Fruit Cobbler - Gluten Free

I found a great recipe for fruit cobbler here and made some changes.

One of our little trees fruited this year! We pruned off most of the fruit, let a few apples mature and are trying them out with this recipe.

Basically, you cut up whatever fruit you have on hand and put it in a cast iron skillet.
Press it down gently to fill in the spaces.


Mix topping ingredients together in a bowl and spread evenly over the fruit - gently pressing down to form a crust. If you are using very juicy fruit these measurements are fine - if the fruit is baking apples, I would double the recipe for a nice thick crust and double the butter.

I would like to try this with pumpkin and apples with pumpkin seeds in place of chopped nuts!


1/2 cup chopped nuts (you could easily use any type of seed here instead of nuts)
3/4 cups oats
1/4 cup coconut or regular butter
2 Tablespoons Coconut flour
2 Tablespoons Brown Sugar
1/4 teaspoon Salt

Bake at 350F for 40-45 minutes.

Vacationing at Home: Day 6

Day 6: Saturday

Today was a great day to sleep in, hang around the house and garden and talk with neighbors. Spent a fun day relaxing, watched a couple of movies, and had some friends over tonight for gaming. I, of course, play a Druid in D&D and it's lots of fun to play and write a story with our friends.

I finished my project and uploaded my final for the Permaculture class. Now I would like to find another challenge, another place to design and work toward teaching abundance, food security, and sustainability. I look forward to where this new perspective on everything will take me.

For house projects today, I gathered together laundry and washed, dried, hung up and folded everything I could find in this house that needed to be cleaned. With everything for the week ready to go, tomorrow I work on the next project - gathering all paperwork, books and magazines to the basement to sort, trash, donate and shred where appropriate.

One project a day seems to work well - nice days on outdoor projects, and rainy days on indoor projects. The difference this time, is that when these bigger indoor projects are done - I won't have to do them again. There won't be a junk drawer or closet left untouched and when I'm done, there will only be what is necessary and needed.

For today's pictures - veggies and fruit from the garden. The perennials are growing: trees, vines, berries, nuts, and other plants.  The raised beds change day to day. We dug up the red potatoes and canned 27 pint jars for winter. The other beds have a variety of plants - we keep trying a few different things in each to find what will grow best for us.  The squashes are thriving this year and I am looking forward to a pumpkin harvest in the autumn.  Our cherry tomatoes are just starting to flower and the canning tomatoes just might make it.

Jerusalem Artichoke (Sunchoke) 

Zucchini

Sugar Pumpkins

Gala Apples

Eggplant

Cherry Tomatoes finally starting to flower

Hot peppers!

Small Red beans for drying

Carrots growing, growing, growing

June Garden and Volunteer Plants

Over the past few weeks we have had much rain, and in between the rain storms we added a few new plants and a few more volunteered in the garden!

New Rhubarb 

New Raspberry

Blueberry from last year has berries! 

Vetch is everywhere

The Paw-Paw is doing nicely - just planted this year!

We planted this 4x8 bed with corn and beans and found that MANY pumpkins came up from last year. As well as an overachieving butternut squash...so we decided that a new bed was needed!

Notice the large volunteer Mammoth Sunflower behind the bed. 

I love these and will find a way to have them all over the garden next year =)

So I took some newspaper and placed it down in the front yard  and wet it with a watering can.

And then I put cardboard over that and wet it down with water.

We filled the circle up with soil...

And moved the many rogue pumpin and butternut squash plants into the new bed...

We watered it in and it looks good as a starting point to replacing the front lawn...

Notice the Sunchokes are about four feet tall in the background!

in the back garden, trees are growing like crazy, grape vines are vining....

In the beds, canning tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and amaranth, carrots, radishes, sea kale,

and eggplant, etc. are all growing. Intermingled hot peppers in each bed as well as 

marigolds, poppies, herbs and flowers all perking up after a week of rain.

And the first of our apple trees is fruiting - I pruned off about 25-30 fruits

and we are letting a few grow near to the trunk where they won't break the branches.

I can't wait to try this fruit!

Toads, Apple Blossoms & a Paw-Paw Tree

The garden is changing so quickly - plants I took photos of yesterday have already changed. I want to be sure I document things that are new to me so I don't forget and have a reference from year to year of where things are how they change and where they show up on their own. Because  plants are making their own decisions only one year into this - and growing where they were not planted...

First - after the past couple of days of rain we have seen several toads. I think this one is an American Toad. What is important to remember, is that we never had toads in our yard before it was a garden.

One of the apple trees has blossoms. We won't let them grow this year, except maybe one to taste it. It's so encouraging to see that these trees we planted only last year have done well through the winter and are acting like they should in spring!

The Paw-Paw Tree - just planted a few weeks ago is getting leaves. This will be the tallest of the trees and is planted in the back corner of our lot.