Harvest Time!

We have been busy all month getting our garden all harvested and canning all those yummy tomatoes for later this winter.  Around the middle of October I felt like the nights were getting a bit too chilly and Mom and I went out after work one night and got in all the tomatoes, squash, pumpkins and peppers that were left.  

We picked 6 bags of tomatoes (red and green), a bag of onions (we already had taken one bag out of the garden earlier), a bag of small peppers, 10 sugar pumpkins (for canning), 5 large carving pumpkins, a dozen baby pumpkins (for decorating), 2 large Hubbard squash, 20 small acorn and butternut squash and another 2 or 3 cucumbers.  Congrats to our long raised beds we put in this spring, you produced 3 or 4 times what we got last year!  We have been spending most of our free time trying to can and preserve all those tomatoes.  I have already made one huge stockpot full of pureed tomatoes into sauce and we have put up around 40 pints of stewed tomatoes.  And there are still three bags left!

Mom has also been canning the sugar pumpkins for pies and baking later.  As if we didn't have enough to try and preserve a co-worker mentioned they had concord grapes if anyone wanted to pick them.  So another night after work Mom and I went out and picked a box full.  He also had an apple tree laden with Macintosh's so we picked a box of those too.  I tell you I have probably been eating apples and peanut butter for lunch for about two weeks, but it's still so good every day.  I spent one afternoon de-steming the grapes and picking out any bad ones and ended up with 3 bowls full.  Mom mashed them down and got the juice out of them and we'll be trying our hand at some grape jelly pretty soon here.  We aren't usually the grape jelly kind of people, but everything tastes better homemade, right?  I'm sure I can find some takers on Facebook if we don't want to eat it all....

On the other side of things we finally got a rug for the living room and it's so pretty!!  Unfortunately the cats think so as well and have been sticking their claws all over it.  :(  Whatevs, it still is pretty and now the living room feels homey again.  

For those of you not in Washington, fall is officially here.  I had to scrape frost off my window last week (only once and it was real thin...but still....really?) and we have been firing up the pellet stove most evenings.  Luckily the days are still really wonderful, sunny and warm, but you can tell the summer heat is gone and won't be back for a good 7 or 8 months.  Yea for fall!