August 2011

August was the month everything came in. And I mean everything. Take a look at this wheel barrow full of veggies and remember -- this is ONE morning's picking.

Our days were a haze of food processing, mostly tomatoes. We put up 50 quarts of tomatoes in the freezer, probably 20 quarts of tomato juice, uncounted packages of broccoli, sweet corn, beans, peppers, zucchini -- I can't remember it all. My sister kept joking that all her clothes were splotched with tomato seeds and we forgot to wear aprons. The daylilies had come and gone. My sister Susan and husband David went out and spent an hour picking all of the browned stems and making the place look better.

We still had so many zucchini and cucumbers that we couldn't eat them fast enough. I googled every zucchini recipe on the net and we made them all. Chocolate zucchini cake, zucchini manicotti, zucchini with parmesan pasta shells -- we ate them all. But for the rest, they went down the road to the baby Holsteins.

"Hey guys!" they shouted when we drove up with the truck. "They're back!" They came running to munch on corn stalks, cucumbers, zucchini, and they loved kale. This last was a blessing because we had so much kale. My sister wanted to grow it. At first it was tiny and we thought, well, this will be fine. Soon it was hip-high and truth be told, I didn't like it that much. It was coarser and chewier than swiss chard (which I loved) and so it grew and grew. But the cows loved it. Especially the one we named Snowflake. Look at those eyelashes.

We finished up August in a whirlwind of more tomatoes. They were coming in at a rate of one wheelbarrow load per day. More than we could eat or process. At the end, my sister read about a way to make tomato paste. We put them through our processor that skins, cores, peels, and seeds them. (This little machine clamps on to the countertop and you wind the handle like an old-fashioned meat grinder. This little puppy saved our lives). Anyway, you wind up with quarts of luscious, pinkish-red seedless, skinless tomato juice. It's relatively thick because all the pulp is still in there. Then you pour the juice into a clean pillowcase and hang the pillowcase over the sink. After about 12-15 hours, hey presto, there is tomato paste at the bottom of the pillowcase. I was a huge skeptic. Didn't think it would work. But work it did and not only did we have tomato paste, but it got rid of huge loads of tomatoes. We took the paste, plopped it onto cookie sheets, and put them in the freezer. Later we took out the little paste plops and put them in a plastic bag. Worked like gang busters.
So August was over. We were tan, we ate everything in sight and stayed the same size, and many of us had sore muscles. My sister's shoulder went out after she weeded the strawberry bed, my husband's back was bothering him from standing over a sink washing tomatoes, and I cut my hand pretty badly on the blade in the food processor and had to have three stitches. But boy oh boy, did we have food in the freezer.