Top Ten Favorite Heirloom Seeds

My favorite time of the year is quickly upon us…NO, not christmas!! 🙄  .. the arrival of the seed catalogs!! 😀  

So, in celebration of that here is a list of some of my favorite heirloom seeds!  Most of these are really easy to grow too!

((Note: most of these photos are mine, but I didn’t have pics of a few so the smaller-ish ones were foraged off google images))

1. Marvel of Four Seasons Lettuce….French 1830’s I think, slow to bolt but also has good cold hardiness. Frilly green leaves with red tinge.

2. Costata Romanesco Zucchini….Straight from Italy, the BEST tasing zucchini I have ever had, nutty fleshy sweet…not watery, perfect for stirfries. Not as prolific as hybrid zucchini, but in some ways that is a good thing LOL…what it lacks in production it certainly makes up for in taste…the male flowers also make delicious fritters…YUM!

3. Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkin…from Austrailia over 100 years old. Super dense super velvety super sweet flesh and grows to about 5 pounds, it is also earlier than other pie pumpkins and keeps very well. Last year, I harvested 3 at the end of August and stored them away to make pies for Thanksgiving and they were in perfect condition.

4. Delikatesse Cucumber…from Germany. More cold tolerant than most cucumbers, has small worts, 8″-10″ long good for pickles or slicing, but if used for pickles should be picked on the small side, like 6″ max…has a slight honeydew melon nuance that you don’t find in commercial/hybrid cucumbers.

5. Japanese White Hulless Popcorn…by FAR the BEST popcorn in the world, and I am not exagerating. I have never been a huge popcorn fan, don’t like them getting stuck in my teeth all the time…but the hulls on this popcorn are so thin no toothpicks are required….it is also perfectly white and tender, like a blanket of fresh fluffy snow covered in salt and melted butter! LOL

6. Hooker’s Sweet Corn….unlike hybrid varieties the kernels develop on their own and don’t rely on the others so that you can even have tiny ears or large sized ears depending on sun and soil quality….great for short cool seasons and it only gets about 5 feet tall. The kernels are white and yellow and different shades of purple which is also really neat!

7. Wonderberry (aka Sunberry)….used to be very popular in victorian times. Grows a rather large sprawling bush like a tomato and produces small semi-sweet purple berries about the size of heirloom blueberries (not the huge hybrid freaks), when sweetened with sugar and cooked down it makes a great ice cream sauce….but if you’re like us the berries usually never make it into the house…. Warning: the unripe green berries are poisonous.

8. Flat of Egypt Beet (aka Egyptian Flat or Crosby’s Egyptian)…I am a huge beet fan, beets are the most nutritious vegetable you can consume. This beet has been around for forever, they are earlier than most varieties and more uniform, the shape is like a somewhat flattened sphere….their flavor is also extremely sweet, and they don’t get tough even when you let them get real big. They also produce a lot of yummy greens.

9. Red Russian Kale….the sweetest of the kales, especially after a frost and one of the most cold hardy. I had 3 full grown kale plants survive our horrible winter of 09′-10′ (3-4 FEET of snow), then they went to seed in the late spring and by fall I had more kale without even planting anything…you gotta love a vegetable that easily plants itself! 

10. Big Month Paste Tomato….an old amish heirloom exclusive to baker creek seeds (no longer available, at least not on their website, check the printed catalog). PERFECT for canning since they all tend to ripen at once, the plants get absolutely huge if you allow them, it was grazing the top of my 15 foot trellis last year! Great flavor, little water, small seed cavities…unique in that in produces two shapes of tomatoes…elongated plum shapes and small round globes. The flavor is great and makes great sun-dried tomatoes!

Neutrality

I see time and again around the “christian” community and most conservatives quoting the Bible, “Those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed”

Well, what if I do neither?? 😆

You see, Israel had a deal with God, the deal was that if they obeyed Him they would live long in The Land and prosper, they didn’t keep their end of the bargain, SEVERAL TIMES they were removed from The Land due to disobedience. If they had kept their end of the deal they would right now possess the WHOLE of The Land…God keeps His Promises.

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; In that I command thee this day to love the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it. 
But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; I denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish, and that ye shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over Jordan to go to possess it. 
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live: That thou mayest love the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length of thy days: that thou mayest dwell in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.” Deuteronomy 30:15-20

“We have dealt very corruptly against thee, and have not kept the commandments, nor the statutes, nor the judgments, which thou commandedst thy servant Moses. Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandedst thy servant Moses, saying: 
If ye transgress, I will scatter you abroad among the nations: But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence, and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there.” 
Nehemiah 1:7-9

I’m certainly not for the palestinians, but I neither bless or curse Israel cause it’s got nothing to do with me. I’ll let God be God.

There are sects within Judaism…mostly within the Haredi/Hassidic Jewish sects who see the creation of the nation of Israel as an attempt to bring about the promises of God through the hand of man, thinking to fulfill the promises physically on this earth to bring about The Messiah (which, if this is true, would make their “messiah” the anti-christ) because Israel HAS NOT returned to God, has yet sunk deeper into sin and idolatry.

The promise to return them to The Land is conditional upon their obedience…yet it’s impossible to fulfill all the requirements of The Law without Jesus…whom they will NEVER accept…so there they remain, blinded and stiff-necked until God sees fit to restore them.

If they indeed are attempting to bring about the promises and blessings of God through their own hand, apart from Him (which is utter foolishness btw) then that makes them His Enemies. And I cannot say for sure which it is, and in order to avoid possibly blessing His Enemies, I remain Neutral on the issue 🙂

Oats Three Ways

One thing that you may not know about my family that makes us VERY different from most families is that we do not eat cold boxed breakfast cereal, it’s been at least 5 years (possibly longer, I honestly don’t keep track..) since we last ate any boxed cereal.  My reasoning?  Well, it’s expensive and for all that money you aren’t getting much at all in the way of nutrition…it’s a convenience food and nothing more.

I make a home-cooked breakfast every.single.day…breakfast is actually our biggest meal of the day!  With dinner being medium sized and lunch being really just more of a snack to help quiet tummies till dinner time rolls around.  We do A LOT of physical work around here, I get up at 8am and milk goats and feed animals and haul water buckets and haul wood and do all sorts of stuff before I even eat breakfast or even have my first cup of coffee…then we eat a hearty breakfast and go do more work, including home-schooling and house chores, we don’t sit on ass watching TV all day! 🙄

We need good hearty food to fuel our days, and one of the cheapest most nutritious of these is OATS! And oats are cheap, I buy organic rolled oats in 50 pound bags.  The last time I bought some, about a month ago, it cost me $1.06/lb.  I order all of my grains through a bulk food co-op that I am a member of through a church in a local town, I am not a member of the church though, it’s a service they provide to the community regardless of whether or not you attend, and I am very grateful for that!

So, here are my 3 favorite ways to eat oats for breakfast 😀

Traditional Oat Porridge (enough for 5 kids)

2 1/2 cups of oats

3 cups of filtered water

1/2 cup whey (I use whey leftover from making raw milk cheese, or you can drain it from yogurt)

12 hours before I plan to cook this I mix it all up in a pot and stick it in a warm place (at least 80F, I like using my oven with only the oven light on) for probiotics in the whey to do it’s “thing” in partially digest the oats and neutralizing phytic acid and other anti-nutrients that are present in all grains/seeds.

When I am ready to cook them I add:

2 cups milk from our goats

1/4 cup rapadura (whole cane sugar)

a dash each of salt, cinnamon, and vanilla extract

I then cook it all on med.-low heat, stirring every 3-5 minutes, until the oats are thoroughly cooked and the porridge is nice and thick.  The secret to good porridge is to cook it s.l.o.w.l.y…it should take at least 20-30 minutes, 45 minutes is not out of the question.  After it is done I stir in 1/4 cup (half a stick) of butter and let that melt.  Then I serve it up in bowls garnished with raisins and/or chopped up banana.  I also like to heat some of our goat’s milk on the stove till warm and pour it on there, and in early spring when we tap our maple trees a drizzle of homegrown maple syrup is pure heaven!

Another recipe that I often make is Oatmeal Pancakes  ..it requires:

2 cups oats

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

3 cups buttermilk, preferably homemade with live and active cultures

Again, just like the recipe for Oat Porridge, I mix all of this together and let it soak in a warm place for at least 12 hours.  When I am ready to make the pancakes I then add:

3 eggs (from our hens of course), well beaten

2 tbsp. olive oil or melted butter

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

dash of salt

I cook them on a greased griddle (I prefer a cast iron griddle greased with butter) just like regular pancakes.  My favorite way to eat these is in early summer with fresh ripe strawberries (both wild and domestic) harvested from The Land 😀

And lastly comes my favorite “hot weather” oat recipe…I call it Nourishing Summer Oats, I did a blog post about it earlier in the year…click here.

First things first, Begin at the Beginning

NOT tending the earth, NOT being fruitful and multiplying = DESOLATION (which is an abomination) 

I have NEVER been the type of person to be politically involved, all my life I didn’t give a rat’s ass about politics until, at age 18, I met my husband who is VERY MUCH into politics…so, I do what a good wife should, because I love him I get involved too!   😀

I watched the news and educated myself on politics and current events and the constitution, even history too, especially the cold war era which I new NOTHING about…they barely touch the subject in public school, it’s like it doesn’t even exist. We had long talks about politics and philosophy and constitutional law etc etc..I had a long stretch of 10 YEARS of being VERY politically involved and then this year, like the switch on a light bulb, it was over…I could no longer stomach it, it was too obvious…I suppose I made the mistake of also reading books on propaganda and mind control after reading all those political/history type books LOL!! Like Neo in The Matrix I could see the scrolling ones and zeros and I have a VERY DIFFICULT TIME in playing along with a lie, with me what you see is what you get and once I could see that it was all just a big steaming pile of you know what, I was DONE.

I think it’s very sad that people get all caught up in such things and let it dictate to them their feelings and attitudes. When I was 12 years old God gave me a vision of The Remnant at the time of the end, not just a vision but a mission and download of all that I would need to fulfill that mission.  I didn’t completely understand it at the time, but over the years I grew into my calling and I’ve known, since that time, even if not fully understood on a conscious level, that things were going to DRASTICALLY change in my lifetime!

He told me “Begin at the Beginning” and so I did and opened Genesis..the first 2 commandments in the whole Bible are this:

1) Tend the Garden and Keep it

2) Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

We live in an age where very few actually physically care for the earth, to get their hands physically dirty is beneath most americans, so many can go the day without even touching dirt! It’s AMAZING! and be fruitful and multiply?? HA! Killing babies is our favorite hobby! and there are more than enough who are quick to have their fertility surgically taken away calling it “getting fixed” like it was broken or something…and sure we’ve subdued the earth but only in the same way that a rapist subdues a victim…and I don’t think that’s what HE had in mind.  As a whole, we as a nation are deserving of judgement just based on those reasons alone!  But there are many many other reasons as well…

We also see this reiterated when Israel was taken into captivity.  This was the instructions that God gave to Israel living in exile, captive in Babylon:

“Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon;

Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them;

Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished.

And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.”

~Jeremiah 29:4-7

We all know the rest of the Genesis story and how it went, and the “curses” that God gave to man and woman because of disobedience, but I am here to tell you something…the cure is in the curse!  It’s not an “angry God” applying a curse because he hates us all, the curse is a discipline, in the same way that a parent disciplines a child to get at the root cause of the disobedience and bring about right behavior.

We have man who, as a whole, tends to be dense and hard, logical and rigid…controlled too much by the senses and the physical world, allowing it to dictate to him his actions.  Why else would have Adam followed his wife over God??  He was afraid of her displeasure, her wrath, which translates into…not gettin’ any, a COLD marriage bed (and how can he be her protection and covering when he is afraid of her??).  And I really do believe that is the main reason that Adam did what he did, and allowed Eve to do what she did.   His curse??  That he would now have to toil and sweat and work hard in the dirt to produce food to sustain himself, not just food from the ground but caring for the animals as well eventually carrying over into care of his wife and children, and through this he would begin to learn of the miracle of LIFE.  Rebirth through the soil, life springing from death, all of which are designed to soften him in a spiritual way..to see the “other dimensions” that lie beyond the physical plane.

Woman, on the other hand, has the opposite problem.  Being emotional and very spiritually attuned, there is a reason Satan approached Eve first, without the protection of the man who fails her because he doesn’t truly love her, if he did he would stand up to here, but loves his own pleasure more so that he seeks to never irritate or displease her…without his protection combined with her emotionally controlled nature she was just plain “easy pickings”.  Her “curse” was painful childbirth.  And after having given birth to 5 CHILDREN without any pain medication, I fully understand the reason for it!

There is no better way to learn self-control or inner strength more quickly than enduring childbirth without pain medication.  Fear is what causes pain in childbirth, the less fearful you can be and the more relaxed you become the easier and less painful the birth is…every one of my births has always been easier and less painful than the one that came before it.  And because of birth, I now know my emotions, can identify which are helpful and which are harmful and where they are coming from even (from within??  or influenced from without??) and with this also comes self-control, hardening what is too soft and gullible and emotional. Helping to “fine-tune” The Will which overtakes the spiritual intuitiveness so that instead of being wild and chaotic it becomes controlled and channeled….woman instead of being subject to her hormones and subsequent mood swings learns how to have “calm in the storm.”  She also becoming a help to him, seeing how his seed planted comes forth in a way most illogical way, helping him to see the deeper spiritual realities of life…how can something the size of a watermelon come out of something so small??  And yet it does!  The amazing power of birth to transform both woman and man!

And both men and women are always very quick to wanna escape their “curses”.  Man brought about the industrial revolution, utilizing what could only be described as “earth magic” (ie technology, created through utilizing oil, the “blood” of the earth), manipulating physical matter and laws of the physical world so that he could be released of his curse of having to tend and keep and care for the dominion that God assigned to him.  Not allowing himself to be at the whim of God the Creator of all things who gives the harvest and just as easily takes it away, thinking to bypass this, he came up with all kinds of ways and things to avoid being subject to The Will Of God, which lies in the curse, which is the cure that he so desperately needs.

The same goes for woman.  Most today say they would NEVER dream of giving birth without an epidural not understanding that she does herself a disservice…which is why SO MANY of our women are completely given over to their emotions, most retaining the mentality of a child well into adulthood, never really truly “growing up”.  Allowing fear to dictate so many of their actions.

So there it is, The Beginning 😀

Better the Devil you know…

I haven’t posted in a while, things are well here.  Snowicane Sandy dropped about 14 inches of snow on us and we had some wind gusts up to 40 MPH and the electricity went out for 66 hours but it was nothing we couldn’t handle.  Our first winter in this house, back in 09′, we dealt with snow that was MUCH WORSE, 3-4 FEET to be exact so 14 inches is really nothing.  Elevations higher than us, however, got 2-3 FEET of snow from the snowicane.  I got a lot of reading done by oil lamplight beside a roaring woodstove fire, it was glorious 😀

I am not surprised by the election results, nor am I stressed, nor am I depressed…I don’t put enough stock in politics to be depressed, for me it’s more of a hobby, I find it all to be quite entertaining and, truth be told, I feel excited and hopeful!  And SO GLAD that all that election monkey business is behind us and people can stop being so compartmentalized and caught up in all the drama.  Let’s lay the “voting demon” to rest already!  sheesh…

I am just happy to know which devil will be leading us to Hell in the next four years, and to a certain extent, I am relieved to know that it is Obama…as they say, “better the devil you know than the one you don’t know”.  I didn’t like the uncertainty that came with Romney and the possibility of complacency that would arrive should he have won the presidency.

“Whew! There’s a republican in office now, that means we’re safe!”   NOT! 🙄

People look for any excuse to feel complacent and secure, any excuse to go back to sleep and stop fighting.  So, for that reason, I am GLAD that Obama got re-elected!

Four more years of that lying bastard’s ugly face stinking up your TV screen LOL.  His version of corruption is SO OBVIOUS, so totally in your face that it cannot be denied, I hope that it continues to sicken and disturb more people with each passing day of the next 4 years.  He is exactly what this country deserves and NEEDS!   People call it judgement, but it is MERCY and LOVE, designed to help you SEE and identify evil for what it is…the ability to discern such is what the average person is greatly lacking in this country…it’s called WISDOM and there is very little of it left.

I did learn one new thing though, I live in the most conservative eastern state.  West Virginia went 62.3% for Romney and 35.5% for Obama (KY and TN had nearly the same percentage spread)…every other state farther east than us went for Obama and those that went for Romney (NC, SC, GA) were all very close…but NOT West Virginia!  I find it to be very funny how it is quite nearly the complete inversion of Maryland (O: 61.7% and R: 36.6%) the state that I grew up in and left…from these statistics you can clearly see why I left! 😆

All is not lost, the real fight lies not in the empty promises of vapid men, but in the nitty gritty of everyday life…THAT is where the REAL living is done!  Today I took care of and provided for my 5 children.  I cooked them food and changed their clothes and cleaned them…we live and play and learn all day, together…and with each passing day I grow ever more grateful for such a precious gift!  I took care of animals and they in turn took care of me by providing me with milk and eggs and meat.  I watched over the land and it watched over me and provided me with radishes and lettuce and spinach and beets, yes even in the cold weather it provides!  Wood to heat my home as well!  And this evening, when Nathan gets back home from running errands in town, he and I will sit down and have a beer together and talk about our day or the news or whatever seems interesting to us at the time…it is such a joy to be married to my best friend!  Life is good and precious and I REFUSE to curse it simply because Obama won the election…

He may have won, but life goes on…and I hear threats that “Obama will do this, and Obama will do that..”  but I will continue to live my simple peaceful life and if one day the communist gestapo brigade pulls up in front of my house with a tank and blows it to smithereens then so be it!  But, until that day comes (IF, it indeed DOES come!),  with my lamp full of oil and my wick trimmed, I will live without fear, happily even, awaiting HIM and following HIM as best as I am able…and whether He comes for me or I go up to meet HIM…does it really matter??  In the end, it’s all the same anyways! 😀