GuardNGuy.blogspot.com

  There are plenty of “back to the earth” bloggers out there who do amazing things with their gardens and livestock. As much as I admire them, at this point in my life I either don’t have the energy to do what they do, or I’d rather use that energy for other things. I suppose that if modern society as we know it collapsed, I’d be out there building a greenhouse out of milk jugs and Amazon boxes. That being said, there are a few things we’ve done that fall into the self-sufficiency basket. A few years ago, I started to tap our maple trees and made syrup. We don’t have the “right kind” of maple trees, but it still works, and the end product is really nice. This year I wanted to try making horseradish. We planted our horseradish oh, maybe 15 years ago. Up until last weekend we’d never done anything with it, but after watching a half-dozen YouTube videos it seemed like something easy enough to do. And, other than being a little time consuming, it wasn’t bad. We dug up some roots –

  Frankly, I’m glad it’s almost over. There are no more apples, peppers, or tomatoes to deal with. Bumper crops are wonderful, but contending with them takes a lot of time and effort. Fortunately, we have some willing recipients of some of our produce which both makes us feel generous and reduces the canning/freezing/dehydrating workload. Despite several frosts there are still beet greens growing on a comically large, unpicked beet. The Swiss chard (a relative of beets) is also putting out new leaves from the base of the plants. The kale plants stand defiantly, daring us to cut them. Even the raspberries have a few more treats for us if we look carefully. Some spinach is growing from seeds that were left to grow after the plants bolted back in late June. We had a little pea plant growing near where the peas had been. It’s time to put the garden to bed, but we are reluctant to cut down a lot of the dead things because the birds seem to be feasting on flower seeds and such. It’s al