel a fall chicken pot pie coming on.

What's fresh and local and wonderful in your area now?

Frondly, Fern

Peach Season!

UNGERS FARM HAS RIPE PEACHES!!!!!

This is on of the most important days of the year - the day I hit the farmer's market and the Ungers have fresh peaches. Oh, I suppose they might have had them last week when I was out of town, but c'mon - this blog is all about Fern (sorry, Suz).

The Ungers grow the most amazing fruits and veggies. Great flavor, lovely stuff. Cherries, beans, plums, green beans, peppers, are all wonderful. But their PEACHES are amazing beyond words. I bought two boxes (10 peaches) of seconds, which came to about $1.25 a pound. Yes, about 25 cents a pound more than grocery store sale price peaches. But these are from the UNGERS - we are all blown away by the flavor, and the heck with the tiny cosmetic flaws!

Being broke I didn't buy enough for us to each eat one a day, let alone enough for me to bake with or can. Might do some canning later, if $ allows. But I have 4 jars of peaches left from last year .... no, I HAD 4 jars left from last year. I only have 2 jars now. For I just made peach cobbler out of two of the surviving cans. And my husband is so happy with it that I might have to make more this week. Or make a cobbler of the canned cherries.

Life is sweet.

Frondly, Fern