What Marcy said.
What are you doing this summer?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Cubs Phillies tonight and Wed;
New kittens and all that entails;
Netroots Nation in Aug. Looking for someone who wants to share a hotel room.
then back to work just as it feels like vacation is starting to work.
Off to the game . . .
Reading BMT. And working. Or, reading BMT instead of working.
this summer, i’m pickin’ a lot and using photographs as propaganda.
Acadia National Park next week. Biking, hiking, eating, drinking.
I will be spending my summer Processing Food: The effort that is expended in tilling a row, putting in seed and weeding is actually surpassed by the act of processing the results from a large garden. As I spent an hour or so yesterday shelling peas from their hulls, I realized home gardening really requires a housewife. A couple of children would be helpful, too.
Back in the day when a man earned enough to support a family and the wife stayed home, one of her tasks could pleasurably be shelling peas. Nowadays, with couples working full-time, who has the time and energy to do this kind of thing except for partly disabled, old women like me? Especially when you can buy a can of Martha White’s Homestyle Field Peas for $1.14? O yes, the peas I cooked up for dinner tonight tasted so much better and were so much more nutritious than anything I could buy at the grocery store but still… I basically worked for less than 50 cents an hour processing the peas.
At this point, I spend two to four hours a day processing vegetables for immediate and future consumption. Even at that pace, there’s a current backlog of squashes demanding that I break out the Mason jars and devote an entire day to standing by a steamy pressure cooker. In another month, I’ll be buried in grapes and figs screaming, “Jam me!”
OMG, you have a fig tree, don’t you? I love fresh figs. Maybe I should move to NC where I could grow them. 🙂
We belong to the CSA, and I freeze some stuff (I still have 4 red peppers left over from last summer), but have never tried the canning thing.
Unless you invest in one of those monster box freezers, canning is the only way to go. The huge, cast iron pressure cooker I’ve got belonged to Hubby’s Mom and still has the book of instructions that came with it. The publication date is 1934! Once I got past being scared that it would blow up, it’s not hard to use. It’s just hot, steamy work after a lot of prep work.
We’ve got TWO fig trees and a heavily laden grape arbor that’s 10′ wide by 30′ long. I think I’m going to be driven to make wine. 😉
hopefully owning the roof over my head.
Did your bathroom attack you?
My parent’s bathroom tried to off me yesterday. I don’t know if it was the heat or my electric personality, but the glass door literally exploded when I touched it. Luckily it was the inner door with the outer one providing somewhat of a buffer between me and the supernova. I still feel like there are tiny shards of glass in my arms.
Glad that you’re okay. That must have been scary.
thx, b2. It was scary enough to elicit a top-notched “OH F*@%!!!!!!!!” outta my lips, but no serious cuts to speak of, thankfully.