Restful Sunday

Yesterday I canned the beets and their greens. I wound up with about 10 quarts of greens and 4 quarts of beets. It doesn't seem like much for a full day's work. (My back was killing me by the time I was finished.) Still, I cooked a jar of greens with the Sunday meal today and even Tom couldn't believe they weren't spinach. Lara even ate hers, and I had to laugh at that because when she was a baby, she was the big spinach eater while Sarah was the squash eater -- maybe she unconsciously remembered how much she liked spinach!

After I did the beets, I thought I would try out my dirt sifter and work on filling up the boxes with dirt. The sifter works great. It was a good idea, but because the weather was warmer, the sand gnats were out in force and I decided I'd rather hack cold ground with a pick-axe than be eaten alive by sand gnats, so the dirt project will have to wait.

Today after lunch while Tom watched the Bears lose to Atlanta, I put about a gallon of cranberries in the dehydrator and canned 5 more quarts of tomato sauce. Most of the tomatoes are now canned. I have one consolidated brown bag of green tomatoes left, and at the end of this week I'll can whatever is turned red and put what's left go into the compost bin. The raspberries I dried taste ok; I don't care for them as much as I do the dried blueberries and cranberries. This week I'll get some more canning jars and make cranberry sauce and can the sauerkraut. I want to get some more apples and put up some slices for pies.

I got my first 2009 catalog yesterday: Fedco Trees. I've gone through it twice already and will graze through it again later today. I'm looking at their cider apple tree collection for one thing and thinking about whether or not to get some more hops or just use rhizomes from the plants I already have to extend my fledgling hop yard. I'm itching to get about 20 lowbush blueberry plants, too. I will put those down by the swamp in a spot I scouted out about two years ago. I love looking through garden catalogs!