The Garden is Life

My husband has a need to plow and toil and plant and pull weeds :) … I love to watch it grow and harvest. Our daughter Ava loves to plant and pick. She is a pea-eater :). Jim and Ava plant rows and rows of peas and Ava picks them one at a time, putting them in her little sand buckets and gives them to her neighbors Pat and Sue and PaPa.

Last year we had the usual vegetables that grow well in our climate here in western PA: green peppers, Hungarian wax banana peppers, jalepenos, peas, zucchini, acorn squash, basil, watermelons, cantelopes, and of course lots and lots of tomatoes. We like to make our own spaghetti sauce, although the year before last we lost 16 quarts of our sauce because we didn’t process the long method. Cutting corners was a huge loss and made us both sick as we dumped each jar of that sauce we worked so hard for.

 

This year we were determined to not make the same mistakes in the processing department. We endured a very dry summer, producing tomatoes that we bought from a man on a back road one day on our way to a picnic, in which he said were heirlooms. The tomatoes were monstrous in size and very complicated and bulbous in their shapes and dense and not juicy. So on my travels to take the children to meet their dad we passed a little farmer’s stand owned by a preacher and his wife who have a bountiful garden. I asked if they had any tomatoes to spare and the lovely older woman grimaced as if to think for a moment until she said she thought she could rummage up "some". I waited all that Saturday for her to call me to come and pick them up and at about 7 p.m. I got a message from a very tired little woman that she picked quite a few and to come get um. 12 bushels of tomatoes were waiting for me on her door step! My husband nearly fainted at the thought of squeezo-ing that many tomatoes. Overly confident in thinking I could give some away I took all of them because I felt so guilty that she had picked and picked all day and could have gone into cardiac arrest, although she is probably in better shape than I am. I was only able to give away 2 bushels so my loving amazing husband and I washed and cored and squeezed 10 blessed bushels of tomatoes in one day. Exhausted, we froze the juice in gallon freezer bags and had to buy a new deep freezer to accommodate the massive gallons of tomato juice. Finally many weeks later we boiled it down into tomato juice to can into spaghetti sauce. 64 quarts and almost a month later and they are all still sealed! Hallelujah!