Ah, corn. Good old sweet corn – and bees. 

Yelp – bees. 

It is amazing thing, but without bees you can not have a garden – or, actually, you can have a garden, but you wont be harvesting a lot…. 

Luckly for us we have lots of bees in our garden – meaning that we have lots of corn to harvest…

This of course, brings it own set of problems – namely the fact that two people can not eat that much corn… [@more@]

So we decided to blanch and freeze a buch of ears.

Start by shucking the corn – unless you want to eat frozzen corn husks… Once the water is boiling, put the corn ears into the water and let boil for about 10 minutes (depending on the diameter of the corn ears).

After the 10 minutes, dunk in ice cold water for 10 minutes and then dry. 

 Wrap in alumninum foil and then place inside a frezzer bag. Place in freezer for a few months and then enjoy wonderful home grown corn in the middle of the winter.

Remember those peas we pick? Well, we decided to postpone the enjoyment of our taste buds for a few months – saving them for the cold winter months instead of gorging ourselves with peas today.

This is where blanching comes into play. Speaking of blanching – who ever thought of such a word? Ever time I say the word I think of the banshee in Darby O'Gill and the Little People…. ok… so I'm a tad strange…

Anyway, so in order to keep the peas we harvested this weekend, we boiled them in a pot of hot water for two minutes – then immediately dunked them into ice cold water for another two minutes. [@more@]

This process – called blanching – is supposed to allow the peas to be frozen while keeping all the healthy vitamins and nutrients. 

While the process seems straight forward, it was actually a tad scary as our cook warned us against under cooking the peas in the boiling water, over cooling them in the cold water and everything else…. sigh….

We took the "a-few-seconds-here-or-there-shouldn't-kill" approach. Hopefully we will still be around next Spring after enjoying our peas all winter.

After the blanching process, we sealed the peas into four quart size zip-lock freezer bags and stuck them into our deep freezer. We will continue to add to this stock pile over the summer so that we will have plenty of home grown vegies this winter.

This past weekend was a joyful occasion as we were able to harvest the first fruits of our garden.

You know, when you think about it, gardens are pretty amazing. You dig up a piece of dirt, throw in some tiny dry seeds – add water and the next thing you know you’re standing the middle of a vegetable aisle! 

*smile* I know there must some kinda of spiritual lesson there…but I’m going to skip commenting on it and tell you just to read Mark 4.

Peas where the first vegetables we were able to pick (some of our co-gardeners harvested some radishes before hand, but we missed out on them). =   However, a few days later we were able to pick a few tomatoes – and let me tell you, these tomatoes were awesome!

Eating these first fruits is a reminder that all the hard work of weeding, watering and taking care of the garden is worth it. It just takes a little patience. [@more@]

Weeds and dirt. oh – and a machine with lots of teeth.

Yesterday was the start of a love/hate relationship with the soil and weather of Idaho.

Yelp – we are planting a garden.

Only, it is not on our property as originally planned – it is next door at my neighbors place. She has a nice garden spot where she has been farmin for years. Only this year she is unable to work the land like she is used to…so Em and I decided to help her out.

We prepare the land and she helps with the watering and picking. A win-win deal. [@more@]

Shoot – we are thinking about hosting a "community garden" there as the plot is big enough to grow a TON of food. We are not sure who, if anyone, is going to join us…but we are offering.

So, yesterday we broke out the tiller and started turning the soil – trying to chop up all the weeds that grew up over the winter and spring.

It was slow going…well, until we were told to stop.

Our neighbor has found someone with a tractor who is willing to disk the whole thing….