An Abundance of Produce (and Work!)

At this time of year everything ripens and is ready in the gardens, orchards, and fields.  I've been busy the last few weeks with canning, but now I will be working with fruit and corn for a while.   Yesterday I picked most of the apples off of our trees, and also picked a bucket full of apples from a friend's trees.  I also was given some large apples that are good for pies.  I will be making applesauce from many of these apples and then canning up the product.   I will certainly keep plenty for apple pies, and for dehydrating slices for my favorite winter snack.  If I want more apples (highly doubtful!) , I know of two farms where I can get more.   Today we picked plums from a neighbor's tree.  Over the weekend Harold and his brother in law Tom picked all the wild plums from our tree in the pasture.  I will be juicing these up and saving the juice for jelly making.  Plum jelly is so delicious!  This afternoon we also picked all the ears of corn from our garden.  I will be putting this corn in the freezer, cut off the cob.
     In addition to all the canning we still are trying to finish putting on our new metal roof.   I also need to cut grass now that the rain has stopped (it pretty much rained every day for a couple weeks).  The grass is about 6 inches or more high.  Then we need to clear out the garden, bottle up more honey, pick all the pumpkins and winter squash that is ready, and clean up bee equipment from this year's honey processing.  After all the honey and sticky canning season, I will need to really scrub the kitchen floor to remove pieces of wax and bee propolis, and re-wax the floor.  Harold's tractor/loader has a broken starter, so he needs to take the tractor apart to fix that! Then I also need to get the greenhouse ready for winter by taking out all the overgrown plants, tilling up the soil, planting garlic for next year, and covering it with straw.  Another job is gathering all the dry beans in the garden and podding them out and drying the beans in trays. 
      As if this isn't enough to do, in two weeks Harold will be doing the main season sugar beet harvest.  He works by driving a truck in the fields hauling the beets to the piler.   This job takes several weeks in October.  When all the main canning is done, then I work on making jelly in October from juices saved during the summer.  This year I will be working with apple, plum and cherry juices.  When the jelly making is done, then we gather the popcorn ears and shuck them and dry the ears, then put the dry ears through the corn sheller and dry the popcorn until it is ready to package.  A final job will be saving flower seeds from the spent flower heads and putting them in envelopes.   Whew!  Do we know how to make work for ourselves, or what?  But this is the way it is when you grow your own food and live a homesteading lifestyle.   I wouldn't have it any other way!  The whole schedule of seasonal chores keeps life interesting.  No boredom around here!

Now that the honey processing is done and the rain has stopped, we set the extractor outside in the sun for the bees to clean up.  They gather every bit of leftover honey in the extractor and in the frames.  When it is all cleaned up by the bees, we use a pressure washer to clean it, and store the extractor until next year.   The hive boxes of supers are stored in a grainery building with moth balls to discourage wax moths over the winter.  You can see about a thousand bees here working hard to clean up the equipment.

Some of the apples I will be working with to make applesauce.

Here are domestic and wild plums I will be cooking and juicing for making plum jelly.  Plus more apples for making dried apple slices.

Harold sits by the pile of corn harvested from our garden.   We shuck this on the front porch and I cut the corn off the cob and freeze it for winter use.

Here are large piles of parsley harvested from the greenhouse.  I will dry and crumble this to store in jars for winter cooking.   I have already dried and stored the dill, oregano and basil for the year.