Oh yes, freezing absolutely counts! I've been eating the neighbor's parsley/mint pesto leftover from Easter dinner on roasted potatoes, very yummy.

Elery agrees with you on the beer. He doesn't care for it unless it's hot and he's thirsty, then he says a cold beer is really good. I still prefer ice water, LOL, because I'm a peasant. The proliferation of small artisan breweries has provided a plethora of "flavors" from coffee to blueberry, but that doesn't really sound good to me either. Blueberry beer?

Annie

Yuk. I like beer flavoured beer. Although I do drink a lot of water it doesn't give any energy after a long day's walking.

Well, no beer here, but I did can 5 pints of pickled asparagus. Lots more coming up, and we've eaten one batch, so the season is starting. Next it'll be garlic scapes and strawberries.

Annie

No one else? I just made 8 half pints of strawberry freezer jam, some garlic scape pesto and put 2 gallon sized bags of asparagus in the freezer.

Annie

We were without power with high temps of 94 from 9:15am Sunday until 2:30pm Monday, so I was happy to just make coffee. :) I did harvest my garlic scapes last night though!

Re processing our harvest, this is about half of the basketry willow I’m preparing for a large class tomorrow. I’ve never prep’d so much willow at once so I’ve got it soaking everywhere. lol! wish me luck!

Annie

My garlic never came up this year...not a single plant. I think it froze out from some below zero temps we had last winter. I never mulched it but I've had it survive similar temps without mulch before and do fine. So, no scapes for me. I may order some new bulbs this fall.

I've pulled 95% of my onions and got a decent but not great crop. The red onions never seem to get very big but the white and yellow do great.

I'll start harvesting some leeks pretty soon and freeze them for use in stir fry Chinese and soups.

I stopped harvesting gus in early June but since then the deer have been eating the tops of the spears as they come up so I'm not sure the crowns will survive. Fingers crossed. Never had that happen before.

PM, I hope your class went well, you're a brave woman! Your baskets are beautiful, though, so I think a class would be very popular.

Dang, Jack, I never mulch my garlic and it comes up every year in spite of the below zero nights we get here, I'm sorry you lost all of yours.

Onions haven't started bulbing yet here and the leeks are still too small to use, I won't start pulling onions until at least mid-August and that will be the sweet ones, the reds take even longer than that.

Hopefully your asparagus will survive the deer. Last year the deer nibbled the tops off several crowns of my asparagus after I carelessly left the fence open, but it still came back, so maybe yours will be OK. The deer are getting more brave all the time, I've been leaving the greenhouse door open thinking a deer wouldn't "trap" itself in a 5x12 greenhouse and sure enough, one ate the tops off a bed of carrots a couple of days ago and finished off some romaine. I keep announcing to them that if I have to feed them I'm going to eat them, but they do not seem scared. In fact, I think they are in collusion with the groundhogs who have eaten all the chives and 2 super hot Death Spiral pepper plants!

The horseradish, though, is coming along nicely, nothing seems to want to eat that, LOL.

Meanwhile, I rendered some pork fat and froze two pints of leaf lard.

Annie

Annie - I have to disagree on your comment about nothing eating horseradish....just yesterday I noticed my plants had a bunch of Japanese Beetles munching on them.

My local groundhog seems to have left my property. Haven't seen it for over a month. It might have been run off by my hens that have been out free ranging.

Jack, now I'll watch for the Japanese Beetles, although they mostly seem to want to eat the basil, nothing has ever touched that horseradish. Watch, this will now be the year that it'll all get eaten by something!

I only wish the groundhogs would move out. The only saving grace to having groundhogs is that at least they don't kill the chickens like the raccoons do. My chickens have never had anything to do with the groundhogs, they just kind of ignore them.

So, what did I can today? 6 quarts of beef stock, before the bones and scraps get buried. We'll be processing chickens next week sometime, so I'm trying to figure out what I have in the freezer before it gets buried.

Annie

Still no one? On July 4 we processed 21 broiler chickens and on July 5 we cut them up and packaged them. I left 6 whole for roasting, the rest are cut into parts and packaged. 125 pounds of chicken, into the freezer.

Nothing from the garden yet, though.

Annie

I completely forgot to check my asparagus this year, I think I froze a quart of rhubarb, and my cherry trees bloomed early and never set any fruit at all. We had rain and cold weather for months straight and then recently switched to hot weather with occasional passing storms. This is definitely not setting up to be a great growing season for me. lol!

There’s a little par-3 golf course near here that was once a fruit orchard. I’ve played it 4 days in a row and stopped each day to snack on the black and yellow raspberries that grow at the edge of the fairways. yum! Sadly, the best apple trees were lost last July in a freak tornedo-force storm.

Sorry about the apple trees, PM, but those berries are amazing. We are in a drought here, and although I"ve been watering the raspberries they are still really small.

Still, the garden is starting to produce, so today's project was 11 pints of pickled beets and 8 pints of coleslaw. That's really more a sweet/sour cabbage relish but it's meant to be mixed with mayo and turned into a creamy coleslaw. We like it straight out of the jar as a side dish, though. If I hadn't run out of sugar (and time!), I'd have made another batch of the cabbage, because this is waiting on my front entry porch:

Along with these onions which were not yet mature, but I needed onions for the pickled beets, so I pulled them anyway. They are Walla Walla, and the red beets I used are under them:

And this, which doesn't really taste like cauliflower. That's a good thing, since I'm not a big fan, and this tastes more like cabbage. I haven't decided what to do with it yet, though.

Tomorrow I have to do something with squash, either zucchini bread and patty pan fritters or Sol's zucchini pancakes and......something else, LOL.

Annie

It sounds like you are starting to get very busy Annie.

I bought a bushel of freshly picked sweet corn yesterday morning and then spent several hours shucking, blanching, de-cobbing, and bagging for the freezer. I got 17 - 2.5 cup bags and set aside 8 ears for fresh eating. Might have to do that again next weekend.

Wow, Jack, sounds like you are really busy too. I just keep humming "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. There are green beans for canning, strawberries for jamming, corn up to your ears, It's the most Wonderful Time of the Year". (grin)

I think LindaLou's 10 day sweet pickles are next, if the cucumbers get going. Corn won't be ready here for a couple of weeks, not even the farmer's markets. We had a frost on June 1, now a drought, everything seems to be slower than usual, in spite of the sprinklers.

Annie

I guess no one is canning except me, although I know Floral has that wheelbarrow full of plums and she made jam and compote.

I've managed to can 14 quarts of green beans, a couple of quarts at a time because I can't keep the rabbits from eating the leaves on the green beans. Only the green beans, nothing else.

I've also canned 14 pints of red beets, 10 pints of golden beets, 16 pints of bread and butter pickles. I have 20 pounds of sauerkraut fermenting, a bucket of Linda Lou's 10 day sweet pickles going on day #9 so they'll be canned tomorrow, and I put 3 quarts of refrigerator dills in the fridge and 7 pints of freezer dills in the freezer.

Corn is just ripening, and I think my next project will be canning potatoes or dehydrating some herbs.

Annie

wow, Annie, that all sounds wonderful. We're having a poor growing season here. It was rainy and cold for the entire months of May and June, and then it got really hot and dry for weeks. Now it's swinging back and forth, but with some cold nights so it's starting to feel like autumn is near. I just started picking my first Sun Gold tomatoes! lol!

Yes, I've finished the first barrow load of greengages. Now I've just done 2 kilos of free Damsons which I couldn't resist. To be clear I haven't done any actual canning. We don't can traditional jams here and chutneys don't need it either. And the compôte goes in the freezer. The fruit leather experiment is still liquid. And the prune experiment looks doomed. I just have oozing brown smelly blobs. They refuse to dry.

My BIL has a lot of plums this year too — he sent over a huge bowl full this weekend, so I made a plum shortcake, froze some, made a batch of jam, and BF is thinking of doing a pork dish with the rest.

floral, I've never tried to dry prunes but "oozing brown smelly blobs" don't sound very good at all. I do have a problem dehydrating some items that others don't seem to have a problem with. I have a "good" dehydrator, an Excalibur. Yet I cannot dry tomatoes dry enough to make tomato powder. I've gone up to 48 hours with tomato slices and they just gunk up in the food processor into a gooey mass, and never make powder at all.

PM, my tree gave me exactly zero plums this year, I think it was that frost we had on June 1. Ah well, maybe next year. Plum shortcake sounds really good, though.

I'm still working at canning. Today it was 3 quarts and a pint of green beans and 2 bags of corn cut from the cob and into the freezer. Before that I made 5 pints of Christmas pickles, a very sweet cinnamon spiced pickle, as well as 9 pints of horseradish pickles and 6 quarts of Yukon Gold potatoes. Oh, and another 10 pints of coleslaw, I think I'm about done with pickles and coleslaw and ready to move on to other things!

I think tomorrow I'm going to be canning a double batch of sweet relish and then I'm finished with cucumbers.

Annie

Well, they do resemble prunes. They taste quite tart but not unpleasant. And they've taken ages.

Meanwhile the leather is still sticky. But at least it's not gone mouldy or fermented.

I can empathize Annie, because I got zero cherries this year. My tree bloomed too early, and it got rained on for days, and there were no pollinators out yet. My cherry tree at BF’s bloomed later and set a ton of fruit — but birds or squirrels took every single cherry before they even had a chance to ripen. weird.

Floral, your prunes look interesting!

Floral, those prunes do look interesting, I think I'd like those. I also have an issue with fruit leather, it never seems to dry entirely and if I try to roll it up after drying it just sticks together in a mess. It was suggested to roll it up with waxed paper and all that did was add wax paper to the sticky mess because I could never peel the fruit leather off it. It was a total fail and I haven't tried again, probably I should. I'll be watching your plum adventure closely!

PM, every year it's something different, and this seems to be the year of the pest. Rabbits ate the green beans, groundhogs got the broccoli. Deer ate the lettuce right out of my raised bed, but it was kind of my fault because I left the lid up. A bear planted his butt down right in the middle of the sweet corn and helped himself, but he at least ate entire ears instead of just a bite or two out of every ear in a row like the raccoons did. Tomato worms, potato beetles, coddling moth, squash bugs, sheesh, I've never had so many pests. I'm kind of thinking that all the animals were scrounging for a food source this year since it was so hot and dry everything that wasn't watered just burned up, including my hay field, the pasture, the neighbor's corn. We got several 90 degree days in July and just over an inch of rain, which was about 3 inches short. Now it's August, more 90 degree days and 2 inches of rain, which is about 2 inches short. We're in drought and I think the animals are suffering just like everything else. Then they find the nicely weeded and watered "salad bar and buffet". (sigh)

Even so, I'm still canning. I just packed another 35 pounds of sauerkraut, and canned that first 20 pounds, so 13 quarts and a pint. I'm in the middle of shelled beans, yesterday I canned 12 quarts of kidney beans and 22 quarts of cranberry beans, plus one quart of mixed beans and one pint of kidney beans. 5 quart bags of corn in the freezer, and I think that's the end of the corn.

Annie

Just checking in..... I'm still canning .... some... I just put up 21 jars of dilly beans and will blanch freeze about 10 pounds of beans tomorrow. I did a couple of batches of pickled asparagus in the spring, too. I've got Curtdo fermenting (its a Salvadorian cabbage with carotts, onions, spices). I hope to put up some of Annie's Salsa and some tomato's with the nieces. Maybe some Corn Relish and if I can find some reasonably priced Okra... I may pickle that up, too. Good to see that a few are still using this forum...

The greengage leather has worked! Tart but tasty. No added sugar, just neat plum puree.

Wow, Floral, that sounds delicious, I'm glad it worked!

Canfan, some of us just keep hanging in there...

Yes, I'm canning. 6 quarts of baked beans in molasses/tomato sauce, 5 quarts of cannellini beans with some kielbasa that I wanted to get out of the freezer, 8 pints of catsup, a gallon bag of sliced peppers in mixed colors, 7 quarts of corn frozen and 10 pounds of pork belly cured and smoked, vacuum packed and sliced and in the freezer.

My nephew brought us the pork belly, his employer buys various 4H animals at the annual Fair Auction, wanting to encourage the kids and support 4H. He then has the animals processed and each employee puts their name into a "raffle". It costs nothing for the employees. A package of meat is selected and a name is drawn, that person "wins" the package. When all the names are drawn they get put back into the bowl and it starts again and continues until the packages of meat are all distributed. Philip also won 2 pounds of ground beef and 3 pounds of breakfast sausage but his wife cannot eat pork. He kept the sausage to mix with ground venison as hunting season is coming, but brought the pork belly to us.

What's next? More catsup, the ladies across the street love it and asked for more last year. Also salsa and what will be the last of the bush beans. After that we start on the pole beans, potatoes and sweet potatoes if I get a good harvest. Butternut squash and red and white onions go into storage along with the garlic, which I still need to trim and clean. Sweet onions will go into the dehydrator and I have some mint I want to dry for tea and some pineapple sage and some parsley that I think I'll also try to dehydrate.

Haven't even thought about the horseradish...

Annie

What? No one else is canning? Since the above post I've canned 14 more quarts of beans, white cannellini and some Rattlesnake, both shelled. Also 22 pints of salsa and 16 more pints of catsup, a half gallon jar full of dehydrated onions and a quart jar with dehydrated spearmint leaves. Holy Basil/Tulsi is in the dehydrator now. I have a bushel of pears in the garage ripening and poblanos finally getting ready to roast and freeze.

I have about half of the garlic cleaned and ready for storage, I've been doing it a little at a time as I find the time. Still haven't figured out the horseradish, LOL.

Annie

My niece and I Labored over Labor Day weekend and canned 28 jars of tomato's, 34 pints of salsa, 6 half pints of Mrs wages jalapeno relish. This will be a nice pantry stash for both of us. Today I'm making refrigerator mustard pickles. I may decide to can those up too but it will be 6-8 half pints...

Thats a lot of canning for one weekend canfan!

Annie - you can wait until after a couple light frosts before you have to deal with the horseradish. I usually dig up my HR roots in the second half of November.

The marathon continued with 5 dozen ears of corn, that became 14 jars of Corn Relish, 1 dz ears of frozen corn on the cob, 8 2 cups packages of frozen corn and 3 more gallon bags of off the cob frozen corn. phew..... Once the weather cools down, I'll oven dry the gallon bags of corn for long term pantry storage. My niece also cut up red/greed/some yellow peppers into strips... that she froze and will use for fajitas and stews...I'm grateful she has held on to our family's canning heritage and knows the value of home made vs store bought.

Well, thank goodness something will wait, thanks, Jack!

My marathon included 29 pints of cinnamon pears, 9 quarts of tomato sauce, 12 half pints of limed pickled hot peppers, 6 more quarts of beans including 5 rattlesnake and 1 Christmas Lima. The second batch of sauerkraut is ready to can, probably tomorrow after we load two steers I sold to a neighbor.

Annie

It has been a horrible gardening year here. I am lucky that one of my apple trees is producing apples. I made a batch of applesauce yesterday and it all went smoothly. I have a new stove with one huge burner that turns out to be perfect for doing BWB. :)

Following the greengage glut the apple glut is in full swing here. The freezer's crammed with compote and I tried apple leather.

Normally I'd make apple chutney and jam but I have a shelf full of greengage chutney and jam already.

Floral, that apple leather looks awesome. I suddenly had a vision of the food storage room in my great-grandmother’s house, where she’d always have apple pieces strung on cotton string and then draped to dry. :)

I forgot to mention that I dehydrated zucchini and summer squash, and I made two batches of blackberry jelly. One batch went to some friends yesterday. And I took this pic because I decided it would make a really good car color!

PM, I agree, it would make an awesome car color. Better than my white one, at least. When we bought this car I told Elery I wanted two things: I wanted to be able to pull a small camper and I wanted it to be ANY color except white. Yup, white Honda CRV that won't pull anything. He says it has a great warranty, though, LOL.

Floral, the apple leather looks perfect, I'll bet it's good too.

Here I'm still buried under produce. I canned tomato soup and peach salsa, put 18 quarts of peach slices in the freezer along with two gallon zip lock bags of sweet pepper strips and one of roasted eggplant slices. I've made 16 jars of peach butter and 6 jars of grape jelly, 14 more quarts of tomato sauce, another batch of salsa. I've got a 5 gallon bucket of mixed hot peppers on the porch with another 5 gallon bucket of sweet peppers and half a bucket of poblanos. I've roasted, peeled and frozen 48 poblanos for future chiles rellenos and pickled 13 pints of sliced hot peppers, a mixture of Anaheim, pasilla, Hungarian Black and Sugar Rush Peach. We dug 300 pounds of potatoes on Saturday, a mix of Kennebec, Pontiac, Dakota Dawn and fingerling/creamer, which are now in storage curing with the onions and garlic and 43 Butternut squash.

We are projected to have a frost on Tuesday night and a hard freeze on Wednesday and I'm not even disappointed, I'm ready! All that's left in the garden are two huge Cushaw squash which will come inside tomorrow, one row of leeks and one row of kale, both of which will withstand the cold, and some overgrown beets which will become cow food.

I haven't even started on apples but I think I'll be able to go all winter without going to the grocery store for food, I'll just need cleaning supplies and dairy products for the foreseeable future. Well, not really true, there is Christmas baking coming up so sugar and flour, I guess.

Edited to add that we dug 17 sweet potatoes from 21 purple sweet potato plants, but the 17 plants of white sweet potatoes yielded a milk crate full, so I'm happy with that.

Annie

Everyone else is done?

I'm still plugging along here. The garden still has kale, but we dug the leeks yesterday, they are very aromatically living in the garage until I get time to dehydrate them. Today it was 11 jars of apple butter from a half bushel of MacIntosh apples. They were very pink, nearly to the core, I've never seen them do that before but they were very good. I also put a sheet tray of red habaneros and some Sugar Rush Peach in the freezer, all diced up for later batches of habanero gold. Yesterday I dehydrated a half gallon jar full of very mild hot peppers. I put one of the pasilla in some queso fundido today and it wasn't even slightly spicy, but the flavor is good. 24 sweet peppers are "gutted" and frozen whole for later stuffed peppers and 36 more poblano halves are also frozen for later stuffing. I didn't roast and peel this batch, just cut them in half and put them in the freezer on sheet trays, I'll package them after they are frozen so I can remove just a couple at a time.

Annie

Annie, you must have multiple freezers to fit all of that! That sucks about getting a white car that can’t tow! What good is a warranty then? lol! There are so few choices in car color now. My previous car‘s color was called White Gold, and it was a beautiful softened shade of silver. My current car color is called Pyrite something… like a dark grey silver. Not horrible as colors go. Since my last post… I made a batch of jalapeno-tomatillo salsa. Also learned that all 3 friends loved my blackberry jelly. :) We were supposed to have our first frost last night, so I got everything picked or moved indoors yesterday. The forums here have been inaccessible to me for days. Just blank pages.

PM, I was getting the same thing, just blank pages. Today, like magic, it's back. I guess I'm glad it wasn't just me!

We do have four freezers. Yeah, four. Plus the smaller freezer on the bottom of the fridge. But by the time we process a steer, and we raise 25 chickens every year, Elery usually hunts so we need room for venison, and we buy a pig from a neighbor, well, the usable space seems less. Chickens and the pig fit in one small freezer, the steer in another. The third is for venison and various fruits and vegetables and salmon that my local farmer's market has on Fridays, caught from Lake Michigan. The last one is for things like cookie dough and egg over flow, nuts and flours and our "emergency" frozen pizza and ice cream. Yeah, it fills up.

I think your friends are wise, I like blackberry jelly a lot. I just don't have enough berries to make jelly after Elery snacks and I make his once yearly blackberry cobbler. He loves blackberries.

Car warranties? Well, I have managed to put the transmission out of two Dodge vans at 80,000 miles. Next up, Buick Electra, needed a transmission at 78,000 miles. Oldsmobile Bravada? 92,000 miles. OK, so I'll switch to a manual transmission. Jeep Wrangler needed a transmission at 56,000 miles. We traded in a Buick Enclave with 116,000 miles and guess what? We did it because it was going to need a transmission. I told Elery we were getting the best warranty possible and dumping the car before that warranty expired! It's not just me, Ashley had two replacement transmissions in her Ford Edge before she got rid of that car, Elery's son replaced a transmission on his Honda Element at 60,000 miles and his DIL torched one in a Toyota Sienna at 74,000 miles, so I guess that covers the spectrum, LOL. We do have a 4 wheel drive Silverado that would tow a camper but it's a 2010 and has way over 200,000 miles on it and Elery says I can't touch it. (snicker) He doesn't know that all I really have to do is ride in it and it's a goner!

Annie

OK, today's project was kale. I picked a 5 gallon bucket full, stripped leaves from the stems, washed it numerous times, blanched it and vacuum sealed it. It was a lot of work and a lot of kale, which reduced down to 4 pints when blanched, LOL.

Annie

O m g. It sounds like you all put a lot of miles on your vehicles! My one and only transmission problem was when my transmission cable broke. :)

Having four freezers would explain a lot. lol! Sorry you only got 4 pints of kale after all that work, but the effort is always worth it.

Yesterday I made and froze another batch of that salsa we like. Unfortunately, it can’t be canned.

Yeah, that's the disadvantage of living out in the sticks. Everywhere we want to go is at least a 100 mile drive. Elery drove back and forth from Jackson to White Cloud for 3 years, not daily but weekly. That's 300 miles round trip, plus we both had kids that would take our cars, and we never buy new vehicles, we always buy used because we don't want to take that depreciation that you get when you drive a new car off the lot. The current CRV only had 16,000 miles when we bought it, but it was still used.

That's one of the reasons we have the well stocked pantry and freezers, we don't want to have to drive to town if I run out of something, but somehow we're still regularly running to the feed mill, or picking one of the grandkids up at school or driving to a football game at the aforementioned 300 mile destination.

Annie

Wow, Annie! I’d be certain to stay well stocked too!

We’ve had a few light frosts this week, so everything is out if the gardens. I split, seeded, and froze the poblanos, and I’m starting another batch of jalapeno-tomatillo salsa right now. :)

It's sloe time here. I picked a kilo today ready to start the sloe gin.

Floral, I know sloe gin here is red, I always imaged the sloe berry would be red. Those look kind of like blueberries. I'm surprised.

PM, I do have a small town about 10 miles away, and another one 20 miles away, but they are small. The one closest has a state university but everything centers around the college students. So we have something like 13 marijuana stores and a dozen bars, but no where to buy a pair of black dress pants. We had a JCPenney which closed, a JoAnn Fabric which closed and a Big Lots which closed, there's kind of a theme, I guess. Current population is somewhere around 7700, down 3000 from 2010. My closest town has a Meijer, a Walmart and an Aldi, so I could get groceries, but living on one of the secondary roads, if we get a snowstorm we might not get plowed out for a couple of days. We do have a small hospital and an urgent care, but anything other than routine health issues require that drive to Grand Rapids, 100 miles round trip. Any type of surgery? Go to Grand Rapids. Testing other than routine? Drive to Grand Rapids. Need a cardiologist, a neurologist, an orthpedic surgeon? Drive to Grand Rapids. It all adds up to a lot of miles on a vehicle.

Meanwhile I dehydrated a batch of leeks, there are two half gallon jars sitting on the counter waiting to be added to the shelf.

Annie

Yes, the outside of the Sloes is dark blue/purple with a bloom. But once steeped in gin the result is a beautiful ruby red. I'll post pic when the magic starts to happen.

Regarding long distance shopping. I'd find that difficult.. I'm at the other end of the spectrum. My nearest food store (an excellent greengrocer and grocery) is approx 4 minutes walk away. I can see the doctor's surgery from my upstairs windows. We're lucky not to have to drive at all in our daily life. We can walk almost everywhere. The Sloe picking session was incorporated in a 5 mile circuit which included a haircut, a visit to a wool shop and a tangent out into the countryside. The car is just for trips away.

The sloe gin is underway. Should be ready by Christmas.

Oh, that's pretty!

Oddly, since we were just talking about the long distance drives for everything, I promptly had a little "adventure". I've been struggling with "asthma" this summer. It's the heat. It's the Canadian wildfire smoke. Nope, apparently I had a coronary artery 99% blocked, got an ambulance ride to the above mentioned Heart Center in Grand Rapids, received a stent. I went to the ER on Sunday, heart cath and stent on Monday, home on Tuesday, it was exciting. And poor Elery and my girls had to drive to visit. I told them to stay home, but they never listen to me.

So now I'm home and recovering. I outran my genetics for 70 years, but finally they caught up, I guess. So, cardiac rehab in 3 weeks, after I recover and the usual: reduce salt, reduce caffeine, lose weight, watch your blood pressure, exercise more, yada yada. The doc said this was my "shot across the bow" so I should pay attention. No heart attack, no other blockages, no heart damage, so I'm fortunate.

Madison was especially upset, she's 13. I promised her I would do everything I could to stay healthy, so I guess I'd better take it seriously and get to work.

I'm only guessing that sloe gin isn't on the menu, LOL.

Annie

Sheepishly . chiming in to say, I've dried and stored my thyme and oregano, if that counts ...

Well done, everybody ! I'm very impressed:) I can grow wonderful raspberries and normally make jam but need to rejuvenate the patch ... next year I'll pick gallons of native blueberries that I didn't manage this year - my Alaskan cred is much diminished - sorry to be a damp squib but mainly I wanted to say how awesome it is to read this thread and see your pictures.

I did blanch and freeze giant collard leaves from the farmers market, just piled them up and roll into a log shape in dinner-size bundles....

Sloe gin is completely fat free.😉

Also picking them involved walking several hilly miles. So I'm confident it's acceptable in moderation.🤞

Oooh, Floral, that sounds almost like health food, plus some good cardiovascular exercise! Yeah, I'm going to suggest that to my heart doc, LOL.

Meanwhile, I baked that last cushaw squash and got the last two packages into the freezer for pies.

Annie