~and so a new day begins~

Yesterday we finished up the last of the processing of the herbs we tried to grow this past summer and the fruits of our labor yielded about 20 teaspoons of dried product grown from a variety of plants.  To the stockholders and CEO's of the Schilling and/or McCormick seasonings conglomerates, I have a quick memo for you.  You need not worry about a new company making its way to the market in 2015 by the name of "Renfro Seasonings".  We barely figured out how to grow enough to get us through the winter, let alone take over the corporate world of food flavor enhancers but hey, we had fun and we learned from the experience.

Quite honestly, I am not sure why I didn't try growing herbs for cooking a long, long time ago.  It was easy and actually very relaxing in a strange kind of way.  I've been missing out on the fun of it for years now.  When I was fretting over life's trials and tribulations, I could have been smelling the delicious aroma of basil or oregano.  I am such a slow learner but now that I do know how much fun it is, I intend to grow more next year.

We decided to grow our herbs in pots this year outside on the deck.  These basil plants finally took off after we were able to get rid of (temporarily) some pesky ground squirrels that kept eating them off.  In all, we had five different varieties of herbs going (basil, oregano, sage, thyme, and rosemary).  I loved the appearance of them and shoot, they were beautiful to look at regardless of how much yield we would be able to get.  I'm a firm believer in the power of aromatherapy and sometimes it was fun just to go out and pick off a leaf or two and press it between my fingers and catch a whiff of that lovely aroma herbs have.

Towards late summer, we finally began to harvest the plants and make preparations for drying them.  There was no scientific, age old formula that we used as we just laid them out to air for awhile and then stored them inside of paper bags from the local market.  Mike tucked them away in a box in the shed and we basically forgot about them in the days that would follow.  In their "undried" state they took up a lot of room on the outdoor table and foolishly I forgot that when they dried there would not be near as much as I thought we'd see.  Kind of like realizing that 10" of snow from a good old Kansas blizzard in January would only yield about an inch of real moisture.  Have I told you that I am a slow learner?  :)

Yesterday as we were hustling to finish up some things outdoors before the weather changed for the colder this week, I remembered that we hadn't done anything with the "produce" we had stored away weeks ago.  So Mike hauled them into the sunroom and kitchen and we began the process of preparing them to store by hand.  There is no science to the approach we took here either, just a whole lot of sorting through the dried up plants and running them through a sieve.  Mike was much more patient about it than me but when we were done, we came up with about 5 bags of the different kinds.  In all reality it was a very small yield but that wasn't the important thing to us.  What counted was that we had actually tried to do something we'd been wanting to for a long, long time and followed through with it enough to come up with a finished product, shown below.

One of us, not saying who, came up with a new seasoning called "organo" but with the insertion of the letter "e" in just the right spot made things right again.  If this photo was a "scratch and sniff" kind, you'd be enjoying some mighty fine smells right now.  It will be fun to actually get to do some cooking and baking to enjoy them.  Perhaps our small amounts won't last for long but while they do last, we intend to use them.

It was nice to finally be able to grow something here in this new place along the Western Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.  We were able to get some tomatoes, pumpkins, and birdhouse gourds as well as the herbs.  There was no luck to be had  in the gardening season of 2014 with the potatoes, peppers, sunflowers, or corn.  Ground squirrels, weird weather and just not the best of planting conditions hindered our original efforts.  Still we didn't give up and the result was the knowledge for me that things can and do grow in this clay filled soil if you just have the patience to stick with it.

The summer of 2013, my first one here, was a dismal one.  Homesick for Kansas, I tried my best to at least get some sunflowers to grow.  Thousands, no maybe millions, of seeds were put into the earth along the fence row in front of our house.  I was just positive that I'd have a forest of sunflowers to remind me of my old home in south central Kansas.  In April of that year, the month before Mike and I got married, I was visiting one weekend and decided to get the process going.  I was so happy and positive that everything I laid into the soil that day would grow.  It did not.

Less than a dozen sunflowers actually came up that first summer here and I was so discouraged that I nearly gave up the idea of ever planting anything again.  "What's the use?" I began to think to myself.   I recall telling Mike that I wasn't going to waste any more time planting anything in this Colorado earth.  Yet that was last year and this summer my attitude had righted itself. Even though not everything sprouted that I ended up planting, a whole lot of it did.  Things could grow and have a place with a real purpose here and a homesick flatlander from Kansas was one of them.

And so the new day begins.

The last cutting of alfalfa is through and the bales of green sustenance that were harvested are already on their way to the farms and ranches throughout the valley and beyond.  I have loved being a witness to it.  The blood of my father, a Kansas farmer and custom cutter for his whole life, still runs through the body of his little girl.