Fueled by ample amounts of espresso (more on our coffee drinking habits soon), we decided to spend this Sunday, again, tackling those things that needed putting by. (sheep’s milk soap in the background! shepard neighbors make for good friends! More on beauty products soon too. I have been getting so many orders for my e-booklet lately and I’m so very appreciative of each and every one!) First up were the peaches. Another few trees are coming ripe on the other side of the house, so into the freezer in quarters they went along with others to be made into fruit leather.

Next up was 8 pints of apple sauce. Turns out we were able to round up enough Gravensteins to make a batch! Oh, it’s so delicious!

Green beans were blanched and frozen in portion sized sections. Do you have a FoodSaver? We use it regularly, I’ll talk about it soon. My writing has been quiet on this blog lately, but it isn’t for lack of activity. I do have a lot to share when and if I do get some more time to write! Anyway, the FoodSaver sucks all the air out of the bag and you are able to keep your food fresher for much longer in the freezer, which will be perfect for our storage of green beans.

This is our first successful year at growing cabbages and today I found three more in the garden. Into the crock for sauerkraut they went. We use Sandor Katz’s method in Wild Fermentation along with a packet of Vegetable Starter Culture from Cultures for Health, just to insure that it will ferment correctly. If this batch turns out anything like the last, it will be delicious!

Lastly, we also canned seven jars of pears too. I don’t know. I’m suspicious of canned pears. I have very vivid memories of the rare times my parents let me buy school cafeteria lunches. They always had canned fruit cocktail as ‘dessert’. It was totally disgusting, but I do remember that if we took our red milk straws, we could poke the pears with them. They’d fill up with pear and then we could blow the other end of the straw and shoot pear bits at each other. That’s my best memory of canned pears. All the rest go downhill after that. So, we’ll see about these. If they don’t fair well with us over winter, it’s back into the cider press next year! They are pretty there, floating in the syrup! Having that recording log inside our kitchen cabinet has already proved itself priceless! I’m keeping notes on such things as how many jars a full pot yields, how much sugar was used, and all sorts of other misc. notes I knew I’d forget. Since I wrote it on binder paper, I plan on transferring it into a binder at the end of the season to keep for next year.

Tonight, we’re exhausted and really enjoying our gin and tonics. If I don’t have to quarter and peel another piece of fruit again this summer, it will be a-okay by me! Now to get ready for a certain someone’s ninth birthday tomorrow!!