Well, i loaded up my little SUV to the brim with my new wine making stuff and took off last Friday (Aug 29, 2014) for the farm. It was a rainy kinda weekend - not a lot of rain - about .5 inches all told, but it was on and off making it hard to get out to do much.
More mower issues
When it dried off enough for me to mow, I took out the Huskee riding mower (the one I had just replaced the spindle on last weekend) and proceeded to mow the front lawn. Mission accomplished. That was Friday, between showers, if I recall, I did some food processing Friday night while it rained a bit on and off. When it dried off a bit Saturday morn I took the mower out and started mowing around the paw-paw trees. Didn't get far though before I broke a mower deck belt! That's the second mower deck belt i broke this year on the Huskee! i hope that it was just because the belt took damage when the spindle went to hell.... So mowing was done that day! I decided to do some harvesting and preserving work, Eventually I got up to TSC in Everett and got a replacement belt (and some slime for the front tire that kept leaking air - I couldn't find a leak - but it was consistently going flat pretty fast!). I replaced the belt and filled the tire with the slime during rains. Eventually I got back out and finished the mowing. The tire leak seems to be ok now. We will see how it holds out over the week!
Dehydration Mania!
I got my zucchini sliced up and in the dehydrator the first night (Friday night). They continued to dehydrate nicely the next morning while i went and picked more pumpkins, squash and tomatoes from the garden. I got quite a haul of tomatoes - and I already had a bunch on the porch ripening from last week! In the meantime I noticed that some of the pumpkins needed to be processed due to spoilage issues. So first things first, I decided to make "pumpkin leather" from risky pumpkins first. I followed the recipe, but I substituted splenda for the sweetener. That turned out to be a bad idea. The leather turned into "paper" or hard cardboard! You could seriously cut your mouth trying to eat this stuff! I pulled the pumpkin leather off the "silpat" dehydrator trays and loaded them up with tomato leather mix (recipe on the same page as the pumpkin leather above). While the tomato leather was drying i loaded up the rest of the dehydrator with tomatoes!
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| Dehydrated tomatoes on the right! |
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| tomato leather - it grows on you! |
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| tomatoes - some saved pumpkin seeds there too, on the paper towels |
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| more tomatoes and some dill - i saved about 1 pint of dill seed. |
Onions Cured!
I checked the onions out in the red-barn., they are cured! So I trimmed the stems and put them in my new plastic crates.
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| Yellow seem in great shape. |
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| the red seem ok - but the white may have issues. Mom warned me about that earlier this year. The white ones don't keep well - they will be used first. |
More Tomato Processing
Well, with Katherine busy making cucumber relish this weekend down in the "city" house, I decided I would try using the vitamix to process some of these tomatoes. The plan was to simply clean and then puree the tomatoes in the vitamix, then boil the puree/sauce and can like regular tomato sauce. Well, it worked like a charm! My only concern is the taste and if it gets bitter due to the seeds being ground up. I did 2 loads of 7 quarts and then 4 pints.
Oh, and i made some more Mrs Wages salsa mix salsa - just did 6 pints (canned 5 - ate one!)
Potatoes - finally all picked!
Was hot as hell and barely got it done because of rain - but I did it!
Letting them dry and cure - then I will sort and process the rough ones. Then i need to get moving on that root cellar!
Took back alot of tomatoes, some cabbages and pumpkins. Whew
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