updates

I haven't updated in quite some time, life has been very very busy here this summer. I spend my week working all day, getting home around 5:30 and usually throwing something on the grill as well as grabbing whatever veggies are available. Weekends have been spent out fishing or camping or else at home canning whatever I find in my path :-) It has been busy for sure, but well worth it, especially as I watch my cupboards begin to fill up. Later this week I will update on my totals so far.

Canning this summer has been pretty fun actually. I have been visiting www.gardenweb.com which has several vegetable forums as well as a harvest forum. I have found the most delicious recipes there. My two favorites are a salsa recipe and an Apple Pie Jam recipe. They are so delicious I can't seem to make enough!

Here are just a few fun pics from this summer . . ..


I guess you can't really see it on here but this was a huge bumblebee coated in pollen in my Zucchini plant. It is wonderful to see them, definately more this year then last year. With more people using organic principles and less pesticides, it seems they are coming around a bit more. I was sure happy to see him!

This cute little yellow bird visits the garden daily. He is so tiny that he is actually just resting there on a chard leaf. Hes quite cute! I love sharing the garden with him.

Dinner one night, this was all of our homemade organic yummy delicious food! How's that for a descriptive sentance lol. We had bbq'd chicken (courtesy of safeway) sliced cucumbers, zucchini - parmeson bread, sauteed garlic and chard, homemade salsa and pickles and the leftover apples from canning became pie. Nothing so good as whole healthy foods. I feel blessed to have them to give to my family, and I sure wish that others would see how simple it is!

Salsa ~ Beautiful jars of salsa, this is the best ever. I can't seem to make enough because Katie keeps opening jars and once one is open . . . its all over with :)

One day of canning, This was beans, applie pie jam, and I think veggie soup? I don't remember.

This was part of todays work. This weekend we put up 12 more quarts of tomatos, 2 pints sloppy joe sauce, 4 quarts tomato juice, 9 more pints salsa, 8 jars raspberry jelly, 7 pints applesauce, 7 pints apple pie jam, 4 quarts of spaghetti sauce and 7 more jars of tomato-garlic soup.

That should suffice for a weekend :-)

Not much prettier then raspberry jam

Todays applesauce, raspberry jelly and apple pie jam.

Now - I am exhausted so . . . better updates later!

Peaches . . . 250 pounds of peaches!

I woke up two weekends ago thinking it was probably peach picking time. I saw that a local orchard had peaches for 45 cents a pound. I thought about how fun it would be to take the kids to the orchard and let them go crazy picking peaches. I thought about 70 pounds or so, maybe 3 boxes would be a good amount for some peach jam and some jars of canned peaches. These are so good in the dead of winter! We love to open a jar and make a peach cobbler or spoon them over pancakes or waffles. . . I knew the kids would be up for a morning picking peaches and we had a friend over that . . . lets just say this kiddo has a tough life, and I thought it would be a blast for her to go picking with us.

Before we left I went and picked a 5 gallon bucket of cucumbers for pickles and a 5 gallon bucket of tomatos for salsa and pasta sauce. I figured since I would have the canner going for a load or two of peaches I would do them at the same time.

I then loaded up four kiddos and off we went to the orchard. Each kid had a bucket, not too big, most were 3 -4 gallon sizes. . . and then . . . I let them go.

NOW here is a warning! If you do NOT want to feel invasion of the Jolly Peachy Peach . . do not do what I do. Indeed. . . do NOT take your children to the orchard and let them go. Tether them with rope and twine, or better yet, leave them home and buy the cans for 99 cents . . . but if you don't heed my warning, this is what you will find . . .




Here is our friend Des . . . figuing out how to balance her box with a ladder and peaches . . .

Hannah, delighted that she found another bag to fill with peaches. She made jelly out of this batch and brought it to her new and old teachers for the first day of school! They loved it! I was just glad to get more peach stuff OUT of our home . . .

Des Katie and Hannah scoping the best peaches, of course, they were the ones highest in the tree

Jake on a ladder, perched at the top. It would have been way too easy for the smallest kid to pick the peaches at the base of the tree. Alas, Jake had to fight for the ladder then climb to the very top and hand me peaches one at a time (do you see now why I was distracted from our peach mountain building?)

Hannah had to have her turn with the ladder as well . . . and hand the peaches down one at a time!

Some. . .S O M E of the over 250 pounds of peaches that ended up loaded in our car, see, I didn't realize that the kids were getting extra buckets in the field. To be fair, they told me but I assumed they meant filling their own buckets. . . I don't know why I didn't make the connection . . . This is only a bit of them. We gave a box to Des, one to my daughter, one to my mom, one to a friend, buckets to 2 friends, 3 neighbors and the magician that came to my daughters birthday party!

I put them to work! Here is Jake slicing cucumbers for pickles. That was NOT the day to come up with this job, WHAT was I thinking??

Hannah got put to work on the tomatos . . . .

SOME of the bounty . . . in all we ended up with about 122 quarts of peaches from that endeavor!

A snapshot from the pantry . . . its not full yet but we are rapidly filling it up. That doesn't include the produce in the freezer! Its full of shredded zucchini for bread in the winter, corn, beans and other yummy stuff.

The garden is replanted for winter . . . carrots, beets, turnips, radishes, spinach, lettuce and more is sprouting up between ginormous zucchini and overgrown tomatos . . .

Life is beatiful!