Chaos and Reward

Oh! How much chaos there is during harvest season! But in the chaos of reaping the harvest and KEEPING the harvest, comes great rewards! FIGURATIVELY AND LITERALLY!

Messy Kitchen/ AKA Canning Time!

This last weekend, we (yes! Hubby is a HUGE help!) put up 5 pints of tomatoes sauce (so far) and 33 pints of grape jelly. We need more jelly.... Who am I kidding. I think we now have enough jelly to feed a medium sized army... And we will PROBABLY put up MORE jelly. WHY? Well, our grapes have seeds... bummer. I MAY try to make straight up grape JUICE, but I need to get a strainer first. The grapes DO smell lovely as they are cooking on the stove...

This guy was bored with all of the canning going on...

Here is our little grape sneak!

Speaking of lovely smells, I also enjoy the smell of tomato sauce cooking! We didn't get much put up this weekend, BUT there is more to come! More tomatoes on the vine, just waitin'... It rained Saturday, so we will have more poppin' out.

There is such a rewarding feeling that goes along with all of the mess in my kitchen and the jars, upon jars of various fruits and veggies... And even a rewarding feeling trying to figure out WHERE I will be putting all of those jars... WHAT A PROBLEM!

Speaking of problems... I have NEARLY run OUT of jars! I am TOTALLY out of the pint jars, and ALMOST out of the quart ones. I have more tomatoes to put up, more grapes (in one form or another), that MAY be all for the jars though.

We harvested a BUNCH of potatoes this weekend also. Those are going in the basement, to keep cool for the Winter. We also are ABOUT ready to harvest our Winter Squash, and Spaghetti Squash. More to keep for the Winter!

These are red and yellow potatoes. We harvested about 125-150 lbs! What a blessing!


Check out these HUGE red potatoes!



I also harvested, believe it or not, for the first time, seeds from my lettuce! I let my first row of lettuce go to seed, and now I have twice the seeds than I bought this Spring. With MANY more to come! I can't wait to try to plant these in the Winter. I bought a rectangle shaped pot to stick in my South facing window, to see if I can plant some lettuce in the Winter!

Also my Sunflowers came out finally! They are ABSOLUTELY HUGE. Here is a pic of them, to the left of them is corn that is about 6 foot tall:


We also have small pumpkins that are also ALMOST ready to rock-n-roll... :)



Our apples aren't perfect, but they ARE organic! Looking forward to some apple sauce and maybe some apple butter...


That was OUR busy harvest weekend SO FAR! We praise God for the blessings that we have harvested so far, and are so happy to be able to save money in the future on groceries for our growing family.

What are YOU harvesting right now?