Canned alive

8 pints pasta sauce. Three more trays of sun-dried going into the hopper. My advice to those who would can fresh tomatoes or processed ones.. when squeezing the seeds out of them after parboiling and peeling them, SMELL the tomatoes. If they smell 'off' or not like a tomato is supposed to smell, then throw it to the chickens.. or, uh, put it in the compost bin. They're not going to make your sauces taste as good as they could. We've had a lot of rain and picking tomatoes when they're just turning orangish or reddish is best, as they will ripen just perfectly off the vine and taste just as good, despite the fallacy of the marketing hype that tells us all that only vine-ripened tomatoes are worth eating. Bah!

Planted twelve pepper plants that were in small containers and not doing so well. Mike had prepped a 4 x 4 area and I added finished compost to the top of it and then stuck the plants in that. It's been raining so water will come from the top and let the water take the nutrients from the compost down into the soil where the roots stretch.

Also added compost to the watermelon and the gourd plants just outside the garden. I saw one of the apple gourd plants today that I planted in the specialty gourd area and it had a tiny little apple gourd on it! Woo hoo!!!!

For harvesting gourds, you have to wait until they dry or the stem turns brown before you pick it, otherwise the gourd will pucker and the whole thing will rot. Once the stem is dead, the gourd itself has also begun to dry and won't rot after you remove it from the vine. I could also just leave them in the field and let them dry, but I don't. I use the greenhouse during the late summer just to dry gourds. The greenhouse, at that point, is too hot for anything else.

While I was doing the inside work on the tomatoes today, I thought of this beautiful woman who is about to embark on the journey of her life. She is going to homestead in Virginia. I was thinking back to a time when we were doing all the stuff to prepare ourselves for farm life. We bought a cream separator (and used it, but ironically, not on the farm, yet). We had chickens in a fancy neighborhood until the roosters started to crow and we had to off them. We grew a small (18 foot by 14 foot) garden and learned to can stuff. We learned how to test the soil and how to make compost and compost tea... and a lot more. We were preparing, but nothing can prepare you for farm life, really, unless you were born on a farm. Luckily, this woman will have had some experience as a child on a farm and be better prepared than we were. My bones ache just thinking about what she's up against.

Tired.