Hedge No More

I have one fairly large problem with my little backyard garden, I have to water over the top with sprinklers because that's how my grass is watered.  The yard was designed for grass, not vegitables, so. . . .  Vegitables like to be watered on the bottom.  If you don't, you get mildew and other issues.  My hedge of tomatos and cucumbers were starting to show the effects.  Plus it has been so hot here that no new fruit was really setting anyway.  Same thing happened last summer.  They did start to produce again when it started to cool down, but I had weeks of them looking bad until then.   Finally, I had to travel for work and so some of the extra watering didn't get done when it was needed so they were really looking sorry.  My solution was to pull most of them and plant potatos where they had been.  I should get a good crop of potatos and not have to look at an ugly garden in the meantime.

Sprinklers make the lawn look great, but the garden look bad.  Here is the garden with the offending plants gone.

When everything got pulled, we picked everything, whether ripe or not.  If it's ripe, we will eat it fresh.  If it's green, it will be pickled.

I don't know the name of the little red tomatos on the left, but they are great.  They are still growing in the new L shaped bed.  They get a lot of shade and so don't look as bad as the rest.  I never caged them in the spring, so they have just run all over the place.  The round red tomatos to the right are Porters.  They were developed a few miles from here in the 1930's.  They stand up to the hear well.  They don't have a perfect texture, but not bad.  They didn't get pulled either.  The yellow tomatos in the upper right are Lemon.  My first year to grow them.  They weren't in a great spot, but did relatively well.

These are some of the last from the monster.  The heirloom yellow pear was simply huge this year.  I didn't pull it, but did cut it back quite a lot.  It should put out some new growth and keep producing.

Here are the potatos cut and curing before they are planted.

I made homemade fermented sauerkraut about three weeks ago.  I tasted it yesterday and it was pretty good so I jarred and processed it for 15 min. in a water bath.  Should be good for a long time.  I'll make dill pickles next.  In front are the roasted bell peppers I grew.  I only had one plant and wanted to do something nice with what little was produced, so I decided I would let them mature until red, roast them and put them up in olive oil.  They will be good for sauces and salads now.

Kraut looks pretty good.  I have a jar in the fridge getting cold.  It won't last long.

Makin' Bacon-- Part II

Alright, a week ago I had a post about making bacon with the dry rub, etc.  Those two pieces of bacon, 10 lbs, have been curing now for a week.  Today I took them out and rinsed them very well in cold water.  After that I patted them dry and put a bunch of fresh ground pepper on them. The result is below.

I left them to set for several hours in the open air before smoking.  This allows a film to coat the meat that helps the smoke to stick.

Here is the meat in the smoker.  It is really basic.  I like a light smoke on my bacon, so only a couple of hours is necessary.  I keep the heat at about 220F for a hot smoke. 

This is the finished product.  It has a really nice brown, smoked coating and smells great.

Here it is sliced into two.  Notice how think and meaty it is.  The lighter shade at the top on the piece to the right is not fat.  That is a nice thick layer of light pink meat.  There is actually very little fat, maybe 20%.  It slices like butter.  At this point I cut it into smaller, one severing pieces and vacum pack them individually to use as needed.  I fried up some of the end pieces you see on the edge of the photo and it was very good.  It is very different than the type I made last time. This has a more intense flavor.  You can taste all the herbs and garlic.  This isn't the kind of bacon you sit down and eat a pound of.  It's very rich and it doesn't take much for me to feel full.  Rich food does that to me.

This is actually bacon from the prior batch that is the more traditional, sweet type.  We decided to have breakfast for dinner, so I fried some up.

It cooks up very well and is crispy golden when finished.

These are some of the hierlooms from the garden.  I wanted to use them so I cut them up, along with some pear type and stewed them with some onion, garlic, tyme, red pepper flake, salt and pepper.  

Here it is when it is nice and stewed down, but still with plently of liquid.  I poached three eggs in the stew and spooned the whole thing over toasted home made bread, with the bacon on the side.  It was good.