Getting ready for winter...

Friday, we took delivery of two more 'ladies'. They are mostly getting along with the other chickens, although they are clearly their own distinct flock. But no serious fighting--- just a little hen-pecking as they figure out the pecking order! Ha! We also got a big grocery bag of mixed peppers from the Johnson family, who had more than they could handle.

Saturday, we got the last of the harvest in, just in time for it to turn cold and sleeting and raining and snowing. 3.5 bushels of apples, three bushels of grapes, 10 pounds of carrots, a mess of beets, tomatoes, corn, green onions, acorn squash. Add to that a half bushel of tomatoes and a bushel of anaheim peppers, and it's starting to look like we have real food around here!

Yesterday was a canning marathon. 13 straight hours of preserving. Prepping grapes for wine, roasting chiles, cutting tomatoes, slicing carrots. We added 25 half-pints of grape jam, 6 half-pints of mixed fruit jelly, 11 pints of green chile, 18 pints of salsa, 8 pints of pickles, 5 pints of carrots, 4 pints of chopped tomatoes and 5 gallons of wine mash to the 'stash' in the basement! Looks like we won't starve this winter. We still have a bushel of grapes and all the apples, waiting to be made into all kinds of goodness. (We have no idea what we're going to do with the rest of the grapes, actually. But we'll think of something! Maybe we'll feed them to chickens, and have them as eggs!)

We expect to get more winter squash from the CSA over the next couple of weeks. We haven't gotten any butternut squash yet at all, and only one acorn squash. Usually, we are overloaded with spaghetti squash (ick!), but so far we've only gotten one. The big bags of local potatoes have shown up at Cochran's produce, as have bags of onions. I'll have to figure out a spot to store the onions, so I can keep them separate from the potatoes... We've gotten the potatoes for the last couple of years, and it's a screaming deal (~$17, or $0.34/pound) that lasts us all winter. So this year, we'll try adding onions to the list.

I brought the lemon tree in last week, and one of the lemons is starting to turn a little yellow! I've been waiting all summer to see what happens next!

In the middle of all this activity, J turned to me and said, 'Do you think we're turning into Mormons?' I pointed at the grapes he was mashing for wine and said, 'I doubt it!' Still, it is not lost on us that we now have more food in storage than fits in the 'food storage' area of our house!

As J's grandpa used to say when he sat down to dinner: 'I wonder what the poor folks are doing tonight...'