June 21 is the Summer Solstice- the longest day of the year and surely-SURELY- the official harbinger of summer, right?  Well, Massachusetts doesn’t seem to have gotten the message this year.  This is, by far, one of the gloomiest Junes I have ever experienced.  I don’t think we’ve had more than one day where it has been over 70 degrees.  The sun has been shy but the rain hasn’t.  I feel like I’m in Scotland.  Everything is damp and cool, including the soil in my garden.  I lost about half of my Okra plants- not sure if they weather had anything to do with it, but they looked great last weekend.  Everything seems to be growing slowly, slowly, slowly. 

I’m just so eager for blazing hot weather and sun for days, though I’m certain as soon as that happens I’ll start complaining about that, too!

Forgive my very long absence!  (Well, at least from this blog.  Readers of my personal blog will know this is rather par for the course.)  Two weeks ago, I got a promotion, and I have been working like a crazy person.  I worked 57 hours one week and 52 the next!   I’ve been exhausted to say the least.  But, the benefit of working so much is that I am off until January 5th!  Woo Hoo!  Two weeks!

I’ve got lots of cooking plans over the vacation, and I’ve already successfully completed several of them, including roasting one of our new farm-raised chickens that we got from our CSA.  I wanted to truly taste it, so I only seasoned it with salt, pepper, and a tiny bit of parsley.  I am not exaggerating when I say it was the best chicken I have ever eaten in my life.  I do love chicken very much…but this is just spectacular.  Not only was the meat delicious, lean, and plentiful, but it also produced 5 quarts of the best chicken stock I have ever made.

I’m so glad that there are 5 more in my freezer right now.  They were a little pricey for us at $5/lb, but I’m telling you that it is so worth it.  Especially since we never buy or eat chicken anymore (not after Omnivore’s Dilemma!) so it was OK for us to splurge.  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat conventional chicken again!

I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t post at all over the last few weeks, because we had a HUGE snowstorm that was quite impressive.  We got easily 2 feet of snow over a 36 hour period.  In fact, in that time, it didn’t stop snowing a single moment.  It was the most snow I’ve ever seen and it buried everything around here.  It would have been a good weather post!  Ah well, you’ll just have to take my word for it!   I can’t even show you later pictures, since it all melted on Christmas Eve.  All that and still no white Christmas!  Bah!

My seed catalogs have started coming in, so keep an eye out for a planning post soon!

Please do not take your wintry vengence upon me.  I see you punishing my fellow bloggers, but I don’t know why!

What do I need to sacrifice to you to assure me of warm weather and no snow?  I don’t think I can take flurries just yet.  Please wait until December at least!

I don’t want to end up like these guys!

When we got up this morning, there was a thick layer of frost on our cars.   This wasn’t a little rinky-dink frost either, the grass sounded like I was walking on broken glass.   It’s our first one we’ve had so far, though there have been other frosts very close by.  We live on a little hill, so that makes a difference I suppose.  I’ve been anticipating our first frost since October 10th, so I feel like I got 13 extra days. 

Good enough for me!  Two of my green peppers made it to full red and I was able to leave my beans on the vine long enough to get a grocery bag full of mature pods that I’ll shell.  Sadly, none of them made it to full dry, though many of them have leathery, almost dry pods.  I’d like to save some for seed.  Can I let those dry fully off the vine and still use them for seed?  Anyone know?

As of now the only thing I’ve still got in the ground are carrots and Jerusalem Artichokes.  My peas were still bearing as of last night, but that frost may have killed them (it’s pitch black when I leave for work in the morning, so I wasn’t able to check them).  They never really did much anyway.  I think I maybe got 20-30 pods off of them?  Ah well…experiment completed!

My garlic still needs to be planted.  Hopefully I’ll get to that this weekend.