Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Harvest time

This is the time of year I love. The time of year where I finally see where all that effort and money and time went and I get results of our labor. Now generally, we should of been rolling in produce since July, but with the weird weather this year, its taken a bit of time to get things really progressing. In the last 2 weeks, I have been able to walk away saying 'Yep, The garden is producing."

Anyone hungry?
This is the sight that greeted us two weekends ago. That is 15 lbs of tomatoes, over a lb of basil for basil jelly, cucumbers, squash and peppers, oh my. We canned almost all of it in a canning session that took 6 hours, and set off the carbon monoxide detector as well as the smoke alarm. Nothing bad happened, we just were canning with the air on since it was a very hot weekend. Turns out, we put too much humidity in the air and freaked out the detectors. Lesson of the day, can with the windows open. Pooka loves her basil jelly and asked if we could try purple basil jelly as well, so we did. More on that another day. I wish I had remembered to take a picture of the finished products, but I will be updating the harvest page and the canning page hopefully when I am done here.

Then last weekend, I wish I had taken pictures. We had 22 lbs of tomatoes and 2 lbs of tomatillos come in since the previous canning, not to mention peppers and things. We were in such a rush to deal with it all because we had a busy weekend and we knew it wouldn't keep another week. Pooka had a trip to a farm that day for girl scouts, so once we got back, it was straight to canning. She had no problem getting in there and handing us jars and lids out of the warm water so so she could do her part. She loves helping us, I only wish our kitchen was slightly bigger so we had room for her.

In the end, Pooka has already taken basil jelly sandwiches to school for 4 days since we made her the jelly. She loves being able to say she made the jelly and grew the basil, and I am happy to have made it with her.

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