A Year's Worth of Salsa

The grand total came to 51 quarts of salsa, which, at a quart per week, should be a year’s supply. (I have a few bottles of Costco salsa in the pantry, too.) The tomatoes haven’t slowed down, though, so I am still putting them in the freezer to deal with later. I might do a batch of salsa in pint jars for DD#2. And I may throw some tomatoes in the dehydrator. We’ll see how things prioritize themselves this week. I can’t abandon the garden for sewing just yet.

We cleaned off the Wealthy apple tree yesterday morning. That wasn’t my plan, especially as it was raining, but the husband saw the turkeys in the orchard rolling apples around on the ground and got mad. “They are like ground squirrels with feathers,” he grumbled. (I think they were flying up into the tree and knocking the apples down.) He got the orchard ladder set up for me. I went up on the ladder with the harvesting apron and got the apples near the top of the tree and he picked up the fallen ones and the ones on all the lower branches. We were done within 15 minutes. I put the apples out on a sheet on the living room floor to dry off:

They are lovely apples with very little insect damage. I may make a batch of applesauce or the husband may just add these to his lunchbox for a couple of weeks. The Honeycrisp trees still have apples on them, but they aren’t quite ripe yet. No doubt the turkeys will let us know when they need to come off.

With the wildlife successfully thwarted, I was free to spend the rest of the day sewing and organizing. Part of me wants to keep making stuff for the co-op sale, but the rational half of my brain knows that time is running out. I pulled out everything I’ve made and put it in a pile for tagging, then finished the items I had already cut out. I have no idea what is going to sell well, so there is no point indulging in a mad frenzy of last-minute making. I would rather see how this sale goes and plan my production for this winter accordingly. The sale isn’t limited to sewing and quilting; there will be knitted and crocheted items, too, as well as baked goods.

I also e-mailed the woman in charge of the Ritzville relief sale (Mennonite Central Committee) to see if they were accepting quilts for the sale in October. She said that yes, they were, so my plan right now is to try to get my pile of quilts over there the day before the sale for sorting and pricing. Mine are all machine quilted, not hand quilted, so I told Debbie that I would leave it to her to decide which ones, if any, went into the quilt auction and which ones went to the craft sale. The auction usually features hand-quilted quilts, but those are becoming scarce. I just want the quilts to go some place where they will do some good, because they aren’t helping anyone by being piled up in my spare bedroom (and I could use the space).

[Yes, I could sell my quilts at the co-op sale, but I am committed to helping MCC, too, and one way to do that is to donate quilts to the Ritzville sale.]

The shorter days mean that we have transitioned back to sitting and watching YouTube videos after dinner, and I am itching to get the embroidery supplies out and start working on some projects. I have a couple of prayer shawls to fringe, too. We’ve had a run on them lately and could use a few more at the church.