My house smells like corn and pickles

Today was a long busy day. Went out this morning and spent a bunch of time in the garden gathering veggies and checking the ears of corn and picking the ones that were ready to go. Some of the corn I picked out was ready to go before the stuff Scott picked, but I think his is prettier, bigger, and more uniform. All told I ended up with 52 ears that were ready. I filled a whole garbage sack full of corn husk and silk. The pigs, chickens and horses were so happy to see it. Piggies got the majority of it. All morning and most of the afternoon I spent blanching it five ears at a time, cooling it, and either vacuum sealing three ears at a time, or cutting the kernels off the cob and bagging it to seal after it was frozen. I'm officially out of room in my freezer. Breakfast for Scott and dinner for me was sauteed corn mixed into scrambled eggs with cheese. YummiE with a capitol E.

I decided to try my hand at pickles today. I had all the ingredients to make my brine juice, but I'd also bought one of those already packaged kits for pickles. I ended up using both and still had four pint jars left over sitting on salted water in my fridge. This is really the first time I'm caning more than the three jars of apricot jelly I made last year. I did the pints in my regular sized stock pot. I really didn't have the recommended 2 inches of water over the top of the jars without everything boiling over, but do you have any idea how long it takes for the gigantic pot I have the quarts in to heat up to a boil? The pints are done and the big pot Still is heating up. Oh, it's making all the noises that you'd think says I'm boiling, but alas, it's still not yet. And oh man, what a mess I made. Water on the floor from moving the corn from the pot to the sink. Cats trying to trip me as the clamor for attention. Dogs under foot cleaning up the corn kernels that seemed to leap off the cutting board and go everywhere but into the bags.

I've been running the dehydrator almost non-stop for days. Put in another tray and a bit of cherry tomatoes. Already have a whole quart jar and a start on another one of yellow squash.

I've been doing laundry and laundry and more laundry. I wanted to get all the towels, sheets and blankets on all the beds washed and changed before I go in for surgery.  I couldn't find any towels except for the ones in my dirty laundry and I know I had a Lot more. I was also just knew there was a second set of blue sheets for Teh Spawn's bed and another one for The Boy's. After a little searching I found all of it... In the Boy's closet! Fifteen towels, and three sets of sheet, top and bottom. I've been doing laundry for three days trying to not overload my septic and still keep up on Scott and my clothes. I finished the last of the towels and sheet and a blanket today. I still have three more comforters to go. 

A Week late

I was supposed to write this last week, but I forgot. Sunday last week Apache got his feet trimmed. Patches got hers done Monday. All the horses got wormed Sunday last week.

Took the boys out for a ride last night. It was great. Ben didn't fight and act like a butt head. Apache didn't take a lame step. One good thing with all the smoke in the air from the more than 40 fires burning in Idaho right now, is it doesn't let the sun bake down over everything, and last night was not too hot. 78 when we headed out, and 68 when we got home.

My bosses at work made my day this week. Earlier in the year they gave me a pressure canner in exchange for grooming their dogs a few times for free. This week they brought me all their old jars. There were even a few new boxes of lids and rings. Score!

The garden is in full swing. I'm getting so many veggies every day I almost don't know what to do with it all. The first ear of corn was ready and I ate the whole thing raw.

The dairy down the road has been kind enough to let me come over and get their waste milk after they are done feeding calves. The pigs love it and so do the chickens. I leave the bucket sit all day and into the next in the garage, and wait for the milk to get chunky. I have a little pan for the chickens outside the pig pen, and they wait for the pigs to scatter their feed close enough for them to reach through the panels and eat. 

And some random pics that were laying around in my inbox from my phone from this year.

My first eggs from my chickens

 The waterer that Scotty made for the piggies. 

 Back when they were smaller

Hollywood movies with corn fields are full of baloney

I've watched movies with some damsel in distress trying to get away from the axe wielding manic, by running through a corn field. What a load of horse turds! Have you ever even Been in a corn field? Bah. We have a little patch of corn growing in the back of the garden. That stuff shot up like crazy in the last two weeks. Along the edges is still shorter than I am, but in the middle that stuff is taller than the hubby, and he's just over 6ft tall. Well Idaho weather being what it is, two evenings ago, just before sunset, this monster down draft of wind smacked into our house. One minuet Teh Spawn and I are sitting on the couch chatting with friends on Facebook, and the next we hear the wind pick up and start wooshing through the trees. The wall of dust hit, and I could see out the living room window, all my poor corn plants that I have been so proud of start to blow over in the wind. Idaho, being what it is, fifteen minutes later the wind died down and was gone.

I went out to look over the damage. Right in the center was the worst. Some of the corn was bent over, almost onto the ground, just it's neighbor stalks keeping it upright a little. Row after row pushed over. Hoping I could stand it back up I got to work. Out there in the dying light, mosquitoes making me into a sundown snack, I lifted corn stalks back up, and tried to tamp around the base with my flip flop to make them stand again. I made the mistake twice of trying to go back up between a row I'd just stood up instead of walking around the outside back to the front of the rows. That stuff is sharp along the edges of the leave. The leaves want to whip across you eyes, cheek, shoulders.  I was just walking and though, oh I don't want to do that again. My rows are more or less a wide enough for me to walk through. I wanted to be able to get in there and weed. The corn is planted more or less ten inches apart down the row. Have you ever really looked at a field of filed corn? That's the stuff for animal feed, not sweet corn. That's what they grown around here in all the corn fields. The rows are planted a ton closer together than my little garden plot. They don't space them at ten inches either. It's more like four. They pack in as much as possible, in as small an area as they can. That and the darned wind around here would knock it flat to the ground without neighbors to help hold it up. Try running through a field of that stuff. You'd get sliced to ribbons in the first five steps.