Anyone Home?

September 8, 2007

Hi, folks – Yep, I’m home – busy canning tomatoes. Today is tomato sauce day. Tomorrow will be salsa, then marinara sauce. The tomatoes are beautiful this year. Next week is sauerkraut. The cabbages are cheaper now as the harvest is underway. Murphy makes it and I process it when it’s done fermenting. It is wonderful. I had trouble finding canning lids for some reason. The shelves were almost empty of them. I bought the last five boxes at Martins Hardware and I’ll go see if South Lyon Lumber has more today. I froze several gallon size bags of green beans last month. We ate all the peas. I can’t seem to plant enough peas - also asparagus. We ate almost all of it. I froze a little, but I prefer the fresh. The leeks are huge! I need an armed guard to go into the garden with me to pull them. One is enough for a big pot of stew. I found three big pumpkins on the old manure pile. I picked off all the blooms on the plants so they will concentrate on just one pumpkin. I think I may get a pretty big one. Summer squash are coming in every day. I love them fried with a little olive oil and garlic. The zucchini is recovering. It got stepped on by the neighbor’s horses that day when they all got loose. Why is it they are drawn to the garden? There is only one plant left. There is almost never a shortage of zucchini, but this year there is. The peppers crashed, the carrots and beets got taken over during the rainy time by weeds. There may be a few in there, but I doubt it. There are no pears at all. The pear tree was in bloom when we had that late freeze. The buds were all killed off. The apple tree was felled by the same storm. It was over 200 years old and rotten in the center. I knew it would fall one day, but it was still a sad day. I may go pick some raspberries to make sauce for ice cream and smoothies. Later after the frost, I will get some apples and can them. I like to have jars of home canned foods on the shelf. Also, there will be no additives . . .

I smell tomatoes cooking. I better check to be sure the sauce doesn’t scorch . . . OK I’m back. It’s doing fine. Another hour or so and it will be ready to cool so I can press it through the sieve. The seeds make it bitter.

We (my son and I) put up hay last week. My barn is stuffed and he sold what little there was extra to the neighbors. People were driving up the driveway looking for hay. We could have sold several hundred more bales if there had been any to sell. The harvest is meager because we had a drought for almost the entire month of July. It wasn’t very tall, but it is beautiful. My horses love it. The front pasture is nearly all grazed over. I need to move the horses onto the winter pasture about 2 months early. That means there will be a shortage of forage for them about November. By then the grass will not be growing. I will have to pull them off of the fields early so that means that we will feed more hay than usual this year. Watch beef prices. There was a drought in the mid-west and the cattle men will be making those same decisions about their cattle - what to keep and what to sell. Fuel prices have pushed the cost of feed up. Everything will have to be trucked in. They will have to decide whether to profit from the higher prices which will not mean more money to them because of higher costs, or to cull their herds down to the best ones. I think there will be a sell-off which could bring prices down for a very brief period before they climb even higher.

I need to stay near the kitchen as my sauce thickens, so – I’ll be back later . . . hmm it seems to me I have rattled on a bit. I have been off work for one week. I think I may have a chat deficiency.

Glee