Slugs in the Kitchen Garden

Sense of Home Kitchen

With all the rain we have had this summer we have an unusually high number of slugs.  Thanks to our cold winters our slugs are small, nothing like they grow them in the Northwest, but they do a tremendous amount of damage to the produce.  They have eaten 1/3 of a good sized cucumber, the green bean leaves look more like lace than leaves, and it is a race to see who can get to the tomatoes first, which means I pick tomatoes before they are completely ripe, cheating us out of that extra flavor they get ripening on the vine.   To make sure we have enough produce to preserve for winter use I have had to become more aggressive in my efforts to rid the garden of slugs.  

I was recently at a local community harvest festival where there were booths set up for everything from gardening to canning to making cheese to dying wool.  I settled in at the gardening booth for a while asking various questions, but what I was really anxious to learn was how to control my growing slug population.  The horticulturist I spoke with said that slugs do not like to crawl across sand or gravel, this jogged my memory all the way back to a conversation I had with the man we hired to till our garden this spring.  He suggested we add a few bags of sand to the garden to make the soil more friable (we have lots of clay).  I had intended to wait until we tilled again to add the sand, but I figured now might be a better time if it discourages the slugs.  So off to Tractor Supply Company I headed and came home with two good sized bags of sand.  We just sprinkled it over the garden like we were sprinkling powdered sugar on a a cake.  Some fell on the tomato vines, the tomatoes, the beans, potatoes, cucumbers, strawberries and some on the soil itself.

This trick has worked amazingly well.  The slugs are now avoiding the areas of sand and when I do find them they are not looking as plump and healthy as they were before.  My next move was to use beer traps, I say let them die happy.  The beer traps also work very well, the slugs crawl into the beer and, some say, dry out from the beer.  Or perhaps they are just attracted to the smell and end up drowning in the beer.  Either way we have reduced the population considerably.

Tonight when picking tomatoes I noticed that there are a few frogs in the garden helping us reduce our slug population as well.  With the combination of these methods to reduce or discourage slugs, I have seen much larger fruit and vegetable yields.  I now have 25 quarts of whole tomatoes canned and enough tomatoes to make and can salsa for the winter, I would not want to go all winter without my homemade salsa.  I also hope to make and can several jars of tomato soup this fall.

Sense of Home Kitchen / Homemade Living / In the Garden

Creaming the Corn While Cutting It Off the Cob

Sense of Home Kitchen

By "creaming the corn" I don't mean that awful stuff you buy in a can.  No, I mean the natural cream that comes from fresh corn.  This simple process makes the corn taste so incredibly sweet and creamy, plus it involves no cooking before freezing so it is quick and super simple.  Start with fresh, ripe corn on the cob.

Slice down the cob about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through each kernel, leaving some behind to go back to scrap off.

Then draw your knife up the cob scrapping out all the creamy goodness.

The end result will be some kernels that are nearly whole and some creamy bits of corn that are wonderfully sweet.

Package your "creamed corn", as my mother used to call it, in freezer containers.  I put in approximately 2 cups of corn in each container, that is the right amount for a meal for my husband and I, with maybe a little left over for another day.  If I have company I just grab two or three containers to defrost.


Sense of Home Kitchen / Homemade Living / Kitchen and Pantry 

Cucumber, Tomato and Feta Salad

Sense of Home Kitchen

Cucumber, Tomato and Feta Salad
~From the Sense of Home Kitchen~
This salad was born out of an excess of cucumbers and tomatoes coming out of our garden last year.  It is the salad we have been eating nearly every evening for the last two weeks and we are still not tired of it.  I prefer the cucumber peel be left on, for some reason these had been peeled, I can't remember why.  No specific measurements are needed, the ratio of tomatoes and cucumbers are up to you or your supply.  I use red onion, green onion, chives, or herbs, whatever I have available in my garden, for added flavor.

Cucumber, washed and diced
Tomato, washed and diced
Red onion, slivered or green onion, chives or herbs, minced
Oil and vinegar for a dressing (or Italian Dressing)
Feta, crumbled over the salad

Mix and serve.

Sense of Home Kitchen / Recipes / Salads

Butchering Chickens

Sense of Home Kitchen

We spent our afternoon butchering chickens with friends.  Early this summer friends of ours said they were planning to buy some chicks to raise for food and asked if we would like them to raise some for us as well, of course we said yes.  Part of the deal was our willingness to help them butcher.  My husband grew up butchering chickens in the fall with his family.  I had no chicken experience, but I did help butcher turkeys on two occasions.  I have no objection to eating meat, but I do have an objection to the way much of the meat available for purchase is raised.  Feedlots and the close quarters chickens are raised in turns my stomach, so we buy our beef from my husbands family, chickens from friends or local family farms, and pork from a local family farm.  I feel fine about eating meat when I know the animals have been treated well, I have seen how they were raised, and I know they are healthy, quality meat.

These chickens were fed grains and seeds, and allowed to roam freely eating all the bugs they wished.  I would have liked to have borrowed them to eat the slugs in my garden, but that is a post for another day.  The killing was swift, one quick motion, and we then moved on to gutting and pulling feathers.  These birds are an excellent size, they said they watched closely so that the chickens were not over fed, causing their legs to give out under their weight, this happens on large chicken farms where they are over fed and do not get exercise.

Not all the chickens were butchered today.  Our friends let their children each chose a chicken to keep, so three birds were spared.  They said they are not sure how these birds will fare over the winter, but they will keep them around as pets and perhaps they will even begin to lay eggs, time will tell.  The children helped some with the butchering, played with the live chickens and also played with the discarded chicken feet, they are rural children.

This is Princess, one of the chickens whose life was spared.

These are some of the family's laying hens.  We went home with a dozen of their eggs today.  I am looking forward to the many meals all the chickens have provided us, both the laying hens and the meat birds.