Yesterday it rained all day, seldom ceasing. The garden slowly flushed green. The rain tanks filled. The beans began to make fruit again. The cucumber plants perked up and tiny cucumbers appeared in the patch. Thank goodness for the rain.
Attila will not have to spend long hours in the evening watering the garden, at least for now.
It is overcast again today.
The humidity makes it unpleasant, even though the temperature is reasonable for summer.
The pepper plants are doing well this year. Most of the green peppers will be diced, frozen, vacuum sealed, and frozen. Most of the jalapeno, banana, and pepperoncini peppers will be pickled and canned. A few of these peppers were roasted, dehydrated, and powdered. I want to try my hand at a roasted pepper and garlic herb mix. A six quart of peppers yielded about a third of a cup of powder.
Yesterday I canned two litre jars of peach pie filling. We managed to get two more 3 litre containers of peaches, but many of them are green and not quite ripe. After sorting through them I discovered an overripe peach, such a variety. Peaches are messy to process. After bathing them in boiling water for a minute or two, then dousing in cold water, some skins still did not slip off, and I had to resort to using a peeler. This year I put the pits in a mason jar, covered with a little white vinegar, and a few tablespoons of ACV with the mother, then topped up with water. A coffee filter was secured as a lid with the ring. I will stir this mixture daily and keep it in a dark cupboard. I have not made peach vinegar before so this is an experiment. If it fails little will be lost.
We have been enjoying our zucchini and tomatoes every day for the last week or so. I saute onions in olive oil in the cast iron skillet, add diced zucchini and tomato, sprinkle with two teaspoons of a garlic and herb spice (no sodium) and simmer until the zucchini is tender. Into a casserole dish it goes, to be topped with about 100 gm of grated cheese. When other items are ready for dinner, the casserole is heated in the oven to melt the cheese, then served. The only vegetable in the dish that did not come from the garden is the onions. We haven’t tried growing onions, our soil is difficult for root vegetables.
The day stretches before me. There is no pressing project waiting, unusual for this time of year. What shall I do? Soon, as I prepare my morning coffee, and then my breakfast, I will just know what I’d like to do with this precious time.
Ginger is ruling the roost. He has taken over my easy chair, which he vacates immediately when I approach, so that he can sit in my lap and be petted.
I was thinking today of all the beautiful people I’ve loved and lost to time. I don’t live in the past, but I wholeheartedly live with it.
Worldly
Weather
Updated on Tue, Aug 23, 6:25 AM
19 °C
FEELS LIKE 21
Light rain
Wind 4 N km/h
Humidity 99 %
Visibility 13 km
Sunrise 6:20 AM
Wind gust 7 km/h
Pressure 100.9 kPa
Ceiling 900 m
Sunset 8:00 PM
Quote
“A day’s work is a day’s work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day’s sustenance, a night’s repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.”
George Bernard Shaw
1856 – 1950
We had some overnight rains that energized my little flower garden. We’re getting cooler nights now (60’s F). You can feel Autumn coming our way. Your garden fruits and veggies sound amazing!
I’m glad you got some rain. I’m grateful for the rain Yuma’s had lately. The farmers need it so badly. Maybe take a day to just have fun and relax? Anyway, do what you like to do!
Sandy, plants appreciate rain so much more than being watered, so lovely for your little flower garden. I agree, you can feel Autumn coming, here it is only vague hints, a sudden brief coolness in the breeze, a single yellow leaf falling… Thanks re the garden produce, I am grateful every single day that Attila loves to garden, it not only feeds us, it is wonderfully peaceful to sit and watch, walk in, and help with occasionally.
Thanks Joan. Glad you got rain in Yuma! Farmers lead a hard life, depending so heavily on such an unpredictable variable like weather, the most modest and vital contributors to the food chain who take all the risk. I am taking these few days while the garden gets up to speed again to just relax, sit on the porch, enjoy the days. I do a project here or there, like canning the peach pie filling, and that seems like play because there is nothing waiting for processing in the coolers right now.
So glad you got rain. Yesterday it rained on and off here with some good downpours. We needed the rain so badly that it was a welcome sight. There was a not so good result of the rain though. One of my cats was sleeping on my lap during a thunderstorm and he generally isn’t bothered by thunder. Well, we got a sonic boom clap of thunder that made me jump and made my cat fly through the air into the hallway and just sit there stunned. As I got up to go see if he was okay I noticed a five inch gash across my knee. Will not be allowing kitties to sleep on my lap during thunderstorms in the future!!
Eileen, I am so glad you got rain! Oh my, take care of that gash! I will remember your experience, I usually drape a towel over myself when Ginger is on my lap, but forget sometimes, he is furry. Best to remember the towel every time I think. He is declawed in his front claws but has his back claws, important for self protection. I watch those!
Hi, Maggie! I got a bit concerned when you mentioned peach pits. You’re probably aware of it but peach pits contain cyanide compounds…
Had to go into the big city today to return a Chromebook laptop/tablet hybrid I’d bought to upgrade my aging group of tablets. I’ve always done Samsung before and been very happy but this time I wsnted something hardy enough to handle things like creating documents, so I strayed over to Lenovo. I was very disappointed! Not only weren’t the icons and functions intuitive but even the touchscreen didn’t work well. It only responded to my touch about 25% of the time. So back it went!
I figure new lines of machines will be coming out for Christmss around September, so I’ll start looking around again, then.
Teri, you are correct, peach pits should not be consumed. However, encased in the shell, left whole, they should not accumulate toxic amounts of cyanide, if any. Peach vinegar is something I will be using in very small quantities, so I have decided the risk is minimal.
“The seeds of stone fruits — including cherries, plums, peaches, nectarines, and mangoes — naturally contain cyanide compounds, which are poisonous. If you accidentally swallow a fruit pit, it probably won’t cause any harm. However, you should not crush or chew the seeds.”
Source: https://missouripoisoncenter.org/is-this-a-poison/fruit-pits/
Good luck in your quest for a new technology. September is just around the corner, so your wait will not be long. I am old fashioned, still using an old mac laptop, which the warranty expired on years ago, but it does the job. Our cell phone is an old voice only flip phone, for emergency use only.
Hi, Maggie. Unfortunately my tablets are victims of planned obsolescence. Samsung is no longer doing app updates for the two older ones, so they’re slowly failing to respond to newer programming on the internet.
Had that happen with my last 2 printers, too. They program to age out, first refusing to scan documents and eventually they refuse to copy.
Teri, that is unfortunate! I don’t really use the tablet (ipad) we have for much, Attila reads the news on it, it is old, I can’t even remember when we got it. The old computer just keeps on chugging along. I did have a mac laptop once that was a real lemon, only once though, and it was under warranty the whole time so I muddled through with it, and in the end gave it to someone who needed a computer. But other than that my computers have kept on going for more than a decade, and are replaced only because the memory and hard drive storage are no longer adequate to do some of the modern functions on the internet. One of my apple computers, with the operating system on a big floppy disk, went to a collector, I try to give them away as I replace them.
Good luck in your search!