Pioneer Woman at Heart

Most of our days here have been snow covered, and no sunshine.  We are tickled pink, when we do get some sunshine. Raise your hand if you put on 14 layers of outerwear, then trudged thru mountains and hill-slides of snow and ice to tend your hens, came back inside and removed the layers to realize you forgot to get the mail from the mailbox?  Yep.  My hand is up, ha ha!  I'll chalk it in as exercise. I know you are probably reading this and thinking, "this blog can't get any more entertaining" ha ha!  Well, it can. The hubster strikes again.  He wanted to know if we still had some mini tubes of krazy glue to fix something.  I dug around his "catch all" drawer in the kitchen to take a look-see.   First, the drawer is "his" because he puts anything in there after completing a home repair/job when he is too lazy tired to put it away where it belongs. Second, my hands came back out of a corner of the drawer, all purple and goopy.  He put a s...

  Garden clean up is very late this year, due to circumstances beyond our control.  Now we are delayed with rain, but we may have a few warmer days this week.  We may only have two days left to finish the removal. In hindsight, we should have hired help, but..... The sunshine kabocha produced a few, although most do not look completely ripe (by color), and the butternut is pretty small.  The cocozelle zucchini we left on the vines is the perfect size for seed saving. Although most of the mashed potato squash was cross pollinated, we got a few that produced to enjoy.  We literally got zero spaghetti squash (which is very very rare, but we did have a bad drought year).  The Mashed potato squash is the white one in the above photo. Russian red kale and a mix of Swiss chard were washed, sliced, blanched and frozen for winter use.  The bugs got to most of the Swiss chard. Green onions were dehydrated for the first time ever.  I froze some as well, but...

  It's officially "fall" here now.  Woke up to 40°F and boy it is very chilly.  The leaves are turning even more, and more are falling.  The tomatoes are done for the garden season too. 5 pints of Lemony-Basil Tomato Soup was canned.  I normally get about 2-3 batches canned, but not this year.  I am thankful for what we did get.  The cold weather has started to diminish the amount of herbs we are getting from the herb garden now. There are other goals now that the tomatoes are all processed. We will need to pull everything left in the garden(s), and do other prep work to put them to "bed" for the season.  I still have apples to process, but they are in the fridge for now.  I need to get caught up with other work and I have a strainer full of garden bell peppers to dice and freeze. I totally forgot that I planted several rosemary plants inside the garden this year, so I will need to process those (have no plans to try for the umpteenth time to...

  We finally got rain!  So thankful for it.  There was a field fire near us the night before the rain arrived.   It's been so dry, and the field dust was causing upper respiratory issues for so many people (wind didn't help with that). Spicy Barbeque Sauce was canned.  It takes a lot of ingredients, so it's not my favorite to can, but it is real ingredients.  Yes, it has brown sugar.  It's a canning recipe from Better Homes and Gardens, that we have been using for several years now. Rain ~ Spicy Barbeque Sauce ©  October 2025 by  Kristina  at  Pioneer  Woman at Heart

  One more "first" for me this year (something new to try/experience). . .  Cranapple Butter ( A Ball Canning Recipe).  I read this is good to top your turkey at the holidays, but we plan to try it on toast too.  Why did I try it?  Well, we had more apples from our trees.  Yes, I could can apple pie filling, but it may still happen too.

  Wow, the time has really flown by, and it would take a very long post to update every single thing.  Goodness. Thank you all for your advice on recent post question.  

  The early morning weather here has been downright chilly.  One morning it was 42 degrees.  Flower beds have been weeded.  The herb garden is next in line, but I do need to figure out what to do with all the rosemary plants I planted in the actual vegetable garden.  I have not mastered keeping them alive all winter indoors.  They will not survive the winter if left outside. Did any of my blog writing followers locate a better "blog" platform online?  Just curious if anyone is moving from blogger. 

  (picked one for canning) All in one day's picking.  The bell peppers are on, but not all  ready yet (very late harvest year).  Those pickling cucumbers can hide so easily, even after making a thorough attempt to check for any.  The chickens were happy with their treat, and the kitchen was busy again. Both went into meals.  The kale went into a breakfast, and the beans went into a dinner. The English type (will have to look up the actual name) cucumbers we planted are about between 11 and 12 inches long. Two large cucumbers went into making a cold salad with some cherry tomatoes from the garden, along with some fresh parsley, dill and peppermint. We have been pretty creative in consuming the cucumbers.  Needless to say, I am finding some nice salad recipes that we are really enjoying.   Canning season officially started this late month of August - sweet pickle relish.  We did not get enough of our cucumbers last year to can this, but we...

  I'm not sure who is happier when all the canning supplies go back in storage. . . my husband or myself, ha ha!  We got very little canned this year.  In fact, I only canned ketchup and tomato sauce.  Very strange garden year this year. The majority of our own tomatoes were very very small.  Most likely due to the second planting (rabbits ate the entire first before we fenced it), and the drought we are having.  I was gifted enough tomatoes to can what I did this year. The hot peppers are nearing the end of the season, and if you have been following my blog, you read that our "hot" banana peppers were not hot this year.  I yanked the plants and pickled the rest for the season.  These were not canned, but will last 3 months in the refrigerator. I bought us a new tool for when we stuff jalapenos, or when I need to de-seed any hot peppers.  Call it being prepared for the next garden year, as we decided to freeze the jalapenos this round of pick...

                                        The sauce comes out of the center piece and into a pan (white part), and the "trash" comes out the left side and I put a pot there to catch it.  It's the seeds and peelings of the tomatoes.  Basically, anything sauce made, I do not have to de-seed or remove peels, as this hand cranked machine does it for me. However, I always assumed it was doing it's job well the first time. (second time running it thru) I have no idea why no one, who uses a sauce maker, ever told me this tidbit!   I always "assumed" that my sauce maker worked well enough to give me the "goods" when saucing anything.  Wrong!  Run your "trash" thru the sauce maker a second time to get the most of those tomatoes.  I am still using my old sauce maker, as the new one has not arrived yet, and boy did I get more doing it twice.  I found out about t...

  I debated just freezing the last of the peaches, but canned a smalled batch early in the morning.  We'll get more peaches later this summer. I made a new recipe for pomegrante vinaigrette.  One recipe uses the seeds (using a blender) and the other uses juice form concentrate (the one I tried).  I used a bit more dijon in ours to thicken it just a bit more, and we love it.  We are enjoying more salads this week with the heat index so high. I was out checking berries and taking the chickens fresh cold water, when I discoveredd this growing between the raspberries and asparagus patch.  Does anyone know what it is?  The plant itself is growing just like a red raspberry bush, but it obviously is not a raspberry bush. I have never see this before.  In finding this, I do see some poison sumac in another area, so we need to remove it.  Always something to take care of around here. It was so humid and hot, I was getting seriously worried about my ch...