Monday, August 15, 2011

Monday, August 15th, 2011

      Today we did not turn on the irrigation when we arrived. Usually, the first person to arrive feeds the cat, opens the doors and turns on the irrigation. The four- plus inches of rain we got yesterday gave the garden a deep soaking and the entire garden had a robust and healthy feeling this morning. Our visitor today was Pio who is already working on the 20 hours of community service needed as a ninth grader this year. We enjoyed working with him and I think he had a good time too. ("This was more fun than I thought it would be!" -Pio)
     We started by harvesting lots of tomatoes, hot peppers, cucmbers, raspberries and a few summer squash, which are starting to really slow down, thank goodness. The tomatoes and apples are taking so much of our time that we don't have time to chop and blanch the squash. We worked on slicing apples for another batch of applesauce and also slicing tomatoes and cooking them down for tomato sauce. The cucumbers were added to the "bucket pickles" that we started last week and the raspberries were frozen for jam-making in the future. The hot peppers went into the refrigerator and will either be dried for hot pepper flakes or will be incorporated into our extraordinary hot 'n sweet pepper relish. But for Wednesday, it will be corn, corn, corn. We will be receiving 500 ears of sweet corn which we will peel, blanch, cut, bag and freeze. If you'd like to join us for this community-wide event, please do! We will start at 8am this Wednesday in front of the gym. See you there!                   -Celia

PS - We'd love it if you would consider being a follower for this blog or posting a comment! Thanks!


Willie cores tomatoes to be cooked down for sauce

Beautiful tomatoes!

Mitchell, Pio, Carly and Julia slice up apples to be made into applesauce

Pio helps with the slicin' and dicin'

Red hot peppers


Colin and Tamara harvest raspberries


The garden cat loves Tamara






2 comments:

  1. Great pictures. The vegtables jump right out at you, especially the red hot peppers.

    -Shem

    ReplyDelete
  2. Celia, it was great seeing you yesterday...love the blog... but b/c i am technologically challenged, i can't figure out how to "become" a follower!!!!

    julie

    ReplyDelete