Spring Bounty! Ideas for Asparagus and Peas

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Spring Harvest is a snap with Lehman's Maine Garden Hod. Available now! Click for more.

Spring Harvest is a snap with Lehman’s Maine Garden Hod. Available now! Click for more.

Planning your garden is the first step. Planting your garden with plants and seeds is the second step.  But the hardest step may be how to use the bounty your garden produces.

Spring herbs and vegetables are the beginning of a wonderful journey your garden will take you on – especially for first time gardeners.

Here are some simple tips and recipes to use the fresh bounty from your spring garden: Continue reading →

How To: Blanching & Freezing Green Peas

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I’ve moved recently, and found a wonderful farmer’s market not far from my new home. On my first trip, last Saturday, I found freshly picked and shelled spring peas. It was a lucky find, because it’s much warmer here than in my former Ohio home. Peas are going out here, but aren’t quite ripe up north. I bought all the peas I could to blanch and freeze. Not having to shell all those peas myself was a blessing. Continue reading →

Get Protection for Delicate Seedlings

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Get this easy-to-grow seed kit and get into heirloom veggies this season. Still available at Lehman's in Kidron or via Lehmans.com.

Get this easy-to-grow seed kit and get into heirloom veggies this season. Still available at Lehman’s in Kidron or via Lehmans.com.

Last year I bought some heirloom seeds for Oregon Sweet Meat Oregon Homestead Squash from Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener. But due to drought and squash beetles, there wasn’t any produce.

It was disappointing, as I’d sampled the squash before, and loved it. It fed my family for two nights, and the leftovers froze well. Continue reading →

Easy How To: Freezing Whole Tomatoes

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Find Martino's Roma Tomatoes and other heirloom varieties at Lehmans.com.

Find Martino’s Roma Tomatoes and other heirloom varieties at Lehmans.com.

I love tomatoes. They’re an absolute garden staple. There’s practically no end to what you can do with tomatoes: sauces, juices, pastes, salsas, ketchup, diced tomatoes, stuffed tomatoes, stewed tomatoes… I think they’re probably the most versatile food on the planet.

The problem with growing them yourself, though, is that tomatoes don’t come in all at once. It would be wonderful if you could wake up one morning, walk out into the garden, and have all of your tomatoes ripe and ready to be processed all at once. But unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. Instead, they come in a little here and a little there, ripening at their leisure. Continue reading →

Three Sisters Add Success To Garden Reboot

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The companion planting Bible! Available at Lehmans.com or Lehman's in Kidron, Ohio.

The companion planting Bible! Available at Lehmans.com or Lehman’s in Kidron, Ohio.

Gardeners are under the gun: the cold snap here and in the northeast, the terrifying storms in the Plains, and a drier-than-normal spring in the southeast means that many folks are looking at a garden reboot fairly late in the growing season.

If you’re replanting or adding purchased seedlings to your garden, now’s the perfect time to work in companion plantings. Already doing it? Think about different combinations than you already have. The bible for companion gardeners, Carrots Love Tomatoes, is a must when planning your garden layout. You’ll get maximum production following the guidelines there. Author Louise Riotte says careful companion planting can double your garden’s harvest production! Continue reading →

A Small Texas Town Makes A Big Impression

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Editor’s Note: Our on-the-road correspondent Mark Pendl checks in–he’s still traveling the country searching for the perfect cowpony. This is his postcard profile of Yoakum, Texas.

Greetings from the Lone Star State! If you scan a Texas map, you will find me posted twenty-seven miles south of Gonzales (the birthplace of Texas) in a small town called Yoakum.

A local "free range" resident checks me out!

A local “free range” resident checks me out!

In its heyday, Yoakum was best known for growing tomatoes, meat packing plants, for making leather goods (mostly saddles) and for natural gas discoveries.

Like many small towns across this country, Yoakum has taken a downturn economically until recently. What was once a dusty, semi-ghost town huddled around a water tower is booming once again with gushing oil wells. For a few short years before the oil production runs dry, most everyone will prosper.
Continue reading →

Recipe of the Month: 11 Tips for Soybean Snacks!

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USA-grown, certified organic, oil roasted soybeans are on sale now at Lehmans.com!

USA-grown, certified organic, oil roasted soybeans are on sale now at Lehmans.com!

Maybe you’ve seen them on our website: 15 pound boxes of organic roasted soybeans. And you’ve thought, “What would I ever do with 15 pounds of organic roasted soybeans?”

Tell you what: with a few simple additions to those soybeans, you’re going to be wondering what to do with the empty box!

Essentially, once the beans are roasted, they can be treated like any other snack nut: peanuts, almonds, cashews and so on. And you can add them to recipes along with or in lieu of any other kind of nuts. Continue reading →

Water for the Babies; Eggs for Everyone Else

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Raise your own eggs, milk, meat! The Backyard Homestead is in stock now at Lehman's in Kidron and Lehmans.com.

Raise your own eggs, milk, meat! The Backyard Homestead is in stock now at Lehman’s in Kidron and Lehmans.com.

Around here, spring didn’t roar in: it arrived with oinks, peeps, baas and soft moos! The baby animals have arrived, and we are surrounded by their sweet sounds. Right now, they are all safely ensconced in whatever makeshift nursery we could come up with, but they’ll need permanent housing before long.

New fencing will be going up in the next week, at least for the pigs. The calves will end up in the pasture behind the house and will probably be staked until we get a fence up there too. Thank goodness for friends and neighbors. We are way too old to be tackling projects like fence building by ourselves. Continue reading →

Arnold’s Candies: Keepin’ It Sweet Since 1953

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It's retro all the way at Arnold's!

It’s retro all the way at Arnold’s!

Come along with Country Life and get a look behind the scenes at one of our favorite vendors: family-owned Arnold’s Candies. This small northeastern Ohio company makes Sugar Puffs, Butter Mints, and the thinnest, tastiest nut brittles ever: we’re pleased that we can share these wonderful treats with you!

Vice-President and partner Kyle Roberson took us into the place where the magic happens–the candy production room. In the big, spanking-clean space, owner and president/partner Greg Dauphin, brothers Paul and Shawn Freeder, and Tommy Bennett make workday ingredients like sugar, cream of tartar and water into out-of-this-world confections. Continue reading →

Recipe of the Week: Pancake Making Day!

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Lehman's Maple Syrup is from a family member's sugarbush in New York State. In stock now! Click the picture to learn more.

Lehman’s Maple Syrup is from a family member’s sugarbush in New York State.

Sometimes things just come together and the path for the day is clear.

We have had a great sugaring year. The sap flowed early and fast. We aren’t big producers here at Barefoot Farm. We make enough for ourselves and our family and friends with some left over to sell and swap. We manage to cover our expenses but not much else. This year, we even had enough to make up a good size batch of maple sugar.

We get our milk from a neighbor up the road. She runs a very small raw milk CSA and I buy 2 gallons a week. This past week we were away and the milk piled up with no one here to drink it. We also had a lot of eggs as the spring weather has gotten the hens laying again. Continue reading →