August (Preserving Update)

This will be a short post. I'm just coming up for air between preserving sessions. The pictures above are from the web, because im working on an ipad on the kitchen table and I cant seem to figure out howto post pictures that I have just taken. But it doesn't matter: the first photo is a fair representation of what my kitchen table looks like. 

I've been trading milk and cheese to my neighbor (he of the hotel-sized house) for produce from his really excellent garden. Unofrtunately he, like so many of us, overplanted zucchini and so there is a bag of fifteen healthy sized squash on front of me. I don't think I will plant zucchini at all henceforth. I think, when it comes to zucchini, I can trust the Lord to provide. 

Hotel-sized House neighbor (herinafter HSH) also gives me big bunches of cilantro and slicing cucumbers. From my own garden - which does occasionally cough up something edible - I have green beans, cherry tomatoes, and late-crop golden raspberries. Rowan brought home a gallon-sized ziploc of more green beans and shelling peas. The trade network provided a shopping bag full of transparent apples. And on the way home from my roadtrip on saturday I stopped at a roadside stand and bought a crate of peaches and a few pounds of pickling cucumbers. 

This is without even mentioning the neverending flood of milk, you understand. The milk is a whole 'nother situation. 

Here's what I have accomplished since Saturday: 

- canned five quarts of applesauce, some with blackberries and some without.

- peeled, sliced, and froze six quarts of peaches (we still have a couple dozen peaches to eat out of hand). 

- made cheese twice.

- started a three gallon crock of pickles to ferment on the counter

- canned five pints of spicy dilly beans. 

Left on the agenda for today is to bake and freeze enough zucchini bread to make a dent in the pile of zucchini on the table. I went to the store and bought extra tinfoil and walnuts. The kids are so sick of zucchini bread they won't even eat it anymore no matter how sweet I make it. 

The weather has been unrelentingly hot and dry. We have been finding relief at the lake three times a week or so but even with the generous and repeated application of sunscreen, I am too sunburned to go again for a few days. The pasture grass is all golden brown and seedheaded. The pears are swelling on the antique tree but the little baby trees in the orchard are drying out. The hose doesn't reach that far and I keep meaning to do a bucket brigade with the kids but then I get tired and sweaty and forget about it. We should water after sunset, at about 8:30. 

Summer is crawling to an end. School looms. August is a time when I feel nostaligic for August, even as I wipe the sweat off my brow and fish canning rings out of hot water and turn on all the fans and gripe. I am all too aware of how much I will miss August in just a few short months. I'm doing my best to enjoy it while I can. 

Ha-ha. "While I can."