The last couple days the Grandkids have been here while their Mom has been at a Home School convention in another city. It is a welcome event and tends to keep me from becoming to engrossed in the depressing news of the day. The Granddaughter seems to have grown quite bit since the last time they were here. She seems to have matured a little more than I expected. She steals my heart. The Grandson is his goofy self as usual, but he is 3 years younger. All smiles and happy go lucky.
The garden is about done. I only see four tomatoes left on the vines and no blooms. It's too hot to set any more fruit now. Last year the plants were so big and lush I left them in through a second growing in the fall. I don't think that will happen this year. One reason I did it last year was that there were still quite a few tomatoes on the vines. I will probably pull up the plants that don't have the green tomatoes on them in the next couple days. Then the black plastic will come back out and cover the garden soil to kill off the Bermuda grass that has invaded. I tried to keep it pulled up but I lost that battle a month ago. I will try to plant some more onions this fall, they should then be ready to pick in June. That is if I can find some to buy.
Next year we hope to learn how to 'can' tomatoes. We give so many away and then they are gone in such a short time. We would be able to use then the rest of the year for cooking if we learn to can them. I have done a little reading about that and it seems that with certain vegetables/foods you don't need a pressure cooker (which we don't have) to can. Depends on the acidity of the food. That should keep the initial cost down, plus since we know nothing about pressure cookers, we are a bit leery of using one. I have seen pictures of what can go wrong with one of those things if you aren't diligent.
The wife has been working three days a week over at the resort. She has done better than expected. The plan was for her to do that just in July and then back to just Saturdays. But they have since asked her to continue up to Labor Day. September is so slow they usually ask her not to come. So she is worried about $$ for that month. We will be OK. So August will be very busy for her this year and then she has a big convention to provide a craft class for at the old resort that let her go. I think it will be kinda weird for her to go over there again but they have no say in this convention as the convention planners hired her for just that one event. Since she will be so tied up in that we won't really have time for any fun day trips, besides it's too hot anyway in August. It gets even hotter here then.
2 comments:
Good for her! And there's more heat on the horizon...
My mother used a pressure cooker to 'can' (don't know why they call it canning when you put them into a Mason jar, but anyway...) all sorts of vegetables and fruits. As I understand it most pressure cookers have a safety valve that helps prevent mishaps.
In any event, the water bath technique is a relatively simple way to put up tomatoes. Good luck.
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