10-mile meal to become a 100-foot meal

Blackberry topped goat's milk yogurt

For the past couple of days, I've been having a breakfast that is currently about a 10-mile meal. I'm having home-made yogurt made with our raw goat's milk (and then strained to make it a little thicker), topped with blackberries that we picked last summer and froze, and then drizzled with honey that comes from a farm up the road in the next town. I bought the honey because it was 'local' but I didn't know how local it actually was until we passed the farm when out biking a couple of weekends ago. I figure that if we drove directly there, it would be about 10 miles from us. This meal is not only a wonderfully filling and refreshing breakfast, but it brings back sunny memories from last summer. And if I have this same breakfast next spring - I'll be using our own honey and will be calling it a 100 foot meal!

This past weekend, we did a bunch of planting. I put in seeds for some more kohlrabi (the previous seeds were pretty churned up by baby goat hooves...so I doubt they'll sprout if they are even still in the same location!), some different lettuces, turnips, beets, parsnips and carrots. Because carrot seeds are so small, it's hard to not just dump them in the soil and then keep them thinned. But I suck at thinning because I just hate to terminate the life of those little potential pieces of food! I got this idea from a forum I belong to for planting carrot seeds. They were using newspaper, but since I didn't have any readily available, I used TP. I gently spread out the carrot seeds on a dry strip of TP. Then I folded it over the seeds into thirds and lightly misted it with water. Then I layed them on a piece of tinfoil to carry them out to the garden. It worked really well! Now lets see how well they sprout. :-)

Carrot seeds in TP strips prior to planting in the ground.

We stopped by ACE to use up the last of a gift card we had to buy another rain barrel. While we were there, I decided to see if they had canning jars yet. They didn't, but they were so helpful in letting me order some that I decided it was time to start stocking up again. I selected 3 wide mouth pint cases and 5 wide mouth quart cases for now. We'll need more later on, but I can wait for local sales for futher purchases. ACE called me two days later to say that my jars were in, so we picked them up last night. I always feel better with more jars available to me. I'll feel even better once these are full of home grown produce and safely tucked away in the pantry!

The canning jar 'tower' awaiting a trip to the basement.