Howdy dear readers! Welcome back to the farm!
Welcome to the new folks! We are glad to have you here, and the sheep want to know if you will give them skitchies?
Speaking of sheep. The planned and executed another mass escape, this time onto the highway in front of my place. They exploited a hole, of which I am sure they created, to get into the neighbors, then out the driveway. They are quite insistent that the grass out there is so much better than any other grass in the area.
Of course, it was 95 degrees outside and despite chasing their naughty butts for over an hour, I was not able to get them back to where they belonged. By now, I was not able to breath either (thanks to copd) and had to go home to find my inhaler. Not to mention that just a week earlier, I fell, broke my tail bone and had to get 7 stitches in my arm.
When I do it, I do it right!
I ended up closing my neighbor’s driveway gate and calling the boy child to come home to help. I also texted my neighbor to let him know why his gate was shut, and he obligingly got his 4-wheeler out and ran them home for me.
Those naughty buggers were confined to quarters for the duration of the week until boy child was able to fix the fence this weekend, again.
Weeks like this I ask myself why I like sheep so dang much. They are not making that an easy answer at the moment.
Back to the topic at hand. Yes, I am in a pickle. Maybe in is not the correct term. Yes, I have a pickle? Pickles have me?
In the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie…..
“I don't want a pickle
I just want to ride on my motorcycle.”
The cuke plants in the garden have started to produce quantities necessitating me to make pickles this week. WOOT!
My Grandma Peg was the person who introduced me to all things canning. I was lucky enough to spend my school summer vacation at their place in Vermont. 2 months of joy for me.
I know the main reason I was sent there for that length of time was to help them get ready for winter. Their house was on a snowmobile trail instead of a road, and winter’s there can be wicked. Getting out was not always an option.
Long days were spent splitting and stacking firewood, their main source of heat. Eight cords of it minimum! I think there was also a 2 cord surplus to that number. There were day long trips over the military commissary to stock up on all the other necessaries that come with being shut in a house for long periods of time. Toilet paper, paper towels, meat for the freezer, pipe tobacco and cigarettes, soap, canned items they could not produce, flour, sugar, and so on. Along with weeding the garden, and thus, canning the produce that came out of it.
Don’t get me wrong, there was fun too. Fishing, archery, target shooting, riding the neighbor’s horse, and attending some events that go on in the summer in the area.
Both my grandparents came from the depression era, and the shortages from WWII. Nothing went to waste around there.
I recall the garden produced peas, beans, beets, cukes, tomatoes, peppers, a bit of corn, there may have been more. I remember the ground there being full of rocks!
So canning was definitely on the schedule of events for a Vermont summer. I loved seeing those jars lined up on the counter, waiting to be brought downstairs and stashed for a later day. It gives an amazing sense of accomplishment.
BTW, my Grandma also taught me to bake, cook, and attempted to teach me to knit! Evenings were spent playing rummy and the day I beat her for the first time was bittersweet! I tried for years to beat her, and then once I did, I felt like I lost something important.
I got one batch of dill burger slices done on Thursday. 7 jars in that batch. Today was sweet pickle relish, and since I had some mid-sized cukes in the garden, I mixed up more dill brine and stuck them in a big jar and put them in the fridge. Boy child loves fridge dills!
I hope that now that I have cleared out the big stuff, I’ll get enough little bitty ones to do a batch of sweet gherkins.
So, all in all it’s been another busy and adventurous week around here.
Blessed Be!