The Bountiful Blessings of a Garden

This is a red tomato. Not that stuff at the store.

I have learned that store-bought produce is nothing compared to home-grown vegetables. We have had a garden since the beginning of our farm, and it has gifted us with so tons of fresh produce. One of the differences I have noticed between store-bought produce and fresh home-grown produce: the tomatoes are pink at the store. At my house, if we pick a pink tomato, it's going straight to the windowsill. We wait for that beautiful red hue then we slice 'em and eat 'em on sandwiches, with cheese (sometimes our delicious homemade cheese made from our cow's milk), and occasionally we bake them with mozzarella cheese and fresh basil from our garden.
      And we don't only grow tomatoes. We plant bell peppers, green beans, purple hull beans, okra, corn, cucumber, eggplant, jalapenos peppers, habanero chilies, squash, butternut squash, basil, and we sometimes plant cantaloupe and watermelon. We harvest every year in the summer, and good gosh, do we get a lot of the "fruits of our labor."

       I really enjoy planting our garden on a warm spring's day. Mom and I do it together, as we do with most things. Mom and I are very much alike in most things, that's why we get along so well. It takes a couple hours to plant that amount of seeds, but since we have mild spring weather where we call home, I don't mind. On the other hand, harvesting isn't the funnest activity. We try to harvest in the morning or in the evening, because unlike our springs, our summers are hot and (worst of all) humid. Now if you send me outside to pick tomatoes or bell peppers, I probably won't give a fuss. If you send me out to pick green beans, then that'a another story. Let's see if I can find the right words to express my relationship with picking green beans. I abhor, hate, and perfectly well despise picking green beans.
       After we harvest some veggies, we can them. Canning is a preservation technique used by most people in my area. Of course, the area in which we live farmers are everywhere.  As Dad would say ," You can't sling a dead cat without hitting one of them." Yes, my dad says many strange things. Anyway, we basically lived off canned green beans last year. Hey, I said I didn't like picking them, not eating them.

Quart jars of veggies we canned this year

      One of the greatest feelings in the world is the feeling you get when you open a quart jar of veggies, knowing that you planted the very plant the vegetable came from, and you harvested it with your very own hands. It's wonderful, I tell ya.

The Cinnamon Toast Tragedy

Since not much happens on the farm in the summer, I decided to write about one of the classic tales in my family. This one has been told to many a person. It's basically a story of Dad's inability in the kitchen. Enjoy!
     This was before we were homeschooled, so it had to be at least two years ago. Mom was out of town helping with my grandmother after an accident, so we knew we had only one thing to fear when Mom was gone: the kind of food Dad would cook up. Mom and I do most of the cooking, and Dad does most of the grilling. That's just how our little equation works. When you take a parent out, well let's just say things could get messy.
     Trust me, I really tried to do most of the cooking. And I did. I did supper sometimes, and I made sure everything was in the right place in the kitchen. But everyone has that enemy that can stop them in their diligant quest, and mine was the morning. I am not a morning person. At all. I had to get up at about six-thirty for public school, so I paid no attention whatsoever to what Dad was doing. Without my knowledge, he had decided to make us one of our favorite quick-and-easy breakfasts: cinnamon toast. To those of you who have never made cinnamon toast, it has three basic ingredients: bread, sugar, and cinnamon. Pretty hard to mess up, huh? One would think so, at least. Mom, about ten years ago, put sugar in a certain container. It had no label, so there was no way of telling if you had sugar or salt. In present times, she switched the sugar with salt. Dad had no idea, in fact he thought it would be nice to put some extra sugar on our toast. He grabbed the container (still thinking it was sugar when it was truly salt) and he sprinkled tons of salt on our beloved toast. After a few minutes, Dad called us to the kitchen to devour our toast. Noah, being the boy of the family, took the first bite. His face twisted as he tasted the salt. He gave Dad a look that simply said," What the heck did you do?!" I, being the dimwit that I am, licked the toast in curiousity. The taste was awful. Joy, who was fixing lunches at the time, got a lucky break. She didn't taste the toast at all.
     Now, whenever Dad tells this story he says, "Yeah we probably have the only kids with hypertension in our county." Just so I make sure you get the moral of this story: Remember, kids, label your containers. If you don't, something horrible might happen.

Flashback: Four Years Before the Farm

Four years ago, I lived in the big city where Dad worked. It was okay, but not quite my cup of tea. I had always had that dream: I was going to be a country girl. Mom and Dad wanted the same thing, but they had never quite taken the next step. You can imagine my surprise and delight when they started looking at houses. It began at the computer. They got emails from a website that advertised different houses. They scrolled through house after house, trying to find a house that would suit our family. At the time, we were a family of five, so that required a good amount of space. Website advertisements evolved into driving to a house and checking it out. Usually, the houses were an hour away or more. Being a person who doesn't particularly like long drives, the driving part of house searching was not the best part, but it definitely wasn't the worst.
     Imagine this: You are minutes away from a house that could possibly be the "one" that could make you the long-wished for country girl. You pull up to the house. It looks fine on the outside, and it seems big enough. You have to stop yourself from racing out of the car to see if you like it. Dragging your feet to stop yourself, you meet this overly perky lady who escorts you to the door. Mrs. Perky opens the door, and it hits you. The awful smell. Some houses smelled like cat urine, some smelled like garbage. Then you decide that this house isn't the dream house, and the search continues.
      It took months to find the "one". It was a foreclosed house with a pond, four acres, and it was only forty thousand dollars. There was a catch though. The house was unfinished, so we had a lot of work to do. Dad, having no knowledge of construction work and specializing in tearing burning houses apart, walked into the house and said," Let's tear out that wall and that wall." Mom was unsure of this, but we did it anyway. That was the first project we kids worked on that dealt with the house. Dad handed us each a hammer and he let us rip. Let me tell ya, there is a indescribable pleasure in smashing sheet-rock with a hammer. One of the special delights was we had our seventy-six year old grandfather working by Dad's side most of the time. Granddaddy, as we call him, taught me this and that about what he used to do when he was a kid. I greatly enjoyed every story, because Granddaddy lived in the Great Depression. Since he lived in that era, I found it amazing what they would do for fun. For instance, a purple (and toxic if you catch it at the right time) berry worked as the perfect dye for their cotton bags. They would squash the berries and write their names on them.
    Now, I'm definitely not saying that this house was all fun and games. It was quite the pain occasionally. The man who built this house was a lunatic. Nothing was level, his fashion sense was worse than mine, and he just didn't know anything. We had constant troubles. We still held our heads high and trudged on. We did pretty darn good I must say, because we haven't had our house collapse
or anything.  This was part of our house mid-construction. Renovating was quite the endeavor.  

About Me and My Family

My "Farmville Reality" is the slice of heaven we call "New Mercies Farm." I live on this four-acre farm with my family. Here's some info on my family:

• Faith Browns, your thirteen-year-old blogger and teller of all the adventures happening at New Mercies Farm. I adore life in the country. We have nine goats, a cow, chickens, two dogs, and a cat who are all very loved, I assure you. I have two brothers and one sister, who I will tell you about in the following information. I also play the violin, and I have been for almost five years.
• Dad, otherwise known John Browns, is the father of four children. He is a tough firefighter in the big city. One of the reasons we began farm life was because Dad has seen the crime, the fire, and the downright nastiness of the city. He certainly didn't want to raise his kids in that mess, so he found us a house deep in the country to escape it. He still drives to the city to keep the food on the table.
• Mom, a.k.a. Hope Browns, is the mother of said four children. She is a loving woman with fiery red hair. Mom and I take care of the farm animals together,and I can tell you that those animals are happy and fat.
• Joy Browns is my fifteen-year-old sister who loves her some music. Next to God, music is her life. Her favorite kind of music is the stuff from the 20s to the 50s. She is an amazing piano player, so good in fact that I have dubbed her a "freak of nature." Joy is a very good big sister, and she always has been. Joy isn't much of a country girl, but she still enjoys country life.
• Noah Browns is my awesome, annoying eleven-year-old younger brother. He is "tough as a nickel steak" as my dad would say. He is athletic, a good boxer and fighter. Trust me, try not to anger him. Arm bars hurt. And yes, I speak from experience. Putting that aside, Noah and I have a great relationship. We roughhouse and poke fun with each other all the time. It's all in good fun.
• Sam Browns is my almost one-year-old brother who is adorable.  Sam has Down Syndrome and kidney problems. We try to make a point: "Down Syndrome" is not Sam's middle name. He is his own person. I have enjoyed watching the little guy grow up. He is the sweetest thing ever. 

That's my crazy family. Trust me, I have more than a few stories to tell. So, if you want entertainment, stop by my Farmville Reality. I won't let you down.