Summer fruit

Summer has moved quickly and berry season has begun. I noticed that one of the nanking cherry bushes  was in bloom in a park and helped myself.

Nanking are tasty but a huge amount of work to process.

I decided on a cobbler and hauled out the solar oven since it was ridiculously hot and I didn't want to turn on the oven. Took a few hours but it cooked nicely.

Tasted great with ice cream!

Raspberry season is now in full swing and we're getting a gallon every day with no end in sight. I've had to call in reinforcements so we can get the picking done before it gets too hot each day.

The heat is also helping the squash plants (after a terrible spring) and I'm starting to see cucumbers. Not sure we have enough time left for melons but you never know.

The tomatoes are also looking good. It takes a lot of water to keep them alive and growing in this heat.

Bees are loving the poppies.

The back apple tree is also really giving it this year. 

We have many more sweet cherries this year than last. They need a few more weeks to really sweeten up.

Unpictured is the corn which has finally taken off and is a couple of feet hight. I have had to stake the plants against the wind but I am hopeful we'll get a good crop this year with all of the water and sunlight.

Flowers and more solar cooking

The garden continues to provide new blooms each day. Out in the beds Jessica is managing, the potatoes are really flowering. We also spent some time thinning carrots and replanting another crop of lettuce.

Around the side, some of the onions we grew last year but were too small thus replanted last fall, are starting to flower. I'm keen to collect the seeds and see if we can grow some onions from them. Anyone know if you can also eat onions that have gone to seed?

In the strawberry patch, a handful of poppy seeds that came from my mother's garden (I'm guessing in the late 1970s) and have been frozen in a gerber baby food jar since then have sprouted. Low germination rate, but they are 35 years old.

These flowers originally came from my grandmother's garden in Perdue, SK and I remember them from being a kid. I decided to dump the rest of the seeds in the same bed and see what happened--we had a mix of poppies and strawberries in The Snake House--the poppies shaded the strawberries nicely.

The mock orange is also blooming to beat the band. Maybe a mild winter and then dry spring has given it some incentive to seed?

Today's solar cooker experiment was bread. Same recipe I use in the oven; I just let it rise in the roasters. This took about three hours to cook using the reflector attachment and the temp was about 275F when I took them out. The loaves are 9 inches across and the front one is about 5 inches high (uneven split of the dough means the back loaf is smaller). A slightly longer rise might have been good but I was eager to get them in the cooker.

Looks like the weekend will be hot; hopefully there are some strawberries to pick shortly.

Experimenting with solar oven

For the last year I've been mulling solar cooking. I looked at a couple of DIY plans as well as a couple of commercially produced ovens and finally bit the bullet this week at Earth's General Store. Today I started experimenting to get the hang of it.

I bought the reflector set (and additional $30) to help with heating and the angle of the sun, especially in winter. You can see above the oven plus reflectors at about 10 am with the Sun hitting it full on.

I cooked some potatoes and hard boiled some eggs this morning and both simple dishes went well. After two hours both were done (perhaps a bit more than done) and the roasting plans cleaned up.

I was surprised by how easy this was and the heat that built up. You  can see the steam when I opened the oven (above) and it hit 300F at 1 pm (below).

I also decided to try a desert (a raspberry/rhubarb crisp to clean out some frozen fruit from last summer).  This cooked just like in the oven. Actually, it was more like a crock pot with no browning. I wonder if I should have left the lid off?

If I get enthusiastic, I will try baking bread tomorrow.