We spent the week preparing for Thanksgiving at our house. It was low key with some friends of ours that we consider to be family. We hurriedly checked off a few house projects earlier in the week. The kids and I worked together to finish patching and sanding the basement ceiling. They really wanted to help because they know the quicker we can finish up the house, the quicker we can move! Cameron made some good progress on the window casings.
In the garden things have really slowed down. As we approach the winter solstice everything out there stays frozen in time, growing so slowly its imperceptible. Luckily we haven’t gone back down to the 12 degree temperatures so I still have lots of living plants.
I’m waiting on my broccoli, which decided to rebel this year and produce a lot of leaves with no sign of a broccoli head. I grew a variety that should have been ready in 50 days and I’m pretty sure we are approaching 80 or 90 days now. This makes sense though because when the daylight hours are so limited it does make it much slower to get to maturity.
In the garden:
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Harvesting: carrots, lettuce, radishes, and turnips
In the kitchen:
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I canned 18 pints of jellied cranberry sauce in preparation for Thanksgiving.
I didn’t plan on doing so many but my first batch failed when I followed a recipe that used coconut sugar. Coconut sugar has a bit of a flavor and it overwhelmed the whole batch so much that I couldn’t taste the cranberries. The next batch was a mixture of cane sugar, maple syrup, and apple juice for sugars- it was much better! I also left in a cinnamon stick as it cooked and then took it out before spooning the liquid into jars.
