It may be hot still....

But it's fall in the kitchen!  We went apple picking and managed to get enough to put some up for winter.  The orchards around here are in dismal shape, most are rotting on the branch or just look awful, it made for a time consuming hunt to find the good ones!  All we get here due to our climate are Red and Golden Delicious, but I'll take what I can get and live vicariously through those of you who live far enough north to get the coveted Honeycrisps!

We ended up with 2 pecks, or what weighed in at home as right at about 20 lbs.  I would love more, but the condition of the apples along with the heat, humidity and mosquitoes had me quitting early!  Maybe another weekend I'll get more.

I finally relented and bought an apple peeler/corer/slicer.  

I spent the evening making apple pie filling to preserve.  Maybe my family will actually get more than one apple pie out of me this fall if all I have to do now is open a jar and dump it in!

This was only part of it, I had to do two batches or my poor burner would never be able to heat up that big pot!

Now that I have the peeler/slicer, I'm able to get the thin slices I prefer for pies.  I like my pies to have almost no syrup in them so they will pack into a pie nice and tightly with these.  The last time I made a pie I didn't have a slicer and tried to get them thin with a paring knife, ugh... never again!

Apple Pie in a Jar - bring it on, winter!

We were invited to a Labor Day cookout at a friend's house, so I also made an Apple Crisp, my first one ever.

It didn't end up looking like my grandma's, but I guess it turned out okay anyways - 

here is the pan an hour later... hmmm, of course it could have been awful and they were just being nice, they are nice people after all :)

a quick trip to Open House for Loch to meet his new teacher and see his desk -

then yesterday they were off!  Can you hear me shouting for joy?  I'm not being mean, they wanted back in school as much as I wanted them there.  This unbearable heat has made for some cooped up and bored children, and a frustrated mommy.  I love fall, always seems like time for a fresh start.

Marley took no time at all in getting back into her school bus waiting schedule.

I sat around in shock for a bit in the morning, then I figured I better get a plan together quick before they came home, so all I got done was jarring up some Apple Butter than had been going in the crock pot.  With that, all the apples are now dealt with.

Enjoyed a truly local summer dinner.  Although only the bread and onions here are mine, I was able to source the corn, potatoes, butter and pastured pork sausage from a local farm.  I didn't even realize it until we sat down to eat, but it certainly makes me smile to think that everything on my plate came from my own town.

Happy Back to School all you other mamas out there, enjoy!

Things I actually did get accomplished!

Since it's been so miserably hot in the garden this year and I seem to have thrown the towel in months ago, I've had more time to branch out beyond my usual harvest by taking advantage of the local farm stands.  Not the Farmer's "Market", those are usually disappointing to me, but the actual stands on the road in front of a farm.  Usually I go load up on strawberries and blueberries, and then by the time the farms have other offerings I am knee deep in my own garden and don't manage to get by the farm stands to pick up anything more than a few ears of corn for dinner.  This year was sooooooo different!  My tomatoes were all done and canned by mid-July, so I've started becoming a little more creative beyond my usual jars of salsa, tomatoes and jam on the shelves.

One day I took the kids and headed out to pick up some early corn, the last of the blueberry pickings, figs and peaches.

The "early" corn ended up being fantastic, so I went back the next morning and bought a bunch more and put the kids to work.  I ended up with some great jars of canned corn this year, another first (usually I freeze it).

THIS is why I don't bother with corn in my home garden...look at that pollination!

My first time for canning peaches... I know, I know... who doesn't can peaches?  I remember my grandma getting lots of peaches every year, but I never did care much for them and never tried myself.  I have found that I like the taste, but don't like the smell, anyone else have this problem?  Ok, maybe it's just me :)

I decided to get creative with some color by canning blueberries with peaches also -

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.  I am now addicted to stopping by the farm stands and canning just about anything they have going in abundance this year.  It's pretty time consuming, but it's fun and I'm learning so much about the market price of all the things I take for granted since I grow them myself.  Like WOW, the other day I saw tomatoes for 2.99/lb at the stand... considering how many hundreds of lbs I grow of those every year I have a lot of money on my shelves.  Too bad I can't pay the mortgage in tomatoes!  Apocalypse Currency, I say!

All this canning led me to want to clean my kitchen finally.  I'm not talking about the standard cleaning, I mean the stuff that is taller than I am, anyone else have this grime blindness?  Oh yes, the tops of the cabinets, yuck!  Even the top of the range hood :)  I will occasionally wipe down the underside and sides, but I can't see the top so who else will?  Apparently anyone over 5'2, that's who :)  I armed myself with my spray bottle and got to work, tops of fridge, cabinets, and oh, look! - tomato sauce all over the wall tile, wonder what canning year that was?   

Of course I'm about to splatter can apple pie filling this week, but the clean lasted at least a day or two.

The best part of cleaning and reorganizing is being able to look at what you have accomplished!

Other things I have been up to:

a beach in a bowl, just because I felt like it :)

I'm lucky that I have one farm stand 2 miles from the house, and many more only 10 minutes away, more goodies at the farm stand this week:  potatoes, honey, eggs, fresh butter:

all these trips to the farm stand made me want to knit one of those market bags, so I started knitting a little early this year -

I'll be honest, these bags are more form than function LOL, I prefer the empty box I keep in the car, but they are pretty cute :)

I was able to get an evening in kayaking with my "church ladies" :), so much fun - 

I wish we all had the time to do this more often!

Tomorrow is the first day of school, I can't wait!  If the weather breaks soon (we still have heat indexes at 100º) I can be out there doing the big fall cleanup during the day without worrying about the boys burning down the house, and hopefully by October be doing some quilting!

For now, there is school sandwich bread to be made and frozen.  I wonder how long I can keep this up before I give in and buy bread again...(I only lasted about 2 months last year of dedicated sandwich bread making!)

I thought this was pretty cute the other day, the last I had heard that morning was that they hated each other -

I'm all for this "new kind of hatred" :)

I know I'm the last person to be issuing demands and challenges since I've been such a bad blogger lately, but since I put up the kitchen photo and it is that time of year, how 'bout you share a photo of where you do your canning and a photo of what you have stashed away so far?  I'll call this the "Medicine Cabinet" challenge, because you have to admit that for us like minded folks looking at photos of other's canning spaces and under-bed storage pantries is like other peoples' fascination with medicine cabinets!

Want Tattler Lids? Deal Alert!

Then the time is now!  Just a quick announcement I received from a Facebook friend that Tattler is offering a Labor Day special right now 10-30% off and free shipping.  The best deal looks to be the variety pack at $52.95 total includes 3 dozen regular mouth & 3 dozen wide mouth including bands with free shipping.  The going rate on Amazon is $10.50 a dozen so this deal brings it to a more reasonable $8.83 per dozen.  If you notice you save a few bucks getting this variety pack over the individual boxes.  I'm finally taking the plunge - Happy Tattling y'all!

Link to Tattler Deal

 Can on, my friends!

(not my photo, linked from Kelly canning, but it's awesome!)

What I haven't been doing...

Yikes, it's been 20 days since I've blogged.  Thank you to those that emailed me your concern, I'm perfectly fine, just completely mortified at blogging about what has been going on out in the garden!  Our weather has been just awful for a gardener, awful.  We have had rain for about 25 of the past 29 days of this month, and the humidity is unbelievably high whenever it's not pouring.  Nothing dries out, there is algae growing on the deck, even the city has given up making the place look nice for the tourists.  There is no good time to mow with the ground soaked so there are piles of wet grass all over the streets and it's just disgusting.  I hate grass.  The mosquitoes are insane, when I let the dogs back inside after being out for 5 minutes they are at the back door with 20 mosquitoes swarming around their fur, getting a visual yet?  Yuck.

So with that intro, I hope you won't be too shocked by what I'm about to show you - warning, these photos are disturbing!

The one above is overgrown for sure, but not compared to this (cringe)!

Yes, that's my garden.  

Are you still here or did you run screaming for the hills?  LOL, you would never know a "Master" (insert sarcasm) Gardener lives here.

Let's take a look at a previous year:

(this is last year, the same vantage point as above)

to quote Loch this year: "geez mom, what happened?"

Whose garden is that?  I want to live there!  I heard someone say the other day "can't wait until the weather breaks"...what?  I think the weather has been broken all year!

Here's hubby on a rare night off contemplating actually going in there.

There are pathways in there.  You don't see them?  LOL, kind of like the word verifications these days, eh?

And he's in!  He tore out all the tomato plants for me along with whatever else besides peppers there was still in there.  I asked him to leave the peppers since I'm hoping to get one more canning day out of the jalapeños.  Too much rain is definitely worse than not enough here since everything is just rotting and downright gross.

There is an OAK TREE growing in the pepper bed, I kid you not.

My lack of enthusiasm for keeping things neat and tidy this year has apparently extended to potatoes, who needs soil?  LOL

And look at my neighbor fixing what he hasn't been doing!

He's been through 3 lawnmowers in the past week trying to mow this - I'd be mad except that I've seen a few McMansion type neighborhoods that have given up on the wet grass too.  This is pretty insane though, even we were able to keep up with mowing - although we went through about 1000 gallons of DEET.

There has been an upside to all of this neglect however, I have been getting more actual cooking and canning done than in usual years.  In normal years where I actually take care to maintain the garden and have it look "pretty" I end up working outside so much that my harvest sometimes rots on the counter and has to be discarded.  With the awful heat and humidity this year I have been literally dashing out there for 5-10 minutes to collect (or forage, in my case!) what's ready and spending the rest of the day processing and not worrying about what it looks like.  Nobody is going out there to enjoy the steamy scenery anyway!  Make sense?  Well, that's the story I'm telling anyway.

Another major downer - I am supposed to be at the Minnesota State Fair today.

Hmmmph.

I didn't even mention on here that we were planning a vacation home because I had a feeling it would go down like this.  Hubby's leave request was denied at the last minute and instead of eating random stuff on a stick I am blogging about my mess.  The guy has 73 days of leave on the books.  That's essentially not having a day off in 2 years.  We haven't been home to see family since Christmas 2010.  Not for lack of trying, but the squadron says "they need him".  I'm waving the B.S. flag here, give me a break.  Meanwhile, the guys not doing the work are going on leave.  I love the Navy but come on, these guys that deploy constantly deserve to have a vacation at least yearly.  It's "use it or lose it" too, so it's not like someday he can just take 2 months off, but wouldn't that be nice?!  Deployment is coming up quickly for this winter, so his hours are insane now.  He averages 14-16 hour days and also working weekends now and will be in and out doing pre-deployment "workups" (trips to the desert for bombing practice or to the ship for carrier practice) from now until he leaves.  Most Navy spouses agree that this 6 month period before a deployment is the worst since they are not "deployed" so not getting deployment pay either, but are never here.  In and out, in and out - at least once the real deal gets underway, we can get a schedule together for our kids and have a new normal.  Oh well, I've done it more times than I can count so all I can say is "here we go"!

If we want to see Daddy these days we have to go here

or here.

What the hey?  We went to go bring him dinner the other night and I realized these tourists get to see my husband more than we do LOL.

So there's the bad, in all it's soggy, wet, messy honesty.  I mostly want any new gardeners to know that you will have ups and downs, and this year has been an awful one.  Don't be discouraged by any tears brought on by this summer's beating, just chalk it up to another year of experience and hope for a better year next year.  That's what we are all doing, dealing with 2012 P.T.S.D.  :)

Thanks for hanging in there and not abandoning me on your Reader, I have just been kind of depressed and overwhelmed by the awful state of the garden and busy month and prefer to blog as a creative outlet when I'm feeling good - next post will concentrate on what I HAVE been doing, for a lighter fare!

And oh, MN/WI/IA friends - will someone please get over there and eat something on a stick for me asap?!

Catching Up

Time to play catch up!  I have been busy canning and putting things away still, and pretty much neglecting the chores that need to be done around here both in the garden and the house.  I'm hoping that when the weather breaks I will have a burst of energy and get those things done!  The weather here is the other extreme now, it's been soggy wet for almost two weeks and with that brings lots and lots of mosquitoes, so there is just no way to get the summer mess cleared out of the garden until things dry up and cool down.  I can only hope that the heat breaks for all of us soon, there is fall planting that needs to be done!

I finally relented and took the kids out to see a movie (I can't stand movie theaters!).  We even splurged for a little junk food beforehand:

Against my better judgement we went on opening night of a kid movie, but I was surprised to find that there were only 10 people in the theater LOL, probably wasn't a good sign...!

"Diary of a Wimpy Kid - empty!

The next day we followed that up with a trip to some farm stands and out to a local country store we love for their ice cream - I blogged awhile back about how hard it's been for this couple to get their store going and all the red tape the city has been throwing at them - they are still having a rough go (it's in the middle of nowhere), but on this particular Saturday the store was packed and I was happy to see that.

Quite a few people browsing the local handcrafts for sale:

Finn enjoying his ice cream.  The table behind him has about a dozen open jars of locally crafted jams to sample with crackers, great way to make some sales on good stuff!

One day was for the dogs...

Here's a couple of pics of the waiting room at the Army base veterinarian.  LOL this room always makes me laugh because it's so typical of old bases.  Super clean, but old linoleum, window a/c units, cinder block walls, a big room but just a couple chairs lined up close together.  It's the same for the dogs as for their human military owners -

"Open door, step in smartly to the left, sit quietly and wait for your turn.  No talking, no barking. No funny business."  

The dogs even have service records that state "dependent" hahaha.  In all seriousness, this is a great benefit we have.  The Army vets exist purely for the care of all the military working dogs headed to and returning from tours overseas and security dogs here in the states.  They allow a few days a month to see "civilian pets" for their regular vaccines and medications.  It costs us about half the amount of seeing a vet "out in town" so I'll take it, 1950's decor and all!

The next day was my day.

Here I am dropping off all the boys at the pool on base... can you hear the tires screeching as I pulled away?

So what did I do?

The birds left me almost nil in the way of grapes (my fault, I forgot to harvest them!), so I braved mockers dive bombing my head to gather what was left and made some grape jam from the juice I had extracted the night before...

...and then proceeded to do just about nothing for the next two hours!  Haha, I spent two hours playing with my craft supplies and making these dumb little tags for all my jam jars teehee!  Playing with scissors, stamps, yarn, arranging my little jam photo shoot... yes it was divine doing nothing but this all alone in the house!  I definitely needed this little time out to play arts and crafts :)

now the problem is that I want to make them for all my jars but don't have the time!

then it was time to head back to the base and pick up the boys...

"aw, mom - do I have to go?"