Our last day at Farmer's Market! (Unless they do a winter market and IF we do that. It's always nice when something so busy comes to an end for awhile.) We started out with the little card table, expanded to the two tables in the middle and last night grabbed the bench and wagon to put the squash on.  It was nice to have enough to sell.

 In my high tunnel, my tomatoes are doing great so it was a treat to be able to offer tomatoes.  Many people came for beets and cucumbers though and I only had one bunch of beets and no cucumbers.

 This year I had a good selection of peppers.  I raised Habanero and Cayenne as something a little different.  I discovered the trick to ripening those colored peppers.  Last Thursday, I picked peppers for the market and they hadn't turned all the way red or yellow or orange so they sat in the garage covered while we were gone camping.  When we came home, the peppers had turned all the way the color they were turning.  They were beautiful.  If I let them turn all the way on the plant, they will get a rotten spot somewhere and then I can't sell them anyway.  We still cut that part out and eat them.

 Last week squash really went well but this week I went home with most of it.

"The Bread Lady" hasn't been to market for 2 weeks so I decided to add whole wheat bread to our table.  I made 11 loaves on Wednesday and I only came home with 1 loaf! 

Hayride and Pie Contest...

Rebekah's Triple Berry Pie for the Pie Contest at the Cutler's annual hayride.  This was our 10th year of going!  It's always so much fun. 

 

Jordan's Apple Pie! 

 All the contestants.  Emily's is over here in the very right hand corner; a raspberry custard of some sort.

 

The winning pie was:  Jordan's apple pie.  She was surprised because apple is so plain and ordinary.  Rebekah got 2nd place and most all the pies were gone after the shared meal we had.  They were good.

Happy Birthday...

 Happy Birthday Kevin!  Here we are at nearly 10:30 p.m. having cake and ice cream.  We went out to Paradiso (you eat free on your birthday) to eat and did a bunch of errands and got home and had to have a celebration with the kids.  Chocolate zucchini cake with chocolate chip ice cream.   Mmmm!  Late night means late morning.  Thank God for the flexibility of home schooling.  The kids will still get the sleep they need and get their work done. 

This is the effort of the girls and I.  We got 58 jars of food canned yesterday.  On then end is tomato soup.  I had the tomatoes already made into sauce and just had to add the rest of the ingredients and heat it up and can it.  One of my favorite home canned "ready to eat" meals. Someone gave us about 40 pounds of beans. Our beans are not growing well and I sold the little we've had at market so I buy 10 pounds last week and get 7 quarts out of it.  Wow!  You cannot buy your produce to can for a family of our size.  It was $20 for 7 quarts.  While I was waiting for the canner to get done I made a batch of salsa to cook and Jordan canned it up while we were gone.  This doesn't happen very often so I had to take a picture of it.  I used to can as an event.  I had the kitchen perfect, counters cleaned, floors washed, jars all ready but now I can as a part of the day so I usually only do 1-2 canners at a time and wash jars as we need them.  This time the girls and I picked the ends off the beans and watched a different version of Jane Eyre.  It was not as good as the version we like so well.  We were glad we had watched the other one so our minds could fill in the blanks of what this shorter version missed.  We started snapping about 10:30 p.m. on Sunday night and Jordan said she was going to bed (we were up late to a niece's wedding on Saturday and up early Sunday), but as soon as she watched just 5 minutes she was hooked and said, "Oh, fine, I'll stay up."  She's like me, if you start watching it, no matter what, you have to finish it.

High Tunnel...

 Kevin took the day off Wednesday and spent it outside assembling our high tunnel before the possible freezing temperatures last night.  It was a very long day for Kevin, Isaac and Caleb.  Kevin started at 7:30 a.m. and finished about 11:30 p.m. with 2 fifteen minute breaks. 

 They finally got to putting up the poly on the ends while the sun was still up.

 My dad (Sam) and my brother came over to help get the poly on.  I should have taken a picture of the two vans parked on either end so we could stand on them to pull the poly over the top.  A neighbor also came over to help.

 Finally, in the dark of the night the top is getting secured on with wigglewire.

Emily and Kevin are working by headlights.  It paid off and the plants were all saved although it looks like it only got to 34 degrees.  Today it was about 80 degrees in there.  My tomatoes will love it.  I had a good day at the market again so maybe next week I'll have a ton of tomatoes and do really well again!  It may be the last market day so I sure hope we do our best day then.

Here is Lena doing her "school".  Emily has been teaching her to write her name.  She is a noisy student who talks the whole time, hard to do math with her around.  She hardly stops talking during the day and has said some cute things.  Gideon bumped her ear yesterday and she cried to him to say sorry to her.  Then she came to me and told me she needed garlic in her ear and a kleenex (that's what we use for an ear ache).  The telephone guy was here trying to figure out why we didn't have an internet connection and we were doing school.  She was looking at a book about Martin Luther and saw a picture of Luther praying and folded her hands, said "Dear Lord,  You  (pause)    are (pause)     nice.  Amen."  He looked at her and I wonder what he thought!?!   She sure makes us happy!

 My computer won't put this right but thanks to two friends telling me in the same week that they had eggplant parmesan and liked it because Wow, was it good.  We made it last night and it was so tasty.  Of course the eggplant is dipped in egg, then flour with crouton crumbs (can use bread crumbs), and fried in oil before you use it so it doesn't really resemble eggplant.  We used bought spaghetti sauce.  I could have used home grown tomatoes and made a home made sauce but I was canning raspberry jelly and the stove was busy already.  I got 25 more jars of it!  Pray for a good turn out at the Farmer's Market this week.  We did so good last week, it was exciting to see some fruits from our labors. 

Here is our garden/home made supper last night.  Eggplant parmesan, garlic herb bread, tomatoes and cucumbers.  I had two kids try it and then couldn't eat it because of the idea of the eggplant.  I don't think they gave it a fair shake.

 Straining raspberries for jelly.  We really like raspberry jelly, but I hope it all sells at Farmer's Market tomorrow.  We have enough juice to make twice this much on Friday though because I ran out of pectin and time.  I'll make a good profit because I didn't have to technically pay for the raspberries!  The kids are tiring of picking but only a short time more and they will be gone.

 Here we have a mix of garden produce for a veggie soup I'm canning.  I had 14 1 pound bags of baby carrots leftover from graduation to use up so those aren't from the garden but the beans, potatoes, tomatoes, onions and peppers are.  Thanks to my wonderful kids for all their hard work.  They helped in picking, washing, digging, peeling, blanching, cutting, snapping, stirring, snitching, etc.

Our spelling came today!!!!!  The girls were very excited.  I didn't think Gideon would be happy about it but he seemed to be.  Tomorrow our Grammar and Vocabulary should arrive!