Missing Willow Farm

Our pepper pile is now diminished a bit.  I pickled my second batch of jalapenos this morning.  Each jar has a clove of garlic and a whole habanero inside.  Just because.

We are seriously getting this amount of peppers every time we go down to the garden.  We have maybe 4 gallons of them dried and still whole.  I need to take the food processor outside and turn them into pepper flakes.  I’ve already pickled and canned some, need to set aside time to do that again.  Soon.

We spent last weekend at the Euphoria Wine and Food Festival in Greenville, SC supporting our friend and Lambstock host at his sponsored events.  We stayed pretty busy, this is the only decent photo I got from the opening night party which was our team’s shindig.  This amazing cooking rig was built by our friend John Roberts who served pizza from his brick oven on wheels.  The second photo shows how Brian and I spent our Saturday, roasting the showpiece lamb for the festival.  Someone asked if they could get their photo besides the roasting llama.  Goodness!  People usually think it’s a pig.  🙂

Our ghost pepper plants are going gangbusters!  I packaged some of last year’s blend into containers today and literally sneezed for the next 20 minutes.  This year’s batch should be even better.

Our sheep cautiously peer around the barn to see if Jack’s around to bother them.

Here’s a sampling of the canning I’ve done this summer.  Pickled jalapenos, tomatoes, thai garlic sweet dipping sauce and corn relish.  That dipping sauce is so good I’ve made 3 batches so far.  Cider vinegar, sugar, garlic, salt and our hot pepper flakes.  Yum!

Here’s the one watermelon we were able to grow this year.  A miniature variety?  Nope.  Just an example of what not to do.  What’s amazing is it was delicious inside.  It’s bigger than the pumpkins we were able to get this season.  The vines were gorgeous but, despite our best efforts, the bugs got them.  We sprayed everything we had on a daily basis, picked the bugs off and removed their eggs from the leaves every morning and they beat us anyways.  We think it takes something non-organic to defeat them and are considering getting an aresenal of the bad stuff and moving the pumpkin patch to our back yard next year far from everything else we grow for food.

The dehydrator is going pretty much 24×7 these days to process our hot pepper melange into our own special blend of hot pepper flakes.  The house smells divine!  We have a bumper crop this year.  The largest peppers on the right are pimentos.  Those are stuffed with cheese and roasted.  I’m going to try to freeze a few stuffed ones to try this winter.

My freezer is full of lamb and tomatoes.  Not a bad situation at all!  I also found some time to can 6 quarts of them in the middle of our water issues.  Where there’s a will…

After 2 weeks, an electrician, a plumber, a well company and 700 feet of electrical wire, our water woes appear to be over.  We’ve been suffering with a minute of water flow from our well followed by 30 seconds of no water.   Laundry has been piling up, dishes have been washed by hand and showers have been ever so interesting.  There are jars of water everywhere.  A pressure switch and check valve have been replaced, and the electrician has been called to come pick up his 700 feet of unnecessary wire.  Of course, the final step of the fix required bleach to be poured into our well so we’re still drinking bottled water and only washing our whites for now.  To pile onto the misery, we suffered a power outage during this mess the day after we took our generator in for repair.  We need a vacation.  Somewhere with lots of champagne.