Hi all! Lori here, and my feet are killing me. This has been a long week of making pickles.  We have harvested so many zucchinis, cucumbers and peppers this week that I have been canning like crazy. We got 47 pints of bread and butter pickles, 17 and 1/2 pints of zucchini pickles, and 22 pints of pickled peppers. We could have gotten more zucchini pickles but we opted to freeze a lot of it. we have 45 quart bags full and 38 gallon bags full in the freezer. It seemed like as soon as we got to the last zucchini or cucumber, the guys would come in with another basket full. The same with the peppers, they just keep coming. I have no complaints at all, it’s totally worth it. Just seeing what we have done with our garden spots.

I finally got smart and bought a salad spinner for our never ending crops of lettuce that we have gotten. after washing and hand drying 4 bushels over the past couple months, I can do it so much easier with the next few bushels waiting to be harvested.  Here to hoping the spinner rope doesn’t break and I am back to paper towels.

Tomatoes have been abundant, and more are ready to be picked daily. The cabbage is heading up nicely, we have gotten a bushel so far and I think maybe some kraut or chow-chow is in our future.  We managed to find about a half bushel of pinto beans that the turkeys didn’t get, and more and more green beans are ready to be picked. Our watermelons didn’t seem to do well, a couple might make it. Our ever bearing strawberries are producing a handful of berries a day, but we can’t keep them out of some little and not so little bellies, they are the volunteers’ break time snack.

We are looking forward to the 16th when a lady from the WVU extension comes to do a 7 class course on healthy cooking.  We have done a class on freezing with our participants from Southern Highlands, and will be conducting canning and dehydrating classes for the other participants with in the next week or so as their schedule allows. Once they started telling people they were going to take a class on canning, it sparked an interest in several folks in the county. We’re thinking maybe at a future time we could do a community wide class.

May all your jars seal, and steam burns kept to a minimum!