A Blessing of Bounty

Right now, I am pretty much literally knee deep in food.  Bags and half-bushel baskets of tomatoes, pears, and apples stand in my kitchen, turning it into an obstacle course.  The canner runs just about daily, steadily reducing the number of bags and baskets in the kitchen, and increasing the number of jars on the shelves of the cellar.

Green beans and cucumbers await their turn in bags in the fridge, to help keep them crisp.  There was broccoli in the fridge too, but it went through the blancher and into the freezer on Sunday afternoon.

On the days when I'm not canning, I'm out picking, which leads to another build up of bags and baskets, and another round of canning.  It's a busy, busy time, but what a blessing it is to have all this 'free' food.  The fruit trees have paid for themselves many times over, and the $3 or so spent on a seed packet of canning and slicing tomato that I wanted was paid back in the first few ripe tomatoes that were eaten fresh right from the garden, never even making it to the canner.  The other evening, we had K3 and Toad here, and K3 was having fun using my kitchen scale to weigh tomatoes.  Most of the ones I'd set aside for slicing and eating fresh were coming in at 1/2 pound each! At grocery store prices of nearly $2 per pound, that $3 spent for the seed packet was 'paid back' after the first four tomatoes harvested!  So far, I've put up 28 pints of those tomatoes, and lost count of how many we ate that didn't even make it into jars.  Definitely a good investment.

We've been eating corn on the cob like it's going out of style, which, if you want to get technical, it is.  Corn season is winding down here in mid-Michigan. I'm hoping to get some of mine canned up also, if DH would quit inviting the kids over for dinner and feeding them fresh corn!

A couple of nights with low temperatures in the upper 40s this week have the tomatoes really ripening in droves now.  I picked some of the sauce tomatoes on Wednesday, but didn't have time to fit them into the canning schedule. This afternoon I went out and picked more.  Lots more.  Nearly three times more!  Now I'm wishing I had done a quick batch of sauce on Wednesday evening.  Because it's going to be a late night tonight: all those tomatoes cooked down to about 4 gallons of juice.  4 gallons which needs to simmer down and thicken into sauce.

Federle tomatoes for saucing

big pot of tomato juice

Yep, it's going to be a long night.  But, at the end of it I should have roughly 2 gallons (16 pints) of tomato sauce canned up.  Added to the 4 pints all ready down in the cellar, and that's about a half a year's worth of tomato sauce for DH and I.  While I wait for all that juice to simmer and thicken, I can knit, or read, or maybe catch up on some of the blog posts I've been wanting to write.  ;0)  What a blessing.

the chickens enjoy the tomato scraps