Redistribution of Wealth

We have been very busy this past weekend redistributing the "wealth" of previous owners. When we took down all the "added" walls to the house, this left us with a huge pile of wood. By huge, I mean the pile was wider than me and almost as tall.  The longest boards measured over 80" and consisted mostly of 2 x 4s and 2 x 2s. So, we redistributed this wealth of wood into a new pantry...with a lot more space!

This blank wall now features a wonderful set of shelves and a beautiful curtain! (Thanks mom for the apple tree fabric....it is perfect for the pantry!).

Much better! The best part of the whole project was that it cost us four boxes of wood screws. That's it!

Previously, we had a couple of old shelves to use, but these were starting to bow pretty badly and I was concerned about all the weight on them. In addition to the shelves, we had re-purposed a bakers rack to try and store everything. This worked for a while, but now we have room to expand.

We have designated this area for the home canned vegetables. Previously, some of these had to be split onto different shelves and on different sides of the pantry just to contain it all. Each shelf can hold 56 jars of goodies. A huge improvement....so I can definitely plan on canning even more this coming summer!

This nine-cubicle storage unit has also been replaced with more custom shelves, thanks to my wonderful husband! And while the gray shelving worked for a while, they simply did not provide us with enough space and resulted in a lot of "dead" space above. All of this is now fixed!

All of the canning shelves measure approximately 8" high, which is perfect for all sizes of canning jars. We decided to divide the canned fruit section into two so that I could store all of the jams, butters and preserves together and all the syrups and processed fruits together. All of the shelves consist of four boards, with some spacing in between each to ensure good air flow.

The bulk of the original shelves were on this wall, but the spacing did not work really well for us. We did the best we could with what we had, but I like my new shelves so much better. I now have plenty of room to stock up on what I consider to be staples for any pantry.

All the way around the pantry, we started the first set of shelves approximately 20" from the ground. This allows us to store rolling carts, like you see above, as well as some wine and whiskey half-barrels for long term root storage. I am hoping to order a few of those over the summer. It also gives us plenty of room to store water and so much more.

The final wall was originally empty and so we had used some more gray shelving to hold the additional canned jars that I processed this summer. As you can see, just about every square inch of available space was full and I did not know where I was going to expand to when I went shopping this month. Believe it or not, we were starting to scrape the bottom of the wood pile once we got to this wall. Anxious to finish it up and surprise me, my wonderful husband worked late into the early morning hours....

I now have everything categorized and every food item not only has its own place, but I have room to add to some essentials. I am hoping to buy some more "pretty" boxes or baskets for the top shelves and a few other things, but for now, this space is finished and I love it!

Our redistribution did not stop there. Oh, no it did not. My wonderful 18 month old daughter has learned to climb stairs. A feat that she is quite proud of herself for accomplishing. I have spent most of the last couple days running to the sound of an older sibling that "Harley is on the stairs!". As if that were not enough, our 5 month old black lab has decided that he likes it upstairs....regardless that it is forbidden territory for him! All of this has been solved by re-purposing the door that we removed when we took down the extra wall in the basement.

This is only temporary but it works. Someday we will have an original styled door, with beautifully stained trim and charming original hardware.  Someday. But today, I can rest easy and relax. For a moment. While I may not agree with the redistribution of wealth that our wonderful politicians like to speak about, I definitely like redistributing the "wealth" of previous owners!

Our Cold Cellar & Missing Dumb Waiter

One of the joys of owning an older home is all the history that can be learned along the way. For example, a cold cellar. Now, I had heard of a "root" cellar, or in the case of our home, a "fruit" cellar. However, I had not heard of a cold cellar. When interviewing Mr. Schmidt, he had inquired if the original cold cellar was still in the house. At the time, we had no clue what he was talking about. However, using the description he provided us, we did a little bit of searching and discovered the spot where the original cold cellar had been located.

Prior to the invention of the ice box and before electricity was installed, some homes featured a separate cold cellar - a box located in the basement that could hold perishable items. Some of these cold cellars incorporated a dumb waiter to make it easier to raise and lower the food. We even learned that some of these dumb waiters carried the food all the way from the cold cellar in the basement up into the kitchen or pantry. Based on a review of our flooring above the cold cellar, the original dumb waiter most likely only raised and lowered the food within the basement itself.

This architectural drawing was found in a construction manual from the 1800's. Based on the plan above, you can see why I think that this is the one that closely resembles what we have discovered while excavating our own cold cellar (as if we did not do enough hole digging and excavating between the outhouse and well!). I am hoping that we can use this plan to reconstruct a simple dumb waiter and start using the cold cellar. I think it will be a neat experiment, especially working with the kids to track the temperature every day. Because I do the bulk of my shopping once a month, I have to freeze a lot of things that are normally refrigerated, such as butter, hard cheese, and cream cheese. If this system truly works like an electric refrigerator and is able to maintain a safe temperature range, I will be able to stock up without having to rely on the freezer.

Because we had to use a sledge hammer to break through the concrete "repair", we do not have the smooth sides all around the top. I am hoping that this is something that Dave will be able to fix. As part of our restoration process, we are hoping to build a lid, since the previous owners put the door to the this area of the basement to the left of the cellar. It definitely makes it a challenge to do laundry or obtain food from the pantry.

Based on my research of dumb waiters, they consisted of a wooden box slightly smaller than the cold cellar, with anywhere from two (2) to four (4) shelves and a pair of screened or mesh doors, similar to what you can see on the old pie safes. This allowed the cool air to circulate around and through the storage box itself, ensuring the food stayed cold. Since our cold cellar is only two (2) feet deep, I am hoping to have three (3) shelves. This makes the shelf spacing comparable to what we currently have in our refrigerator. I am also hoping to use tin for the doors, so that I can punch my own design.

While we were able to fairly easily identify where the original cold cellar was located, we had no idea what we would find. I mean, we did not know how the cellar had been filled prior to being cemented over. I thought that it might have been filled with sand and debris, similar to the outhouse and well. We initially tried drilling a few exploratory holes using a drill with a concrete bit. No matter how far down we drilled, all we saw was concrete dust several inches thick. We began to fear that they had used concrete to fill the entire opening. What a nightmare that would have been! Dave began tapping the entire surface area and discovered a hollow sounding spot. We began to pound away in that area until we broke through the concrete. Fortunately, the concrete itself was not that thick. It turned out that when they took down one wall of the rain cistern to open up that portion of the basement, they used the rocks and concrete debris to fill the space. Once we were able to remove the concrete top layer, it was just a matter of lifting out all the large rocks and jagged concrete pieces.

The really super fine concrete debris we are thinking about using in the driveway, similar to gravel. The larger rocks we would like to use to build a permanent fire pit.

Overall, I think that this was another fun and exciting discovery and restoration project for us. Once we have the dumb waiter rebuilt and finished, I will be sure to update with photos of the finished cold cellar, completely stocked!

Our Wonderful Fruit Cellar Pantry

When our house was originally built in 1920, the basement had a section built out with masonry to be the home's fruit cellar. Today we use the original fruit cellar as our pantry. It is a wonderful and charming space featuring some of the field stone foundation on two sides and the NATCO hollow tile brick on two sides. Some of the wood shelves appear to be original, but are warping quite badly and will need to be upgraded at some point. In the meantime, we have been adding shelving gradually to expand our usable space. As promised, here are some photos for everyone to see.

When you first open the door to the pantry, you see my baker's rack, full of dried beans, canning and pickling seasonings, soup stock flavorings and commercially canned produce and soups. The upper wooden shelves we believe to be original to the house and hold our dry soup mixes (in the white box) and some more canned foods - mostly tomato products and canned meats.

Panning to the right, we added one of those nine-box storage shelves. Originally it was in the boys' room and held the cardboard organizing boxes. Those boxes did not last long and were destroyed before we even moved into the house. It was shuffled around to various rooms until we finally moved it into the pantry. This cubicle storage unit primarily hold baking supplies, such as brown sugar, cornbread boxes, bread crumbs, syrups, rice, powdered milk and instant potatoes. The top also hold some additional baking supplies as well as goodies for the baby.

This is a picture of the inside corner of the pantry space. We installed one of those metal, five-shelved units that you can pick up for about $20.00 at Wal-mart. For the most part, this shelving unit hold all the vegetables that we canned, dill pickles, spaghetti sauce and tomato soup. We have found that these shelves provide a good amount of storage at a reasonable cost and can be gradually added.
  

 This section of the pantry is where we store our commercially packaged condiments and the three types of flours that I like to stock. We are investigating a better, long-term storage option for the flours, but for now, we are keeping them in their original packaging.

 

The next section of shelving holds our paper products, juice, sugar, chips and water. The shelving space here is a bit awkward. Eventually, we hope to add more of the shelving units to better utilize the space, but still maintain the uppermost original shelf.

Swinging around and we have two more of those wonderful shelves. These are full of home canned goods. The first one holds mostly fruits, in the form of jams, butters and syrups. The second shelf is a mixture of both fruits and vegetables. This is where the overflow of pickles, spaghetti sauce, tomato soup and more is stored.

Finally, we are back around and to the doorway again. We keep crates at the bottom to hold our onions and potatoes and use the window ledge to hold health and beauty products.

So this is our little pantry. I hope you enjoyed the pictures and that it has given you some ideas for your home.

Canning Season Is Over

Canning season has come to an end for 2012 with the processing of the pumpkins. While in the midst of it all, it seemed like I was canning every day. Now that we are done, I was surprised at how little I was able to get done out of our garden. I am thankful for the Back to Eden approach and am looking forward to doing it again next year, but I was really surprised by the total overall. I had such high expectations for our first gardening experience! I am trying to keep in mind that this year we were suffering from a horrible drought and some of our plants just didn't seem to produce, such as the Brussels sprouts.

I have updated the food preservation page to include the totals of everything preserved for 2012. Now that the season is over, I was able to put it into alphabetical order and sort it by size, so it is a little easier to read. It will be interesting to see how 2013 will do compared to 2012 now that we have a better grasp of the garden and canning. I also have to remind myself that this was only my second year of canning, too!

In all, we put away 8.5 gallons (freezer bags) in the big freezer and 93 half-pints, 84 pints, and 187 quarts in the pantry. We are still in the process of organizing our pantry, adding additional shelving and just getting it organized overall. Once we finish getting it cleaned up and organized for winter, I will post some pictures to share with everyone.

We are already in the process of looking ahead to 2013 and are considering a few new things. We are researching greenhouses and are actually thinking of replacing our shed with an assemble-yourself greenhouse. This should help with seed starting come February. I also watched a phenomenal video on youtube that taught how to start seeds to ensure proper growth. I am really excited to try out some of their ideas. We are looking at expanding the garden into the flower gardens around the house by planting the culinary herbs, herbal tea plants and medicinal plants close to the house. This year, we are ordering our heirloom seeds from a provider that we recently heard about, www.mypatriotsupply.com. With the new herbs and medicinal plants, I had to order a book so that I could learn how to use them! Finally, I also ordered a book on owning a root cellar. We used to have a root cellar in our basement that someone cemented over. Hopefully this book will give us some ideas on how to either restore or build a new root cellar for more storage options.

Now that summer is over, we are back to working on various projects around the house. Thus far, we have reorganized the laundry room. All year long, the washer and dryer have been driving me crazy by "walking" around! I was also having trouble adjusting to having the washer on the right and the dryer on the left as I lived with it in a reverse formation for the past eight years. We initially tried balancing the appliances using cardboard, but they walked right off that too! It was getting really frustrating and annoying, especially since we have a metal capped sewer pipe of some sorts right in that area - and the washer seemed to be constantly hitting it, making even more noise. We finally solved all the problems by switching the two appliances and getting everything adjusted. I am so happy! (Isn't it amazing how the simplest things can put a smile on our face?). Our last improvement to the laundry areas was the addition of a shelving unit like we are using in the pantry. This gives me a great place to store laundry supplies and other project odds and ends.

We also hung the original pantry door back up. The door was found lying on the floor against the outer pantry wall. Unfortunately, it was buried behind so much clutter that we could barely get to it. As part of our basement clean up project, we got that area all cleaned up and decided to hang the door. We weren't really sure why it was taken off to begin with, but suspected it had something to do with the hinges, since they were missing. To our disgust, we discovered that the door had been removed because the piping to the furnace was hung too low, causing the door to only be opened a few inches. Thankfully, this was an easy fix - we simply had to move a supporting block of wood and hang a few inches higher the pipe supports. Now the door can swing open freely. The door needs some work and we are missing some of the hardware, but it still is a neat thing to see, especially since most of the original doors were removed prior to us owning the house.

I'm sure that we will be working on a lot more projects in the house over the winter months - such as working on the wood floors! Unfortunately, we need to use our heat guns to do that project and, really, who wants to use a heat gun in the middle of summer!

Next time, I'll try to have more pictures. Til then, God bless!

Green Tomatoes

Living in Wisconsin with our wonderfully unpredictable weather patterns has made gardening interesting this year. First, we had a very late spring, with killing frosts followed by an unseasonably hot summer resulting in a severe drought. We are so thankful that we used the Back to Eden garden method this year! And now, we are anticipating near freezing temperatures at night. Due to our concerns about the temperatures, we decided this past Saturday to pull all of our tomato plants and harvest all the green tomatoes. The final result? More than 26 gallons worth. These have all been bagged in brown paper grocery store bags to ripen over the course of the next week or two.

We are also anticipating a rather large crop of watermelons and so we have been experimenting with some new recipes (new to us) for watermelon syrup and hopefully, watermelon jam. My first batch did not work as anticipated, hence, the seven pints of watermelon syrup. It tasted really good - it just didn't jell the way we hoped it would.

We also have several peppers and some new flowers on our pepper plants. I am anticipating picking the last of the peppers as my bags of tomatoes turn red. All of our peppers have been incorporated into our spaghetti sauce and soup this year. Out of everything that we planted, we hit the balance just right with our green peppers!

Our wonderful neighbor next door has shared some of her Concord grapes with us, too. So, I will be making a small batch of grape jam here shortly.

Finally, we have been inundated with fruit flies ever since we processed our pears. Nothing we did seemed to get rid of them! Until now....

We took a budding meats container and punched holes into the top using a Pampered Chef vegetable holder. We then put some fresh fruit inside (in this picture, there are grapes and watermelon). And then we just let it sit. Man, do those annoying fruit flies love it! Even better, once they are in there, they are not able to get out. After a few days, we stick the container in the freezer to kill off the flies and dispose of them and reset the container. It has worked awesome! Prior to this, we tried different things involving apple cider vinegar, and a variety of containers, covers, etc. None of them worked except for this! Just thought we would share!

Getting Buried In Produce - A Back to Eden Garden Update

Our Back to Eden garden is definitely keeping me busy, especially now that the tomatoes are coming in, literally, by the brown bag full. I know that seeing is believing and so I thought I would show a small timeline of photographs for you.

This first picture was taken on August 27th, about a week before Labor Day weekend. My husband's parents had come to visit us, so we had intentionally skipped a day of picking so that we could share the joy of harvesting with them. And what a harvest it was - the largest that we had picked to date. We picked cabbage, carrots, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, and two bowls of tomatoes.

 

 We continued to harvest throughout the following week, mostly cucumbers and tomatoes. By labor day, we needed to pick even more - butternut squash and sweet corn - in addition to the usual cucumbers and tomatoes. Two days later, the abundant harvest continued.

 

This past Wednesday, in addition to tomatoes and cucumbers, we picked carrots, green beans, and our first red and ripe watermelon. Oh, what a sweet and juicy treat the watermelon was! And, the harvest still continues. Each day, we pick at least one brown bag full of tomatoes, which I am now processing in two stock pots at least twice a week in an effort to keep up! For those on the fence regarding this type of gardening, I highly recommend it! As you can see, we have been truly blessed by God's provisions.

Back to Eden Garden Update

I thought that I would take a few minutes this wet and rainy Thursday to update everyone on how are garden is doing. We are very pleased with our results of using the Back to Eden gardening approach. Other than the initial watering that we did when we initially planted our seeds and plants, we have not had to water our garden - and we are in one of the worst droughts in the history of our area! We are so thankful to God for His provisions!

On the Food Preservation page (see menu on left), I am keeping track of everything that we are preserving. But this page does not really tell the whole story. We have definitely learned a few things along the way, as this has been our first garden. When selecting our seeds and laying out the garden, it was challenging for me to be able to visualize how much produce we would have from a particular plant. Case in point, all the tomato plants! Along the way, though, we have been truly amazed by so many aspects of our garden.

To date, we have finished the European Mesclun Salad. For some reason, our Iceberg Lettuce and Giant Noble Spinach did not really produce this year. Fortunately, we had some seeds given to us for a green leaf lettuce and that did okay. I am not sure what we are going to plant for salad greens next year.

The Catskill Brussel Sprouts seem to be growing good. At least, the plants are getting really big. We just don't seem to have any sprouts yet, but then again, I am not even really sure what to look for!

Next to the sprouts, we had planted our Emerald Giant Green Peppers - none of which survived my initial indoor seed start. Hopefully, we will have better results next year. Thankfully, I had purchased some Big Bertha Green Peppers from the local Amish greenhouse and these have been producing in abundance. While the peppers have been on the smaller side and long and skinny (as opposed to the big round ones at the grocery store), they have been plentiful. We pick an average of 2 to 3 peppers every couple of days. Thus far, I have almost one gallon frozen and have used closed to a dozen of them in homemade spaghetti sauces, salsa and tomato soups.

As mentioned in a previous post, we finished up our broccoli some time ago, but I think we may have stopped a little prematurely. Once I decided to let it all go to seed, we started to see a whole bunch of broccoli heads all over the plants! I probably could have frozen a few gallons worth had I not let it go to seed. Something new learned for next year! We have one plant that we are watching carefully becasue we do not know what it is! It looks kind of like the broccoli, but a little different. We are hoping that it is the Giant of Naples Cauliflower that we planted. Only time will tell.

None of the onions that I planted really grew. I am not sure what we did wrong, but fortunately the local hardware store had given us a bag with 100 onion sets. I planted them with little expectation. I am pleased to announce that these onions are growing very well. The bulbs are still on the smaller side, but the potency is strong! I have been slowly pulling a few out of the garden when I have a lot of tomatoes to process. These green onions - tops and all - are being used with the green peppers to season our spaghetti sauces, salsa and tomato soup. Mmmm good!

Our zucchini plant has been a slow, but steady producer. We have already been blessed with two zucchinis and can see two more slowly growing. The plant itself seems to be getting taller and much wider - taking over some of the tomato and cabbage plants on one side and the broccoli on the other. It is so wide, that we can barely walk around it without risking damaging other produce.

The carrots are also slowly getting bigger and fatter. At least once a week we pull one or two "just to check". We planted quite a few, but they are much slower growing than I had anticipated. The Stonehedge Cabbage is also growing very well. We harvested our first one and attempted to cook it and then serve it with a basic white sauce. The smell of the cabbage was enough to forgo more than just a little bite, but my husband seemed to enjoy it - he ate almost the entire head himself!

And now for the the funny things that are garden has taught us thus far....squash like to spread and are able to bypass the garden fence! We have three or four squash growing outside of the garden in addition to the nearly 30 feet of vines growing inside the garden!

We have also learned that our corn plants get tall - really tall. I remember corn plants from my childhood and they had seemed tall to my little girl height, but I don't remember them being taller than a simple garden shed!

We also learned that a few seeds can go a long way - especially when it comes to watermelons. We planted 25 seeds and we now have over 20 watermelons growing behind our shed, with new ones appearing almost weekly!

We had one watermelon that we thought might be ready and so, anxious to try one, we went ahead and picked it. It sounded hollow, the skin was dull and it looked so good...until we opened it!

Needless to say, we were all very dissapointed. But all is not lost - I found a recipe online for pickled watermelon rind and we were able to can one quart of the rinds. The most challenging part of the whole thing was getting rid of the seeds - there were so many I seemed to get a scoop full every time I attempted to make a melon ball!

Finally, we have learned why it is so important to cage your tomato plants. If this step is not done, you will end up with a tomato jungle!

We have hundreds of green tomatoes with a few red ones every couple of days. Unfortunately, it can be a real challenge to get the ripe tomatoes out! The branches of the tomato plants are so intertwined that we risk breaking off the branches while moving them in an attempt to get to the tomatoes underneath. So far, we have only lost one complete branch - with about 20 green tomatoes on it! I diced them up along with the red ones and made some salsa. It has also been a race with the chipmunks to get the ripe tomatoes out of the garden before they take a bite

We are also getting a fairly good amount of cucumbers. I have been pickling one to two quarts almost daily - some dill and some bread and butter. My family is counting down until they can open the first jar!

Well, that's about it for now. Got to get back to the canner!

Crazy Summer

This summer has been a bit of a crazy one for us thus far...we have been mostly keeping busy with the garden and the day-to-day chores of laundry, ironing, cooking, and cleaning. We have also been busy preparing to install the fence, which meant a lot of cleaning up along the border of the property line. We also fixed all the windows on the first floor so that we could finally install the screens, allowing some much needed air flow during this hot season!

The garden continues to flourish, despite the heat. The Back to Eden method that we have been using has definitely delivered as promised as we have not had to water our garden all season. Here is a picture collage....

So far, we are done with the broccoli, radishes and first planting of salad greens. Our watermelons are growing beautifully, and we just picked our first zucchini and small batch of pickling cucumbers. We are keeping a close eye on the corn, but it appears to be growing well. Our tomatoes have so many green ones that they are literally falling all over themselves. We are going to have to do something about that, and soon. All in all, we feel truly blessed.

Blueberries arrived at the local Amish store, and so we were in full swing canning, freezing and dehydrating for a few days. I should be updating the food preservation page shortly with what we have preserved as well as what we have eaten fresh! Out of 30 pounds of blueberries, we made 4 fresh pies, 2 gallons frozen, 17 half-pints and 2 pints of jam, plus a dehydrater full. My little helpers were eating them almost as fast as I could process them, so I ended up leaving about 5 pounds fresh to be eaten.

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer, even with the heat!

A Strawberry Adventure

Today I went to a local pick-your-own farm and picked about 20 pounds of strawberries. Last year, we missed the window with the chaos of moving and getting settled in, so I was really watching the signs for strawberry picking this year. While we planted strawberries in our garden, we are not expecting to harvest any of them this year so that the roots can develop real well.

As you can see, they were absolutely beautiful and ready to be picked! Once home, we got right to work getting about 15 pounds of them processed for the winter. My beautiful daughters were eager to help and learn what needed to be done to make our wonderful strawberry jam, syrup for topping ice cream, and a few gallons frozen for making strawberry pies.

They had so much fun and the strawberries were so juicy that little Zoya looks like she was slaughtering chickens instead of slicing strawberries! Her dress was stained right through to her panties and the skin underneath all the way down to her knees! Raeann was just as busy helping, but managed to contain the stains to her forearms and hands! And, we go a lot accomplished in just a few short, busy hours.

Working together, we processed 10 half-pints of strawberry jam, 8 pints of strawberry syrup to use on our ice cream, and 2.5 gallons sliced and frozen for homemade strawberry pies. I couldn't have done it without my wonderful helpers! They did such a great job. I think we can classify this "assignment" as part of our life skills class for homeschooling for today!