Although Dave made headway planting the fall crops, (cool weather plants such as spinach, Swiss chard, kale, radishes, carrots, lettuces, bok choi, kohlrabi, etc.) this week, it seemed, in general, as if the farm was much more like another job site. Sadly, I missed much of what was going on early in the week since my other job sites required the majority of my attention. In my absence, Dave took delivery of the new outdoor grill (270lbs) which arrived via freight. 

He was also here for several deliveries of sand and mortar that the masons had ordered in.

Eventually some other equipment arrived.

An then their tool trailer which they parked in as much of a concealed area as possible.

No, I’m not doing any free advertising for this company, but I often describe them in this way: If you wanted to build a cathedral these are the guys for the job. Again, a crew of father, Bob, and son, Adam, and Sayad along with the laborer, Pete. Here they are last year (along with Mule, some of the carpenters on the kitchen job as well as Dave and Farley) laying the corner stone for Seven Oaks.

Adam had the honors of laying the stone, one of which was placed in front as well in back.

The Masons arrived to begin the terrace steps on Friday. Steps are really tricky, so after some calculations, they were able to figure out how to proceed and got a good start.

When I had snippets of time last week I met with my electrician friend, Rich Wood, (who also delivered the sleeves for future electric under all the new concrete) the outdoor lighting expert, Mark Sullivan, and of course the mason coordinator, Jim Theusch. Our friend Mule dropped by and put on his plumber hat since he will be working on the gas lines for the outdoor grill. I plied both Rich and Mule with additional goodies such as melons and jarred items from the pantry since they really appreciate that kind of thing.

Today the driveway crew arrived to get some work done moving pallets around and exploring what was underneath all of the pea rock on our driveway. A very large dump truck pulled in and we ended up needing to cut back some tree branches to allow them better access to the rear area. We pulled Dave’s pick up into place and he climbed into the back and used his new giant pruner to do the job. 

This truck dropped a ton or so of rock for just a start on the future base.

He then was prepared to receive and haul away whatever was pulled up from the current driveway.

They worked a long time today but were finally stopped after discovering their machine, a Case skid steer loader, had a flat tire.

We felt they got a good start and were not terribly disappointed that the dust and noise was over for the day. 

The farm is suffering from the continued area drought. We have had no discernible rain for more than 7-8 weeks. Dave is watering constantly but managed to plant the fall season of crops and reports that many of the rows of plantings are already sprouting. Our harvest totals for the year as of Friday, September, 6th was 1,249lbs. The big winners listed in order of weight totals so far are: cukes, followed by cantaloupe, tomatoes, strawberries eggplants and potatoes.

I gave away many, many melons this week and had wonderful messages back from folks who realized how very tasty they were. My sister, Lisa, served many farm items at a Rosh Hashanah dinner this past week and picked up another batch of items for a family dinner she is hosting tomorrow.

We continue to enjoy eating and preserving the fruits of our labor but sharing with friends and family is also a great reward.

In addition to all of the joy of progress at the farm this week, the very best part of my week was when a dear friend, Janet Lange, dropped off a beautifully wrapped present for me, in recognition of some assistance I contributed to her recent home project. No need – wish I had helped more – but what a wonderful surprise!

With a full schedule, I had to leave it – full of mystery – on the table all afternoon until I got back from a long day of work. OMG! You would not believe my excitement after carefully opening the package. It was a John Gould bird print, of the Parus Major, which remind me greatly of one of the birds that I have seen around here, the American Goldfinch.

Thank you, thank you, Janet! This was very special indeed since Janet was with me when I bought my very first pair of Gould prints, many years ago! Some people are just great gift givers since they remember details like that! I am so excited to add this print to my small but growing collection of ornithological and botanical prints!

Forgot to add this to the previous post but thought it deserved its own special spot light!

I processed 40 pounds of cucumbers into 40 pints of sweet pickles this weekend. Just so that you know what that looks like…

OMG! Here is what our melon harvest looked like this afternoon after a quick picking in the melon patch this morning.
Can you say Cantaloupe? Or as Kate quipped today, “Can’t Elope”? (Yes, with wedding planning underway, there is no chance of elopement..!)

We picked 111 pounds of cantaloupes today, in addition to 6 pounds of water melons with more out in the field yet to bring in! This follows 40 pounds of melons we harvested yesterday!

Needless to say, despite their incredible flavor, we are giving them away as fast as we can since they do not preserve well and they are ripe, ripe, ripe!

I plan to deliver some to my friend, Mule, tomorrow when I see him on a job site. I hope to find good homes for some with others soon as well since they just don’t last very long.

We had a wonderful weekend with Kate and Jason in town for a wedding extravaganza. Here they are on their way to the rehearsal dinner.

We managed to see them as often as they were available but they were out at wedding party activities most of the weekend. That was okay since we had plenty of farm activities to address.  One of those was getting our stone yard items put on pallets for the guys to move around this coming week. This was heavy work and required a bit of a two person coordination. It reminded me of working on the stone wall I built at the old house. It is back breaking work that leads one to not casually say ‘a ton’. When you have lifted enough stone to equal a ton, you and your back knows it and respects that measurement!

We took a much needed mid morning break when I stepped inside to make Dave a fruit smoothy. I used our strawberries and melons along with some other key ingredients to make a delightful, cool drink to sip. We enjoyed this concoction while sitting together on the front, portico bench, admiring our work while realizing the scope of future work to come.

Despite not getting any of the promised rain last night, we did benefit from a slight cool down in temps so working on weeding and the like was much better today. I spent some time in the blueberry and strawberry patches this morning with Farley, who always finds a way to relax in and amongst the activity.

We managed to make a very nice send off dinner for Kate and Jason. Dave grilled some steaks while I concentrated on an Eggplant Parm dish as well as a Green Bean stir fry. YUM!

When it rains it pours! Oh, what a tease! No, we haven’t had rain for over a month now and everything is miserably brown and dry despite the constant watering. Since writing that sentence, we received a brief shower last evening that measured only .15 inches on our gauge. The prediction for rain today has yet to materialize even tho we had some rumblings of thunder earlier in the day. We had the first triple digit day for the year on Friday. In contrast to that, we had more than a month of triple digit days last summer!

No, I was referring to all the activity here at Seven Oaks on several very active fronts in the past week. The outdoor renovations continued with good success last week. There was demolition work as well as reconstruction which means progress on all levels. As you saw from the last post, the step forms were ready for concrete but the footing for the outdoor kitchen area had not yet been dug. The guys worked on digging that first thing Thursday so as to be ready for the concrete truck to arrive mid morning that day.

Footings for the future walls do not need a form so they just needed to dig deep enough to be below the frost line, which for our area is 30″, and then to make sure their footing is wider than the structure that will be built on top of it, so digging for this was accomplished in a relatively short amount of time since they were using heavy equipment.

The concrete group consists of a very hard working crew of Mike, the owner, his two sons, Mitch and Philip, and a helper, Josh, who have all tirelessly labored under high heat and humidity but with good humor. They correctly interpreted my drawings for the steps, sidewalk and future outdoor kitchen area and worked their foundation areas with precision. Many guys wouldn’t care as much about the part that will be covered by the finish stone, but these guys were perfectionists.

The concrete truck arrived on time and backed up on the old driveway as far as possible to deliver the load.

The crew scrambled to disperse the concrete and get it leveled with a good degree of speed since concrete sets up incredibly fast, especially with some heat.

So fast that within two or so hours after the step pour, they were taking the forms off and brushing the finish on the steps. They did a nice enough job that Dave wondered why were were going to cover up the concrete with stone!

They also removed the old, crumbling sidewalk stone to prepare for the next step…installment of blue stone.

They created a large pile of debris that will be many times larger next week when they remove the rest of the current driveway material before creating the new driveway.

That was a hectic day of job site issues for me so I was scrambling back and forth with trying to oversee the crew at my house while overseeing the crews on other jobs. While I was out and about, Dave sent word that my new pressure cooker had finally arrived!

Yeah! I had been frustrated by the delay in delivery and had called the company that sells these in order to inquire about the timing for delivery. They said they had a run on these items recently….I guess more people are doing what we are with canning and preserving their own food, especially at this time of year when the crops are at peak as far as bounty. I could hardly wait to get home from work and open the box.

Drat, of course, lots of reading had to be done before jumping into using this new piece of equipment but I managed to process 5.5 pints of tomato sauce that evening. It was interesting to note that my Blue Star Range cook top is so powerful that even on one of the less powerful burners, I had my flame set at ‘low’ and was maintaining the 10 pounds of pressure on the cans as prescribed! Wow!

The concrete crew was elsewhere on Friday which allowed us some much needed time to go and collect some wood pallets to organize some of the stone material we have stored on the back driveway turn around. The idea here is that when they come back next week to start demolition on the driveway, we have to have this material situated in such a way that they can move it with relative ease. Pallets are the answer since they could easily forklift everything out of the way and to a better spot or to get rid of it altogether.  But we didn’t have any pallets sitting around. So, I made a couple of calls to some of my construction friends and ended up with a wonderful reply, “Nancy, come get as many pallets as you would like!”

So Dave and I were off to collect some pallets from our mason’s stone yard and stacked them in his truck without a moments thought even tho it was 102 degrees!

The harvesting continues with many, many melons of all sorts. I am so thankful that the weekend arrived so I could address some of the preserving that was waiting for my attention.

Here are the melons that I cut up yesterday and shared with our weekend guests (Kate and Jason!) and my mother.

They are tasty beyond belief!

After cutting up pounds and pounds of melons, I attacked the green beans and froze just short of 6 pounds of them.

I also froze 3 pounds of green peppers and made 4 half pints of Sriracha Sauce.

It was not long after these melons were cut, that Dave brought in 10 more, just like them with many more to come.

Yesterday’s harvest put us over 1,040 pounds of produce for this season with much more to come since the melons are just starting to arrive and we will plant the fall season crop next week.

I’ve been writing this post for a couple of days now since all of my activities have prevented me from publishing. Besides enjoying the company of Kate and Jason who are in town for a wedding this weekend, I had one lovely, early morning surprise that I want to share.

The anemone transplants that a friend, Jill, shared with me earlier in the summer are actually blooming now despite the stress of the transplant in addition to a rough summer of weather. Thanks so much, Jill for sharing these beauties! I look forward to their future bounty since I planted them outside of our bedroom window and know I will enjoy the view of their pretty little blossoms for years to come!

Our prep kitchen, the area where we bring in our harvested produce, smells like nirvana these days. It is because we are experiencing the perfumes of the ripening melons. Ah, the aroma is delightful and distinctive!

Here are the first two cantaloupes, ripe and ready to cut up this afternoon.

Then cut!

And now sliced and ready for the refrigerator!

YUM! There are so many on the way and we will be inundated for the next couple of weeks. Too bad I know of no really good ways to preserve these babies other than to eat them voraciously while in season. In a way, it makes it all the more precious to have them fresh on our plates for days to come!

One note about the melon preparation that I have been following due to news in the last year or so about illness related to this particular fresh product. I wash the raw melons first. Then, after each cut with my knife, I rinse the knife under my hot water dispenser to clean the blade before each successive cut. I feel very comfortable with this process, something that I never used to feel compelled to do in years past, but started this regimen with last year’s crop of melons.

In other news, the concrete contractors started early but had a long day of high heat to deal with as they got ready for the new terrace steps and new sidewalk. They have not begun the driveway yet, but this was part of the plan to get the rear objectives done in advance of the driveway proper.

Here are the forms for the rear terrace steps as they became ready for a concrete pour tomorrow. Look for more pics coming soon!

Short post….just to keep everyone in the loop…our concrete contractor, Mike, who will be tearing out our existing driveway, rear sidewalks and rear steps for replacement, arrived late this afternoon with some of his equipment. Given our response to his appearance today, he probably thinks there was an unannounced ticker tape parade scheduled and he was the last to know!

I LOVE it when the contractors and sub contractors arrive! We are SOOOO excited!

Anyway, the heat continues along with the dry conditions and we are watering, watering but will be harvesting more melons in the days to come.  Wouldn’t you know, the green beans are gorgeous and flourishing in the last couple of days. Dave has harvested about two pounds per day with ease and they are perfect! Here is the recent harvest.

I have a well loved, green bean, stir fry recipe that I will share soon, since Kate and Jason will be around this weekend to share in that as well as our Roasted Cherry Tomato Pizza.

Tonight’s dinner is much the same as many others. Roasted veggies from our garden with chicken breasts to give a bit of protein.  Yum!

Last week was a busy one. The heat is on and no rain so we were busy with watering and this week looks like much of the same. I’m afraid the heat we are getting may be too late for the tomato crop to benefit but it should help to ripen up some melons.

Dave drove to Philly for a brief visit with Peter and took him this box of jarred goodies which included three types of pickles, ketchup, sriracha, pasta sauce and relish. 

In his two day absence, I was in charge of the farm. When he is gone, I miss him and so does Farley and the farm actually suffers. I just cannot do nearly as much as he does on a daily basis. Case in point, it is 7pm on a very hot day and he is still out doing the harvesting and moving hoses. Granted, I have my day job, but lets face it, I had all of Saturday to make an impact and I have very little to show for it!

Okay, I got a bit distracted on Saturday…I did have a ton of fun with friends who joined me here for a brunch at the farm on Saturday, to celebrate our friend, Kathy Bussmann’s, birthday. What a great time, if I don’t say so myself! There were only six of us but everyone brought something wonderful to eat and we had a grand time catching up on news and reviewing silly stories of the past episodes of our gatherings. We laughed until we cried and it was great therapy!

So that was my Saturday adventure. After the party, I went directly back to kitchen and farm duties. Knowing that Dave was arriving home mid morning on Sunday, I tried to make up for the harvesting that I was supposed to have been doing in his absence. I was thrilled to be using a special basket or ‘trug’ that my friend Linda Peace brought as a hostess gift to the party yesterday. Very clever, it is washable! Here it is as it was sweetly presented.

Here it is with the morning harvest. Thank you, Linda! 

In the meantime, I roasted 6 more eggplants with countless cherry tomatoes, onions and peppers and froze two more batches for the winter.

I also made another batch of Sriracha sauce. This time I took some of the pepper seeds out of the mix to make it a bit less hot. I got 4 half pints this time around and have another pound of red peppers in the fridge waiting for the next batch. The tedious part of the recipe is peeling 1.25 cups of fresh garlic cloves. After the jars were cooled and I was done for the day, I realized I made a horrible mistake when preparing the peppers.

Many recipes recommend using rubber gloves when handling hot peppers. I have been careful in the past but never had a problem until yesterday when I realized that the palms of my hands were on fire. Ugh! I had scrubbed these red peppers aggressively with my bare hands where as in the past I had just rinsed them under water. Or maybe it was handling the seeds? I didn’t have any reaction at the time I was cutting, and I do know not to put my hands to my face while working. My hands were in and out of the water all afternoon with cleaning up my mess so it wasn’t until dinner time that the impact was starting to be felt. I don’t think there is anything I can do now but wait for the pain to subside. It meant I had a sleepless night of burning palms but they are getting a bit better now. How stupid was that?

Big news…we picked the first of the water melons yesterday.

It tipped the scale at 13 pounds of beauty!

We popped it into the fridge in order to get it good and cold before cutting!

Here was today’s harvest which included the first cantaloupe as well as a lovely green bean harvest!

In other Farm news, we were at nearly 900 lbs of produce after yesterday’s harvest and I’m sure that will multiply quickly as soon as the melons come in. I was very pleased to have shared some eggplants with multiple willing friends this week: both Jill Stoll and Nancy Hinkson were willing takers! I hope they had success in their use for these items!

Mondays can really be a challenge in my industry. It seems that all of last weeks construction issues start out with a renewed urgency on Mondays and this Monday was no exception. I raced out of the house and ran down to a city plumbing supplier to pick up an order but found myself in quite the snarl of highway traffic. I think many area schools are starting up now and I felt the impact on the roads. Ah, those were the days. For me, when my children were young, the seasons of the year were determined by the school and sports schedules. As I drove around today, it made me realize that I’m totally outside of that schedule. In some ways, it is like missing out on Christmas Eve or something! Sigh.

After dashing around all morning with my phone glued to my ear, I caught a bit of lunch with Dave. We had decided that today was the day to unveil the first of the 2013 pickle batch and so we opened one, special, pre-refrigerated jar of sweets to sample and then added it to our sandwiches. BLAST-O-FLAVOR! The result was wonderful! Yeah! This particular jar was made with my new favorite recipe so it was a good thing it was more than just tasty since I had an investment in this version of sweet pickles already sitting on my pantry shelves! Yowser, this felt good! Since pickles have to sit for 6-8 weeks to mature, how would I have known this was a success until now?

With this success, I jumped back into pickle making this afternoon with renewed zest. I processed 16 more pounds of cukes into delicious pickles and made 20 pints today with the security that these will be incredibly tasty bites all year!

We really love our pickles but will be sharing soon since Dave will take at least a case to our son, Peter, when he travels there this weekend for a visit. Much easier to drive pickles around the country than to fly with them!

So that was not the only fun thing that happened today. My greatest gobsmacked moment came when Dave brought in the mail and told me there was a package from Amazon. I’m often on the ordering end of things but I wondered what this pkg could be since I didn’t think I was waiting for any deliveries. Low and behold, it was a fabulous cook book, sent from a Seven Oaks Farm admirer. OMG!

I am in love! This book is fabulous and I will recommend it to anyone who loves to cook with fresh grains and vegetables! Of course Eggplants are featured on the cover, so that just melted my heart! The photography is outstanding and the descriptions and recipes are amazing.  I think I will sleep with it under my  pillow. Many, many thanks to our dear fan of Seven Oaks!

Off I go off to figure out what to make for dinner using twenty different veggies, staring me in the face, calling out ‘Pick Me, Pick Me’ as if they are orphans, looking to be adopted! No matter, I started the oven a while ago and something will get roasted tonight!

Also, thanks to fans of the blog for all the kudos. We are really just amateurs, doing what we can. No pun!

Last night I had nightmares. This is why.

Help! Yesterday Dave harvested another 13 large eggplants that weighed 11.5 pounds in total to add to what was already in the prep kitchen refrigerators. My nightmare was not due to the fact that we had all these glorious, shining, purple orbs, but that I needed to get more creative about ways to preserve them since we use them as our ‘meat’ in our winter dishes. My research says that canning eggplant is not an option. Check it out, no grocery store has jars of eggplant available, do they? They also don’t really offer it frozen, but I think I will roast some today and freeze them. If anyone is interested in some, please drop by to collect some since I’m way too busy with preserving to deliver! But I’m jumping ahead of the order of things that happened today.

First, there was a great article about the tomato industry in the NYTimes today written by Mark Bittman, one of their regular food columnist as well as a popular author on food/s. I read it aloud to Dave and would encourage you to read it if you have access to it. He wrote about the California tomato canning industry verses the ‘fresh’ tomato industry which is almost entirely based in Florida and was the subject of the book we read last year called ‘Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit’ by Barry Estabrook.

Bittman actually decided to visit a tomato processing plant as well as the farming production that provided the tomatoes to that plant, not far from Sacramento, CA. We, of course, found this fascinating on many levels since not everyone can do what we are doing on a grow your own supply basis, but we all deserve to eat better while keeping the environment cleaner, and also pay the farmers and the hourly waged workers who process these crops from the fields to us, fairly. Check it out. I would copy the contents here but I’m not sure that is kosher. If anyone wants to read this story and cannot get it, e-mail me and I’ll send it to you, which is kosher. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/not-all-industrial-food-is-evil/?ref=markbittman&_r=0

The first chore we did today was to look at the tall, dead, pine tree that had finally fallen and landed in our side yard.

What you can’t see from this photo is that the tree was twice as tall as what you see exposed on this side of the brush. Dave will enjoy getting the chain saw out and cutting this up. Perhaps we can stack it for firewood since it is so dead ripe that it would probably burn well.

Next, we headed out to the blueberry and strawberry patches to work on maintenance. Both areas needed some weeding and watering. I would have photographed the before and after of the row of berries I was weeding but it would be too embarrassing to post, at least the before part! There is just never enough time in the day to keep this place weed free! So, we are kind of over that and just accept that we can do only as much as we can. Three hours later we both had piles and piles of pulled weeds to show for our efforts.

My observation for the day was that I saw lots and lots of crickets and grasshoppers in my area. Perhaps they were relatively safe in the tall weeds? But it got me thinking…what do crickets do? what do they eat? are they valuable to us as farmers? A quick on-line bit of reading tells me they are omnivorous scavengers who feed on organic materials, including decaying plant material, fungi, and some seedling plants. Apparently they mate in late summer, early fall, so perhaps this has some relevance to their presence today. I was just wondering since they were certainly harmless to me as I weeded along and did not seem to be harming our plants.

I ventured over to the melon patch and saw that we have countless (since I did not even attempt to tally them) of the Burpee Ambrosia cantaloupes. 

In addition to that, there are many watermelons of two varieties. The first is the Bush Sugar Babies, which are sometimes referred to as a personal serving . I’m curious as to how they will turn out since they are not something one sees in the stores.

The other one is the Burpee Big Tasty Hybrid which is the typical, oblong watermelon of old.

The pumpkins have also set on with a vengeance which is great to see but they are still relatively small. No pics, but know that that will be coming soon! My mother reminded me today of her mother making pumpkin butter, something akin to apple butter? I will address the pumpkin volume when I see it come in!

After the morning of outdoor chores, my attention changed to food preservation. I decided to attack the eggplants by roasting them with cherry tomatoes and to freeze them for future dinners.

I managed to use 8 large eggplants and countless cherry tomatoes to make 4 batches of roasted veggies for future meals. This is a pic of two of the batches roasting away in the prep kitchen oven.

Finally, I should mention that Dave shared some produce totals with me this afternoon before heading out to harvest today’s bounty. He hands me a document entitled “Farm Report” just about every morning which summarizes where our numbers stand. This, he does, I think because he has a numbers brain but it is helpful for our analysis of the desirable vs. not so much in the veggie harvest. I should figure out a way to add a harvest weight widget to this blog, but don’t have the time to do that right now. But here are the totals from yesterday:

Total weight of 2013 harvest as of 8/17/13 was 764.141 pounds. Yesterday’s harvest was 30.578 pounds. The top 5 producers according to weight, were Cukes (all three varieties), at 221 lbs, Tomatoes (all 4 varieties) at 160 lbs, Strawberries (two varieties) at 159 lbs., Potatoes (two varieties)  at 74 lbs and Eggplant (one variety) at 73 lbs.

For tonight’s repast, I created a combo of eggplant, green pepper, onion and cherry tomatoes along with some spices to roast for a ‘sauce’ I plan to serve over noodles. Here is what it looked like before popping in to roast it.

One key ingredient is freshly ground pepper. Here is my source (Penzey’s)  and my tool for grinding.

Bon Appetite!

Another delightful day on the farm! The weather today made it easier to conduct some chores in the field which would have not been so fun if it had been 95, 100 or 108 degrees as was the case last year.

Today was not unlike our spring and fall mornings when we wake up to refreshing outdoor temps, open the front and back doors on both sides of the house and enjoy the cool cross breeze and the fresh air for several hours in the morning. 

Dave typically makes a big pot of coffee for us to enjoy while reading the papers (he, the STL Post Dispatch and me, the NYTimes) and listening to the news and weather report. We planned our day together over a nice breakfast which I typically try to make extra special on the weekends for Farmer Dave. Don’t think that I’m on the same rations list he is…far from it!

Today’s list presented us with some perennial chores as well as the continued task of ‘Putting Things By’ in the kitchen. The weather prediction is crazy – low temps in the mid 50s, and highs in the low 80s, followed by a spike to nearly 90 degrees expected towards the end of the week! If temps don’t change here soon, we will be living in the high rent district of a resort town!

So, after his lovely breakfast, Dave went out to work on the continuation of the strawberry patch renovation. Do remember that strawberries are nearly like weeds. They are so prolific that you actually have to cut them away every so often to control the growth of the patch. You may remember that in an earlier post I recorded a couple of weeks ago, we aggressively mowed the patch down as the initial step the yearly renovation. The second step occurred today and that was to re-establish order in the patch by tilling the area back into a row-like orderliness. The best part of the work done today, was that our old Mantis brand tiller, which we use for smaller areas such as this, did not hesitate to start up and worked like a champ thru this chore. Here is Dave working the tiller.

Here are the results.

Next we will water and lightly feed/fertilize the patch and then it will be put to bed for the season with high hopes of a wonderful and plentiful harvest next year.

While Dave was working on this project, I weeded the most obvious offenders in the strawberry patch. I can’t seem to keep these nasty offenders off the property! Who ever designed nut grass? Without any herbicides, we can only try to do our best to control it; my number 1 nemesis! 

I then turned my attention to picking the last (or nearly so) of the blueberries. I can’t believe how long these fruits have continued to produce but our schedule for ripening of these 5 varieties of blueberries is from Mid July thru September 1st so I should not be surprised to continue to find fruit on these canes.  Although there was less than a pound to pick today, there is no way I would leave any of these berries for the birds or other critters to consume. While in the patch, I saw several tree frogs, grass hoppers as well as what looks like an untimely death of a feathered creature inside the blueberry netting. The best image was of Farley, who chose to join me in one of the rows where I was picking and indulge in his version of sunbathing.

While these activities were on going, both Dave and I had our phone timers set to scuttle about to change hoses (that were watering trees) as well as stirring (the contents of the stove top indoors). I began the day by processing 16 pounds of tomatoes this morning for another round of ketchup since this is something I can process in a water bath while I wait for my new pressure cooker to arrive. I won’t bore you with the process but I started with these lovely tomatoes and ended up with the miracle of 9 half pints of ketchup.

I also cut up another 4 pounds of gorgeous green peppers which I froze for future use this winter. Easy peasy! Again, faced with an over abundance of Black Beauties, AKA eggplants, I made another double batch of egg plant parm patties and froze them for the future winter use.

As always, I managed to create a huge mess of dirty pots and pans which required several sessions of clean up and dishwasher cycles. This constant mound of dirty pots made me think of my friend, Mike, aka Mule, who brews his own beer in his kitchen. Surely, Mule makes a mess as large as I regularly do? I think we may be on the same page since anyone who makes his own beer/ale, must feel much the same as I do about making my own ketchup!

I am reprising last night’s pizza for our dinner tonight. Yum!

Dave is measuring up tonight’s harvest which indicates that I have a full plate of processing for tomorrow!