More Apple Butter

I have finally made the last of the apples into apple butter. I composted a good ice cream bucket that had started to rot and still made almost 12 pints. I'm very excited that I made my own, but more relieved that I no longer have a tub of apples sitting in my kitchen.....not that it was a huge problem!

It is now starting to be time to work on my indoor projects. I have a quilt that I have been working on and am getting excited that the weather has started to get cooler. I have a hard time convincing myself to work on things like quilts and blankets when it's warm out. I have squares ready for one quilt and laid them out the other day. Our cat decided to "help" and pounce on random squares that sent her flying over the others, causing me to rearrange. I didn't mind since she was so funny about it. Besides, she's my "helper"!

Canning Salsa

I found some time to make some salsa and can it. I used the tomatoes and cucumbers from our garden. Unfortunately, I did not have enough jalapenos and didn't have any Anaheim peppers, cilantro, or onion. So it was semi-from our garden. These are the naked tomatoes from our garden, waiting to be seeded and chopped. I had to roast the Anaheim peppers before using them in the recipe.(I didn't need all of them!) This is the salsa waiting to be put in jars. Here are the eight pints of salsa, all in a pretty row! I had about a quarter cup leftover, so we let it cool and enjoyed with chips! It had some kick to it, but it wasn't anything we couldn't handle. I'm just hoping to get enough tomatoes to make another batch!

Harvest

I had my first harvest of our garden a few days ago. There were three Roma tomatoes that were a very pretty red color. So, I picked them! And I ate them! And they were delicious! There are a lot of green tomatoes, yet, so hopefully they will turn soon and the canning can begin! I also have a lot of flowers on my bean plants. I'm hoping to have beans galore! And of course the cucumbers are taking over their corner of the garden so I'm going to need to start looking up good pickle recipes too!

Fresh Fruit

Since we got our fence up, it seems to be keeping out the rabbits really well. I'm very excited about this since I haven't been able to grow green beans since we moved to this house. I did have to go to the Farmer's Market Saturday to buy some rhubarb. We have our own plant, but it seems to be too dry for it this year. I've picked three times and this last time it didn't look all that ready. I made strawberry rhubarb sauce with it and it tasted really good! I have plenty of strawberries and rhubarb now to try to can the sauce. It will be quite the adventure since I've not canned this sauce before. It's always an adventure trying to can in our kitchen though. It's a little small, but we manage to do it!