Seed starting, the early birds. Hoping we’re 8 weeks from last frost.

Eggplant Japanese White Egg, Eggplant Kazakhstan, Eggplant Ping Tung, Listada di Gandia Eggplant, Black Beauty Eggplant, Celery Tendercrisp.

Turned over two more beds today. Back is killing me.

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First Crocus spotting. Spring is upon us.

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6 new chicks in my life, a gentleman farmer’s dream.

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52 degrees and sunny. Bugs are emerging.

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First sign of Spring blooms, the Snow Drop, always first to show it’s face, ironically, one day after what will hopefully be our last snow fall.

Temp in the mid 40′s, clear skies.

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It’s the final day of the Home Grown Food Challenge, and boy, what a great and enduring month it’s been. Tonight, I’ll be taking Olive for her first trick-or-treating adventure. Hopefully she will be willing to share some of her candy with me after midnight.

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As I enter the final week of the Home Grown Food Challenge it helps to remind myself of the bigger picture. Sure, the challenge is a great way to celebrate the harvest time, but it is also a calculated way to force myself to experience what it’s like to live off of just the food I’m able to grow as well as explore the great local food sources that exist.

That being said, I’m looking for some more meal inspiration. Please challenge me with a meal I can make and I’ll do it for you! Build a Meal

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When you have a nice variety of ripe hot peppers like this, there’s not better use than to make some hot sauce.

I don’t follow a very strict recipe, but here’s the gist of it.

Ingredients:

• Various Hot peppers
• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Garlic
• Salt
• White Vinegar
• Water

Steps:

1. Clean and chop all the peppers, tomatoes, onions and garlic. Remove seeds from hot peppers if you want to tone down the heat just a bit.
2. Combine in a sauce pan with equal parts white vinegar and water and stew for 30 minutes. Peppers should be above the level of the liquid.
3. Run the sauce mixture through a food mill to remove seeds and skin
4. Continue to stew sauce to reduce water and thicken
5. Can and hot bath for 20 minutes

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Thanks to Melanie for submitting this Home Grown Food Challenge recipe. This suggested combination of ingredients was surely a challenge…Jalapeno, Jerusalem Artichoke, Pumpkin, Chili Pepper and Golden Globe Turnip, doesn’t get more interesting than that. Luckily, when it comes to pizza there really isn’t much I wouldn’t try on it.

Surprisingly, this was actually a very good combination. I still used a tomato sauce as the base of the pizza and the dough was made using local flour from Four Star Farms. The key was baking the pumpkin and Jerusalem Artichoke beforehand to soften them up to be used as toppings on a pizza.

A great tasting meal nonetheless. Even if you don’t try this exact combination, I hope this inspires you to put whatever you are feeling on your pizza.

Please take a second and Build a Meal for me.

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On Fri, we got our first frost of the year, which actually ended up being a harder frost than anticipated. Weather.com had predicted 30 degrees, but when I woke up the next morning the temperature was hovering at 26.

Here are some frosty shots as seen from our porch.

On Friday evening, we ran around harvesting everything we could get our hands on, which included tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and all of our herbs. We even dug up our rosemary and lavender plants to see if they’ll last through the winter indoors. Items that we didn’t want to dig up, such as a few lettuce varieties we have, we just covered with blankets overnight, which actually worked very well.

We’ll be dehydrating herbs like crazy over the next few days.

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