Weekend Canning Totals

Pizza Sauce - 40 pints

Spiced Pears - 11 quarts

Done canning until more tomatoes ripen. The cool summer has them lagging behind.

Canning Away

Suddenly, it has become my major canning season.

Yesterday, my mother-in-law came over and helped me put up 23 quarts of peaches.

Today, hubby and I have turned 1/2 bushel of tomatoes into pizza sauce. As I type, it is simmering and becoming yummy! I will let it simmer a bit longer and then the canning starts! The sauce filled an entire canning kettle, so I will most likely be canning some of it tomorrow. Can't wait to see how many pints of pizza sauce we end up with!

The next batch of ripe tomatoes will be turned into soup. I use this recipe from Stephanie at Stop The Ride!

Hope everyone is enjoying their canning season!

A Good Monday

Today was a good day.

First of all, I received about 50# of peaches for FREE!!! I had helped my SIL with her kids a couple times last week and she paid me back with all these peaches. The plan is to can them later this week. We will keep some for fresh eating of course!

Secondly, my not-quite-2-year-old, informed me she needed to use the potty. This time she actually went!! Yay! Previously, she only wanted to sit on the potty and 99%of the time it was just for play. It only happened once today, but that is good enough for me!

Then, I got all my housework done that I wanted to do today. I usually don't hit everything on my list, so this is quite an accomplishment for me! I got my bathroom clean, 2 loads of laundry washed, hung and put away, all the meals cooked, dishes washed and all the trash gathered. I even had time to primer the door jambs of two of our outside doors.

I also put 12 jars of salsa on the shelves. I canned them over the weekend and checked the seals today. All good seals!

I even had time to blog. :)

Now it's time to bathe the little one and get her to bed. Then its time for me to rest.

Hope tomorrow is another good and industrious day!

A really big garden

Picture of an Amish garden. Their farms are so nice and neat!

Back to work in the garden

Since we have been back home, there has been quite a bit of harvesting going on. I picked 1 gallon of jalapenos and froze them until I start making salsa.


Picked enough greenbeans to can up 11 pints. The greenbeans are grown in raised beds done in the square foot garden method.


Fours ears of sweetcorn have made their way into our bellies.

One lonely Roma tomato has turned red.


Yesterday we dug up about a 10' row of potatoes. This is what we got:


Here is the big-daddy of all the taters we dug up. I sat it up against a quart canning jar to show it's size.


Then we hit up the one tater tire. We were anticipating quite a harvest from this finally this year. Last year the soil was so dry inside the tires, so this year we stuck a pvc pipe down the middle of the stack and watered down inside the pipe. The soil was nice and moist all the way through as we dug it up. Guess what we found...not many taters...again. So dissappointing! If the other 2 stacks that are still green don't do any better, we won't try this method again. Here is what we got out of the one tater tire stack. They are in a 1 gallon bucket.


Last night I got ambitious and started pulling the onions that were ready. I grow them in raised beds done the square foot method. Here they are sitting on the porch curing.


Here's the biggest onion so far:

What I did on my summer vacation

Anyone else remember going back to school and having to write a story called "What I did on my summer vacation"? Mine was always fairly drab. We lived in a very small town (population about 900), and there was nothing exciting about it. My stories usually consisted of me telling about riding my bicycle everyday, reading a ton of books in the summer reading program, going to the fair for one afternoon and maybe going fishing at the lake in the nearby town. I always hated writing about it because it seemed so boring. We never took family vacations like so many others did. But that's ok, I am not scarred for life over it. Looking back, they were really good summer vacations. I read ALOT, I got plenty of exercise and got to fight with my sisters everyday! To top it off, my mom was home with us everyday. Sounds like a really great childhood to me!

Anywho, we took a short trip to Ohio Amish country for our summer vacation this year. We didn't go to gawk and exploit the Amish. Seems alot of people do. It has become SO touristy in some areas. I don't like that. We stayed between Sugarcreek and New Philadelphia at a place called Clara's Country Cottage. It wasn't fancy, it felt like home. It was in the middle of the countryside and very cozy.

While over there, we stopped at Lehman's. Lehman's is a non-electric hardware store. The place is HUGE! It has become quite crowded with people since I was last there about 7 years ago. That was a bit dissappointing. We managed around the crowd and picked up some needed (and wanted) items for our home. Here is a wall oil lamp we put in our living room:

We have this in our living room and do plan on using it. We also stocked up on lamp oil and wicks for this lamp and for our table oil lamps.

I have been wanting a wooden clothes drying rack to hang the smaller laundry items on, mostly for our winter drying. We line dry all of our laundry year round. During the winter, it is hung in the basement. I have already used and really like how much fits on it. This will free up alot clothesline for things.



Lehman's also carries lye for soapmaking. I searched everywhere in my area for it and cannot find it. They sell a 10# jug of it.

Next on my list was bulk food. We found a great place (non-touristy) in Baltic, Ohio. It's called Baltic Mills. Stocked up on various flours, sugars, yeast, oatmeal and spices. We also stopped in Sugarcreek at Swiss Village Bulk Foods. Some things were more expensive in Sugarcreek, but not by much. An example of the Baltic Mills prices are: hard red and white wheat flours were $0.85/lb, and whole wheat pastry flour was $0.68/lb. Picture of some of my bulk food storage:


On Saturday, we visited The Farm at Walnut Creek. It was a nice place to see exotic and domestic animals. Our daughter really loved it. Here she is feeding a goat:


That was our summer vacation! It was very relaxing since we didn't do a bunch of running around. We were gone 4 days and the above is all we did. Of course we ate some really delicious food! Mrs. Yoder's Kitchen in Mt. Hope is SO good!

Going to Lehmans!

For those of you interested in homesteading and preparedness, you probably know what Lehmans is. For those of you who don't know, Lehmans is a non-electric hardware located in Ohio Amish country.

And we are going there!

This will be our second time there, but it has been years since our first visit. The plan is to get some oil lamp parts, soap making supplies(I can't find lye around here), laundry drying racks and possibly a few other small items. And of course we will look at the woodstove displays!

While in the area we will also be spending some time in the Amish bulk food stores stocking up on winter neccesities. Once again, we don't have any stores around here similar to what they have there.

Then maybe something that will interest our daughter, like some animals.

So we will be gone for a few days to relax and enjoy doing nothing. Then it will be time to come home and start putting up the sweet corn and tomatoes!!