Work

Picked Nanking cherries at Stehr's around 10:00 am (31st) after going home five of us girls went over to finish weeding garden at Covlins and also to weed the flower beds. We're done with that job now. :-) The kids went riding after lunch I had to stay home and make bread, and I read a book, washed a large amount of dishes and generally was lazy. :-)
Today (1st) I gathered almost all our cabbage, leaving a few small heads for later fresh eating. While doing that Mom and the girls brought in beets, carrots and potatoes to make borscht.... I'm not sure how many quarts we made but it's around 20 maybe more. After we had done the cooking of that, Naomi, Lydia and I drove over to Covlins and Janeen paid us we also had some net time. Though gmail wouldn't work for almost the whole time we were there and only the last 15 or so minutes could we access our e-mails. Oh well. :-) Net connections may be fussy at times but you know you really have nothing to complain about since you're just thankful to be able to use it. :-)
Once back home Mom had started the canning of the borscht and cherry juice so I went ahead on slicing up the cabbage. Only problem was I busted our older electric slicer after only 3 cabbages so we had to finish slicing with our hand held slicer. Jesse thankfully filled in on that as my wrist was already aching from cutting up all the cabbages into quarters. I know I'm a whimp, but I think I ended up cutting some 25 cabbages into quarters.... :-) We have to pound the cabbage (with 2 Tablespoons of sea salt per cabbage) for 10 minutes to get the juices flowing. I think it's another way to torture sore wrists... LOL! So I ended up trading off with Ellie and Mom on the batches. I can't remember how many quarts of Sauerkraut we made, but it will have to do for winter. :-)
So that's what we've been doing around the house. I'm think Dad is still working on the hope chest in the shop. Zeke cut his finger cutting out a sword/long knife so he's not been able to do a lot. The cut will heal quickly so he'll be back in swing soon. :-)
Mom wants to can peaches tomorrow, we were able to pick up two boxes, not much in our family but they will add color a few times. :-) I love canning fruit, peaches, pears, cherries.... and I even like canning apple sauce especially when we have enough apples to make over 300 quarts of sauce. :-) It's only then that the job seems worthwhile. That can be a tiresome job, but if you know that hating it isn't an option then you can at least become thankful for that time of the year. :-) Putting up food for the winter is so rarely done by most people these days, I feel sorry for those who've never canned (or froze) any produce. But that's just me, I like working with my hands sometimes. :-)
Hannah