October is nearly over, and so is the growing season. We have yet to do a fall/winter garden.We do have plans to set up cold frames and have a go at it. But not this year. So, this last week, we began the 'bedding down' of many things around the farm.The last of the garden produce was ...

We eat homemade pizza nearly once a week in the winter. I make my own crust and can pizza sauce with tomatoes from the garden. Canning pizza sauce is fairly easy, and if you are swamped with tomatoes and looking for something new to do with them, this might be for you. I find commercial pizza ...

It is a fact of farm life that bad things can happen. This year a bad thing did happen – my crops were the victims of blight. This season we built raised beds and brought in fresh soil and worked so hard to plant the tomato and leek crops, and they failed. In the past, critters had decimated ...

I love pizza. Who doesn’t? There are plenty of outstanding locally owned pizzerias in my neighborhood, and a select few frozen pizzas are of decent quality, but I like to make my own from scratch, crust and all. I think the best part of pizza is the sauce, especially when it’s made from ...

Fall has arrived very quickly and put an abrupt end to a rather short summer. Where did it go? It seems as if I just put all those plants in the ground. It is the summer that never was. Harvest time has arrived and, as I pick the last of the tomatoes, I have mixed feelings. One of the ...

We’ve make our own mustard, relish and pickles, but I’ve never tried making ketchup. Our bumper tomato crop this year made me decide to try canning ketchup for the first time. Most ketchup brands at the grocery store have high fructose corn syrup, which we try to avoid. I figured why not ...

Our chest freezer is usually quite full of garden veggies by the time our tomato harvest rolls around. That doesn’t mean they go to waste, just that we have to can the majority of our tomatoes. I prefer canned tomatoes to frozen anyway, though it is far more work to can. Canning salsa is a ...

Here in Northern California, months of drought brought creek, river and lake water levels to an all-time low. However, good news came with a light rain on Sunday, Feb. 2, and it’s been raining some every day since. While it hasn’t been what my late father-in-law called a ...

I was explaining some of the problems I was having with my pigs to my daddy. I was stressing and fidgeting, going into great detail about problems. Dad figured I needed to loosen up a little, so when I got done venting, he told me the story of his chickens with the pig.I laughed until I ...