Brummet's Conscious Blog

Dehydrating Garden Harvests Owning a small dehydrator can avert a great deal of kitchen food waste, and you’ll never have to pass up people offering you their garden extras again. Also, leftovers from meals can be easily dehydrated and used later for on-the-go situations like backpacking or snowshoeing.  After dehydrating any vegetable, use a blender, or grinder, to create a fine powder, and store in separate jars. Every year we dehydrate at least one jar each of chopped sweet peppers, hot peppers and ripe tomatoes.  If any recipe calls for chopped chilies or peppers, fresh or 'sun-dried' tomatoes, we can easily substitute with a dried version. We also have a jar of mixed vegetable powder; using a few teaspoons of this mixture in homemade stocks for more flavour or to help thicken and enrich stews and soups. Simply reconstitute powders by covering in a little boiled water for a few minutes. (Reserving any excess water to use as stock.)  Adding tomato powder to hamburger p...

-- Quote of the Day --  "A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night." ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Sensitive Plant,” 1820 Such a touching quote. I so love spending time in the garden. Now that the early potatoes and the garlic have been harvested, we are taking out the nid-season potatoes soon - and space is once again opening up in the garden. As the areas are cleared and cleaned, I've been adding some amendments (green sand, alfalfa pellets, kelp meal, etc.) and forking the soil over with a little extra peat since the beds are still a little too heavy with clay despite all the work we did and compost we put in etc. earlier. Next - it is long past time to plant in the fall beets, carrots and so on... and still leave enough room for September's garlic plantings. We had some good rain on...

-- Joys of Early Summer --  Ah.... the joys of early summer! Birds are cleaning out our bird feeder every few days, and the suet block we keep stocked under the pine tree's boughs is a special favorite of the birds. They are getting braver now that they are used to us and hang out even when we are working in the area of the feeders. I'm hoping that, like our last place, they do a lot of beneficial work for us keeping the pest insect population in check. :) The last couple weeks we've been harvesting mountains of strawberries - starting with only a few cups of whole berries, I'm now filling a large bowl (12 cups approx.) with medium to large berries every other day! Because of the cooler rainy/cloudy weather we've had a couple times the last few weeks - I've been doing more baking - freezing most of it for snacks during the summer. I did 3 batches of cookies, 3 batches of 2 different kinds of muffins (strawberry bran and rhubarb)... a strawberry/rhubarb cr...

-- Quote of the Day --  “Rainforests are very unique in that they are very diverse – you may find in a mid-western forest a 15-20 tree species in a couple of acres, but in a rainforest you will find 4-500 distinct tree species. …Rainforests cover about 2% of the surface on the planet but they may have in those forests 50-60% of the species on the planet. They circle both sides of the equator. They are parallel to most of the corral reefs on the planet, so if you have a situation where the rainforests are being removed and loose the filtration they do, you may find that the corral reefs along the equator (which is where most of the species in the ocean come from the corral reefs) may start to disappear as well. …They are coupled together so if you lose one, you lose the other. …There are so many species yet undiscovered. …It is about overcoming and embracing the challenge – not to shy aw...

-- Sunday  -- As it happened I was taken away from the office today, and was not able to host Conscious Discussions Talk radio as scheduled. Apologies for this, however it was unavoidable. I'll be back tomorrow with some great resources for our blog readers... Find Dave and Lillian Brummet, excerpts from their books, information about their radio program, newsletter, blogs, and more at: www.brummet.ca * Support the Brummets by telling your friends, or purchasing a book - each book sold raises funds for charity as well!