The Weekly Digs #76

During the past two weeks we moved houses! It consumed almost every minute our time and I’m grateful to get back to a more normal schedule. We also still have no Internet so it’s been difficult update on my blog. But here is a summary of how the garden harvesting shook out during that time.

One day before we were going to pick up our moving truck, I went out to the farm garden and we noticed that a huge amount of corn and tomatoes was ready to pick.

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I was alternately really excited and freaking out because there was no time to preserve it if we picked. What we ended up doing was picking about 25 ears of corn and then cooking them for dinner. Everything was packed but my canning pot was still out and we were able to cook them still.

There was still so much to harvest but I was hoping it would hold until after the move. We went out the day after we moved and picked 163 ears of corn!

If you remember birds ate our first corn seeds and it was really hard to get out and plant again in the heat. When it comes to the garden, I don’t give up easily and I wanted the kids to learn the importance of not giving up the first time.  So we planted again. It was a great lesson about perseverance that came to a happy ending!

It made the harvest that much sweeter and more worth it for all of us because we worked so hard for it. We blanched and froze what ended up being 15lbs of corn kernels.

A few days later we were still in the middle of cleaning out the last of the items in our house and doing a deep clean when my tomatoes couldn’t wait any longer and needed to be preserved.

I thought about freezing them and then doing tomato sauce later but I realized that might never happen so I better just do it now. To save time I cut them and threw them in a crock-pot to make tomato sauce the next day.

When I woke up, I planned on running the tomatoes through the food mill to get out the seeds and skins so I could make tomato sauce. I tested a little bit prior to doing that and it was so bitter.

I had to do an online search of why that would happen and it turns out if you cook a sauce with seeds it can make it really bitter. Ugh. So I ran it through the food mill anyway hoping that if I removed the seeds and added the salt and some sugar and spices it might help.  No luck.

So down the sink went about 10 pints of tomato sauce.

We finally finished cleaning out our house, closed and sold it and then that night I had enough tomatoes for a do-over on the tomato sauce. I followed the directions from the canning book instead of using a slow cooker and it was so much better! I canned 9 pints of tomato sauce this week.

We also harvested the first of our muskmelons and a 37 pound watermelon. Today we harvested a bunch more corn (I forgot to count how many). I plan on canning it since Cam said he likes canned corn. I had no idea he liked it until about 2 days ago! I prefer frozen corn but have never tried a home canned version so maybe I’ll like it better.

We planted carrots yesterday and need to plant so many more fall crops.  I am very behind on the fall crops this year and so much else but I suppose that is to be expected with how much we have going on!