Salsa and wiring weekend

You know, sometimes you have a weekend where it feels like it was a week long.  This was one of those because of all that we did with the time.  It started on Friday afternoon when we hung the inverter up in the shed.  We were then invited to an impromptu gathering of friends on another farm near us that was tons of fun.

Inverter hung up in the shed and ready to wire

Then on Saturday we started the day cleaning up the garden a bit.  It has gotten completely overrun by weeds.  When you look at it from a distance, it looks very green, lush and jungle like but up close you see that almost none of it is actual food.  The kids and I spent about 3 hours working on it and managed to weed and mulch 4 beds and mow all the aisles.  It made a tremendous difference in the overall look of the place.

The jungle before we started

The (slightly tamed) jungle when we finished

2 beds that we actually finished

In the afternoon, our friends Doug and Bayliss came over for a while.  Doug helped us mount the breaker box and wire our first 2 circuits which was a huge help since we had never done any wiring before. 

You can see the yellow wires on the right going to 2 new plugs

On Sunday, Jacob and I made a quick run to town for groceries and additional school supplies while Jeremy and Catherine wired the batteries together.  A delicious Mediterranean style lunch followed and then a well deserved family nap time.  Ahhhh, Sunday afternoon…

Of course, this is us that we’re talking about so we didn’t take the rest of the day off or anything.  :D  After we got up and around, Catherine and I picked about 15 quarts of tomatoes, a dozen green peppers, a dozen jalapenos and a bunch of onions and potatoes from the garden.  It’s time to make salsa!  This round of salsa making was quite the adventure.  We started out using the camp stove to peel the tomatoes.  It worked great and we had a little over 2 gallons of tomatoes peeled and ready to puree.  Catherine was my helper putting the tomatoes in the boiling water and then fishing them into the bowl of cooler water while I peeled as fast as I could.

Fresh tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, onions and potatoes from the garden

Catherine and I peeling 9 quarts of tomatoes

Then we started up the generator and tried out our new food processor.  It works like a champ but the container is a little finicky to get on and off the base.  Not a big deal – we’ll figure out the trick.  Anyway, into the food processor went the green peppers, onions and jalapenos along with all the tomatoes.  There was so much that we had to mix it all up in a dish tub!  It was delicious though.

Then came the real adventure - we decided to try canning the salsa over a fire.  This was made slightly more interesting by the fact that it was now getting dark (thank goodness for headlamps!).  We managed to sterilize the jars, cook the salsa and get it all into the canner.  We discovered when we took the jars out and let them cool that we must not have had the canner at boiling for the entire time because 5 of the jars didn’t seal out of 17.  Those we will re-can today.  All told, we made right around 10 quarts of salsa to enjoy over the next year or so.

Firelight through the jars waiting to be filled.  The 2 pots in the background are

the canner and the pot of salsa.

It felt tremendously good to be canning again.  I know that many people think of canning as “slaving over a hot stove” but there is just no greater joy to me than knowing that my family will eat wonderful food from our garden all year.  That and canned food is so beautiful!

Finished salsa this morning before being put away.

So that was our crazy weekend!  I hope yours was as good as ours!