Ummm...still harvesting

News about our little homestead includes more harvesting.  I've put by 8 quarts of tomatoes from the ones I bought from our friend's CSA overage, 8 quarts of waxed beans and today I've got another large crock pot full of tomatoes and basil cooking down into more sauce which will go into jars tomorrow, or maybe later today depending on how well it cooks down.

For a couple of weeks there we had some wonderfully cool temps with some low humidity.  Not at all like our normal August weather, and I was loving every minute of it.  Now, we're back in the 80's with today's humidity registering 93% on the scale, so in my terms, distasteful.  I know, come January, we'll be wishing for this heat, but I'm so very ready for autumn to grace us that I'm feeling grumpy with the heat.  Oh, who am I trying to kid?  I'm always grumpy in the heat.  There's a reason I don't live in Florida anymore.  Yuk is all I can say to that.  However, once you're out in the garden working up a good sweat, your pores feel cleansed and you get to feeling a bit healthier after you've got rid of some of the salts and poisons existing in your body.  Sweating is definitely good for you, and so I'm trying to embrace that thought...though honestly, it doesn't always work out so well.

For those of you that know me well, know this has been a very difficult gardening season for me.  I did not plant much with the expectation that we would not be here to harvest it.  Then house deal #2 feel through and we were yet again here for another summer. Now, I don't want you to think that "here" is a bad place...it's a lovely place, but it's not our place and so any improvements we make to it, we know is not an investment in our family and our own homestead.  Then, my beloved mother in law passed away very unexpectedly and we were left reeling from that.  Something I know will take a long time to come to terms with for her whole family.  But, it's all left me in a funk. 

Now, we intended for this summer to be one of fun for the boys.  They have had enough hard in the last three years to take us far into their adulthood, never mind bringing them to 9 and 10.  So, we decided, no more house hunting for a while, just fun for them, a bit of traveling for the whole family and an actual family vacation, something we've only had one of in their lifetime. Time to rest, recoup and relax.  And we succeeded.  Such a fun packed summer that I shirked some of my duties here while I brought them here or there.  This house was not as clean as it might have been, the laundry piled up more then it might otherwise have and we ate out a bit more then we are accustomed to.  But fun we did have.  When the boys started school last week, I felt like I needed a couple of days of rest to just recover from our summer!

I have started to put the thought back in to getting a part time job outside of the home.  Honestly, not something I'm relishing. I feel the boys are still too young to leave them home alone for any long period of time and I also know how much work our handmade, cooking from scratch, simplified lifestyle takes.  And much of it falls on me.  I feel that working really inhibits some of that for us and takes away from the life that we are attempting to live.  It's a constant battle within myself.  We certainly could use the additional income to afford the extreme home prices in our hometown, that's clear.  But, it's got me down just thinking about it...really down.  In a way, I feel it's giving up on some part of our dream here and that's something I've had to do too much of recently.  It's disheartening.

But at the end of all these random thoughts comes the fact that we've been able to harvest some food from our modest garden effort.  I've picked many tomatoes, harvested onions, picked lots of waxed beans, heated up my husband's palate with jalapenos and am anxiously awaiting the cooler temps later in the week in order to go on a potato treasure hunt.  Like picking apples, I need to have cooler weather to pick certain crops in order to feel the seasonal connection to them. I know, I'm perhaps weird, but that's okay with me.  We all do what works for us, don't we?

I've been planning out a couple of new hats to knit this winter along with hoping to try to figure out how to make socks...this is something I've been wanting to learn for a while now, and am wanting to use this winter to figure that out.  But, in order to earn that couch time, I need to be sweating and harvesting now, so that's what's mostly been doin' round here.  Fall baseball starts this week for the boys, so soon we'll be devoting every weekend to that for a while.

Wishing you onions and potatoes for your harvest, ~Peacemom