Making fresh fruit juice without juicer machine

Dear Family & Friends

We don't own a lot of gadget in our house - we're just happy to make do of what we have. Here's how we make fresh grapes juice - without a juicer machine! With spoon or fork, soft fruit can be mashed easily and use a sieve to separate the fruit juice. We get super fresh and delicious 100% pure fruit juice like this. Grape juice have to be drank as soon as possible because it ferments so quick and turns into wine! 

This is one way of making use of our harvest - because there's just so much of it at this time. We have to keep healthy. Hope you are all keeping healthy too with what God gives you locally and in season - for that's the best food for your body's need where you are! Stay healthy.

Yours

Planting lots of garlic for next year

Dear Family & Friends

This is my garlic bed. I covered it with dried grass to help keep the soil moist. A week+ after planting, it starts sprouting! I planted 500 garlic already...but since I have more space, I've decided I will plant another 500 this week. 

If I have too many, I can easily sell the excess to our city apartment neighbors as they are asking if they could buy shares of our organic garden food - for their family to eat. Well, I'll aim to supply them with seasonal veggie box next year, perhaps include some of our organic honey surplus too.

It's so pleasant working in the garden these days as it's not too hot anymore. Hope you are having a great time where you are too. 

Yours

Autumn air turns Kale leaves sweeter

 Dear Family & Friends,

Early morning air is getting colder these days, but still warm/hot during the day - always very pleasant. I take advantage of this and do as much as I could plant for autumn/winter garden crops. Little by little we dig our potatoes and in it's place I sow hundreds of carrots, onions, garlic and radishes. These can be protected from freezing winter because they are roots vegetables. 

For now, I gather a big handful of kale leaves to cook almost everyday...as the night is cold, the leaves gets sweeter. No one is allowed to complain eating green leaves for the coming weeks/months since I grew so much of these! Nobody does for they absolutely taste delicious!

The season just goes so quick!!- autumn is here! Hope you are keeping healthy and safe too.

Yours

Works and lots of works!

Dear Family & Friends

Morning air is getting cooler these days but the day is still hot and warm - always very pleasant! I still feel tired after my frenzy gardening all day! It was time to divide and transplant my sage herbs, goji berries, and day lilies too! I also planted flower bulbs, cleaned my strawberry beds and pin down the baby runners to multiply them! All week I was sowing seeds:  parsley, carrots, radish, onions, and garlic. 

Day after day I must keep watering my seeds to germinate! So much work to do before winter arrives...so I can't waste time! In our home, we are all so busy with works and we are all so hungry all the time too! Maybe I'll declare tomorrow a holiday!!

 

Work is a sense of achievement for us and it feels us with success and confidence too. Hope you are all having a great successful day too.

Yours

Dill that looks like a tree

Dear Family & Friends

There's several self planted dill herbs in our garden...even though I rarely water them, yet they seem to be so happy that they grow to almost the size of a small tree! It's now putting out flowers that attracts lots of bees and pollinating insects. Soon, there'll be lots of seeds and they will self seed and grow again for next year. That's nature's wonder - the cycle of life!

Outside in the open garden, I often see amazing and wonderful things that never fails to make me smile. So I find a great excuse not to be so rigid with gardening, for that's where I often get wonderful surprises.

Go ahead and have a nice day too.

Yours

Work ethic of honeybees is to be admired

Dear Family & Friends

When we last harvested our honey, we scraped the wax off the rack to expose the honey to enable us to extract them out. We then returned the ruined wax rack back to the hive for bees to re-use & refill. The amazing thing was after only two days, the bees thoroughly cleaned and re-wax the rack back to it's perfect hexagon shapes again -like new! ...and bees even started to cap in some honey too!! 

So we harvested some honey again for we discovered that there's more made for us!! WOW! our bees are so generous! The honeybees are very hardworking insect and they want their hives in perfect order immediately! Just got to love their work ethics!!    

We must be aware how pesticides and spray chemicals kills these beautiful creatures that don't deserve it. ..Please say 'NO' to big greedy commercial growers if you can...and for our good too!  

Enjoy your blessings today!

Yours

The pea size grapes variety

Dear Family & Friends

I took a photo of this cluster of grapes against the morning sun...Doesn't it looks so pretty? The truth is: this grape variety is a miniature fruit- pea size!! Just a good size for our visiting birds to feed on! We have several varieties of grapevines, unfortunately I don't know their specific names - one grape variety even taste like bubble gum jelly but with pip - strange?!! 

It's an exciting new week...we're filling our coming days with every work we could get our hands into for we like it better if we are preoccupied. The more work the better - so we don't experience idleness!! 

Well, I wish you all a very successful week too!

Yours

Sunflowers in the field has done their job

 

At this time, the sunflower fields have now dried up. The season is over, and it's time for harvesting to produce sunflower oil. The girls went and collected/stole two dried flowers for me...so next year I will have a lot of seeds to plant out in our garden too! Already..I'm planning for the new year!

I suppose it tells us that summer is rolling on.... tomorrow is another new day. Hope you all have a wonderful week ahead of you too.

Yours

Free food in abundance

Dear Family & Friends 

Here's my goji berries harvested today which I'm drying under the sun. Once dried, it will keep a long time. I will be able to make a nice and healthy chicken soup with goji berries for winter season. If I'm not feeling too lazy, tomorrow I will go and harvest some more of these because there's just so much more to pick.

Besides harvesting plant base food from the garden, we also harvested some honey produced by our garden bees. There's just so much delicious food in our garden that we are grateful of everyday.

There's  a lot of free good food out there, but it entails some work in put. Well, like we say in our little family, if we want to eat, we must work....but never forget that work is more fun than idleness:)

Have a lovely day.

Yours

Fig jam Making is my weekly routine

Dear Family & Friends

Life is about making 'fig jam' these days - yes, I do have a boring schedules and chores. Nothing complicated or exciting. simply put 1 kilo of sugar and 2 kilos of figs into the pot and cook it for one+ hours till it reach a sticky consistency. (ideal jam ratio is 1:1 fruit to sugar, can be lesser fruit - but I desperately need to process all the figs we get from our garden - so it's more like a compote, the way I do it)

Then pour it into a jar while still hot (this seals the jar up). So my fig jam stash grows in number because in a few days... I repeat the same motion again! Is your life as boring as mine?

Hope you are all keeping happy no matter what the day brings in.

Yours

Farmer's market

Dear Family & Friends

Growing food in our garden is one of the things that brings a lot of pleasure to us. It takes a lot of energy to produce good food. Thus, it goes without saying that whenever I visit a farmer's market, it simply brings us the sense of appreciation that there are people who works so hard to provide good food for others.

As  a gardener myself, I tend and enjoy growing as much as I could of our own vegetables and fruits. We don't normally have a great need of buying these food from market or supermarkets. 

Of course we can't grow everything but as much as possible, we try to grow the vegetables and herbs to use daily for health benefit and it's freshness too. It only takes very little space for some of these plants.

With food prices going up every year, it's time that we try to grow some food in our own garden just to give us the sense of security that we can actually support ourselves even in our own little ways .

Spring is with us, and it's our perfect time to start growing and enjoy being out in the garden too. So I'll be in the garden working most of the days this week - that's the best work place there is for me. Hope you have a good week too.

Yours

Designed an easy life

Dear Family & Friends

Gardening and growing some of our own food helped me understand that I can design my own life. I don't need to surrender to suffering, and constant relying on others for everything. Decision is ours for our life is in our own hands. So, I share what little I do, hopefully to inspire and encourage you to make that little steps too.

Unlike last week, the weather have eased a bit. Daytime still reaches 30C+, but at night it comes down to 20C+ which is a bit better for sleeping beauty. My garden prefers this too...they start smiling again. So, after giving them their morning shower, I picked a handful of fresh free food for lunch today, and had my morning fruit breakfast along the way. This is my daily routine - mundane but I still think it is exciting! Hope yours is much much more!

Yours

Big spiders

Dear Family & Friends

Does your garden have spiders? Our garden got assorted kinds. Nothing to be afraid of... in fact they are also garden friends. They trap and eat insects and pest like mosquitoes and flies... :) Unfortunately, they don't know what are good and bad insects - coz sometimes bees get caught too:(

Big spiders looks frightening, but they can't trap people. In nature, it's all about predators to keep everything in balance.

Don't worry, as far as I know, there's no tarantula around - so the gardener is safe.

Spiders can spin beautiful webs...but certainly not as beautiful as what I can crochet. Stay happy everyone.

Yours

Lavender heart wreath using stem pruning

Dear Family & Friends

Made this very rustic looking heart shape hanging decor using the lavender stem cuttings after trimming the plant bush to keep it compact and healthy. I was happy with the project and it smelled nice too!

I hanged it on the entrance garden gate of  our old home property - Don't you think it's pretty?

This was made some years ago and it still looks good. I enjoy working with my hands using and recycling free materials that cost me nothing:).

When you maintain peace within yourself  and also able to maintain and build up relationship with others - life is guaranteed to be good.

Enjoy your day.

Yours

A quick crispy bread - snack time!

Dear Family & Friends

We just like crispy snacks. So this homemade thin crisp pan fried flat bread is always welcomed from time to time.

Just a few very simple ingredients: made of flour, water, salt and chopped chives.... but messy work because you have to sprinkle flour (to avoid sticking) when rolling the dough very thinly if you want it crispy. If thicker, it is more like an unleaven bread.

Been very hot these day and our electric water pump is playing up...so I had to abandon my watering chore - just when it's needed the most. But I just have to move on to something else for the moment and hope it will rain.

Enjoy your day.

Yours