A man and his chainsaw

It isn't uncommon for me to me to come home and find my driveway blocked. Blocked by 30 or cubic yards of wood that was diverted from the landfill and brought to my house instead. Other times, it is blocked by a few very large pieces of tree trunks. Richard makes short work of them with his chainsaw. You might think that the neighbors would complain. But, they don't. They know that a neighbor who knows how to use a chainsaw comes in handy!

So here is Richard hard at work making big logs into little ones. This wood will keep us warm and toasty this winter!

Canning Tomatoes

I thought I would share some pictures of the canning process.

First we wash and then blanch the tomatoes. We put them in very hot water for about 30 seconds.


When they come out of the hot water, we put them in some ice cold water to cool them enough that we can handle them. You can see here that the hot and cold water treatment causes the skins to split.

Here is a close up of the split skin on a Cherokee Purple. At this point, we take the skin off the tomato.


This is a skinned tomato. We put these in jars. As we shove these into the hot jars (they have been a hot water bath of their own to this point) they produce enough liquid to fill in the spaces between the tomatoes.


They can be processes in a boiling water bath or in a pressure cooker. We added some lemon juice per the USDA recommendations to increase the acidity.

When they are done, they look like this:




Of course, we did all this on the woodstove too!

Saving tomatoes

It started to rain so I ran out and picked every tomato that had started to ripen. I brought them into the house for safe keeping. It will take some time to get through these!

Extras? We don't have any extras!

Last week, I was talking to a coworker about my garden. She asked me how many tomato plants I have. I answered truthfully, "about 40". She replied, "Wow! Well, if you have any extras I can take some off your hands!"

Does this look like I might have some extra?

I'm not saying that I am offended or anything but I do find a large chasm existing between folks like me and the general public. I mean, if I am going to plant 40 tomato plants, I must have a reason, right? Why would someone like me, with a family of two plant that many tomatoes unless I have a plan for them? It would be just crazy otherwise! I realize that most folks buy a couple starts and maybe get a tad carried away and plant several and then have extras to share. Not us, we planted 40 so that we could dry and can. Gardening is a more than a hobby, it is a little bit about self-sufficiency a little bit about independence and a little bit about really, really good food. Asking me for a tomato is akin to asking me for $5.

With that being said, I am not completely heartless. I am selfish with our garden goods but I do occasionally have it in my heart to give one or two to a friend. I always ask them not to tell anybody, though.

Happy Slappy

We have a guest staying with us this week. Slappy belongs to a good friend. When my friend, Julie, and her husband decided to take advantage of the last week of summer before school starts at the university, they asked me to watch Slappy. Of course, I said yes! They have watched Tigger for me a couple of times so I was happy to return the favor. This is Slappy.
She is very sweet and quite sensitive. She would like to chase the cat but is willing to lay off when I ask. She is happy and playful and pretty laid back. She and Shine are doing well with other as long (as they ignore each other). Having Slappy here has been fun and I have enjoyed getting to know her.

Drying Tomatoes

These are the tomatoes that are drying. It turns out, that the steam from the dehydrating device on the wood stove wasn't able to adequately vent from the room. So, the tomatoes had a hard time drying. We aborted the attempt and I used the electric dehydrator. I hooked it up to the Kill-a-watt and discovered the process only uses 4.25 Kwh of electricity. So, it costs less than a quarter to make a quart of dehydrated tomatoes. Richard has a great plan for making a ventilation system for the dehydrator. However, we decided that the cost-benefit isn't as big as we thought it would be. So, we will use the electric dehydrator for now.

Sun-dried tomatoes

Well, maybe not sun-dried but it's the next best thing. The smallish tomatoes are starting to ripen in large enough numbers that my pockets are no longer big enough. I finally collected enough that I could feasibly dry a batch. I love drying tomatoes! My friend Helen recommended it to me one year and I am forever grateful! So much so that I give her some every year.

Normally, I would dry them in my food dehydrator. However, a couple years ago, Richard's grandmother gave us the dehydrator that her family used to use when she was growing up. You know, back in the 20's and 30's. It is very, very cool. How to describe it? It is large and square with a flat top and reservoir on the bottom for water. Richard's grandpa had thought it was an oil drip pan for a car. I am not doing it justice so look at the pictures to get a better idea. The brilliance of it revolves around the fact the water boils at 100 degrees celsius. Therefore, water can never be hotter than 100 (unless it is contaminated with certain other chemicals but we won't get into that right now). Anyway, when fruit or veggies and what not is put on the top of the pan, it won't burn like it does if you try and put it on top of the woodstove on a cookie cooling rack (don't ask me how I know).

When we first got it, we brought it home and immediately and wide-eyed put it on the wood stove we use to heat the house. The first lesson we learned is one I should have known. Boiling water takes up more room than still water so it's best not to fill the resevoir to the top. Once we got that straightened out we noticed the condensation on the walls. Hmmm, that much steam inside the house had to go somewhere. So, we sighed and put up our nifty device and I went back to the electric dehydrator.

Fast forward to now and the recent installation of a wood cook stove on the back porch. With the fall bounty I hauled this evening we realized that now was the time to try again. So, the wood cook stove is sitting out on the porch chugging away with the food dehydrator sending up a line of steam. The tomatoes are starting to get dry. The problem now is that I want to go to bed but I hate to halt the process and have the partially dried but still warm and moist tomatoes hang out all day tomorrow until we get home and can tend the stove again.

I'll post an update when the tomatoes are dry and show you how they look!

Labor Day Weekend at Rokki's

I have one cousin that lives near me. That's pretty much it for my family. So it is a really good thing that we adore my cousin! It is equally great that we also adore her family. Rokki and her husband and kids live about 4 hours away on 0ne of the Peninsulas in Washington. It's a beautiful area and their house is on a dead end road surrounded by scenery and peace and quiet (at least compared to where we live!).

The one person that I trust to dog sit for Shine was out of town herself for the weekend so we had to bring Shine with us. Tigger does not like to travel so we had a neighbor come over and watch him for us.

I was nervous about bringing Shine because she has some issues with dogs she does not know. Rokki has two dogs. One older lab, Jack, that is pretty much benign and a young English Shepherd, Indy, that is pretty energetic. I was concerned that Indy would be too forward and I would have to segregate Shine the entire weekend. I thought it would not be very much fun.

After careful introductions and much micro management, the dogs developed an uneasy truce. They could hang out together and would ignore each other as long as things were quiet. From there, the situation progressed to outright tolerance by all three dogs. Eventually, though, Shine and Indy developed a comfortable and downright friendship. They not only hung out together, they played! They wrestled and tussled and kept us entertained for hours! Because Shine was able to work through her issues, she got to hang out at the campfire, relax in front of a movie, repose in the dining room and literally be one of the family the entire weekend! I was very proud of her and very happy that we were all able to enjoy our weekend. On Saturday night, she did not want to stop "doing stuff" but when we went into our room to go to bed, she went straight to her bed, curled into a ball and fell asleep. Come morning, she couldn't wait to get outside to play with Indy some more! She slept very well on the way home and sacked out when we got there.

In addition, we had a good time with family. Richard helped with a project. They wanted some storage space in their garage so Richard and Kevin (Rokki's husband) built a mid floor in the garage.













I made cheese with the girls Catherine, Brittany, and Uda. We ate a lot of good food while we were there. That's what it's all about!


On Saturday night, Kevin fired up the smoker and cooked up an assortment of food. They invited some friends over and we all ate too much food and then sat around the fire and had S'Mores. It was Uda's first time eating S'Mores.


These are the requisite pictures taken on the front step as we were getting ready to leave.