Assurances of purpose :)

Two friends in two days have reminded me of their desire to get some more info from the life skills I have learned through out many trials and errors. I have been slack with my posts but will update on our course of events. We planted our garden and have now harvested most of it. We are readying it to replant, as we have time for a second harvest. To ready it we have tilled in the leaves we mulched our plants with, to save water and have added chicken manure compost from our little flock of birds :). We will till this in soon and replant and remulch our seedlings when they first appear. We harvested 4 varieties of heirloom corn, three varieties of bush string beans, zucchini, yellow squash, golden zucchini, butternut, and an acorn squash. We also have had five watermelons and 6 pumpkins finish up, though there are still more on the vines. We also harvested black beans and dried them the rest of the way to store. To dry them we just laid them out on our dehydrator trays and let them sit for several days to a week. We cut up gallons of string beans and cut and froze them for later eating and shelled and froze some of our butter beans as well as dried some. Tomatoes are now coming in and the weeks we had zucchini, butter beans, onions, and carrots we had harvested, we cut up tomatoes and put them all together with the veggies in a soup mix, to which I added oregano, basil and garlic to my tastes and pressure canned them in pint jars for 40 minutes. As local produce has come in I have gone to the farmer's market and bought locally grown peaches which I put up in the freezer for smoothies or swirls (Swirls is frozen fruit run through my champion juicer to make an ice cream consistency). Remember the trick to shopping the farmer's market is knowing the prices and what you are willing to pay. If you are not willing to pay 35 bucks for chilean grapes, check out the $13.00 pineapples available, until california grapes come in and the price goes down, then buy several cases and freeze some for snacking and dry some for raisins. Loss leaders in supermarket ads give you the best idea of what is in season and what is plentiful. It is better to buy quality than cheap, so find out where things are grown, if it is local their costs for transporting are much less. Do not get a bargain unless you can prepare your food right away. I bought 40 lbs of bananas for $5, because they were ripe. I came right home and ran them in the blender and froze them for smoothies and some I placed on dryer sheets for fruit roll ups. If you have too many of something preserve it naturally. First choice for me is freeze or dry. I can last as canning kills the enzymes in food that help and aid in proper digestion of foods. Watermelons are cheap now so I will cut them up and dehydrate them, which gives me a treat that tastes like candy :) for the winter months. I dehydrate all veggies at 105 degrees to keep the enzymes alive. Well we are remodeling our kitchen and I need to go supervise my wonderful workers :) Have a blessed day!