You know when you think you just can’t have enough of something?

Do you see them over there?  So cute in their little trays?  Full of the promise of red, ripe tomatoes.  What you don’t see in this picture is the fact that I bought two entire flats of tomatoes.  I’m sure you are probably doing the math faster than I at the time of purchase – and yes, that does equal out to roughly 96 tomato plants.

I blame my enthusiastic purchase on two things:  1) On the last possible day of planting season in Ohio, I took 3 very hot, tired and cranky toddlers to the greenhouse. I wasn’t even reading labels I was grabbing plants and throwing them onto the wagon before Wyatt could pull the leaves off of anymore pepper plants and before Autumn became and immobile, weeping, mass on the gravel walkway.  In fact, I was truly racing to get out of there before I became a weeping mass of mama in the middle of the cauliflower and brussel sprouts.  2.)  I have had miserable luck with tomatoes, losing what appear to be tomato trees laden with the fruit of Eden, to tiny black spots of blight.  I’ve picked off leaves, burnt beds, danced and chanted prayers, all to no avail.  Tomatoes hate my wooded raised bed gardens.  So I thought this year, I have a 50/50 chance, better up the odds and put out lots of plants!  Geesh. . . . This year I planted a few heirloom varieties, Amish Paste, Roma, Beefsteak, Starbright (?), and cherry tomatoes.

So here I am in late August/early September juicing and canning tomatoes for 12 hours a day.  Last Saturday, Will and I picked 7 five gallon buckets full, today I walked away with 8 five gallon buckets, a milk crate, and a coke crake full. (I was getting desperate for containers by the end.)  And there are plenty of green tomatoes left. . . I’ll be picking and canning until it frosts!  And now for the sad truth. . . .it makes me smile.  Ok, don’t get me wrong, I’m a little tired of my manual juicer.  And my husband is a little tired of my juicer so he went out and bought me a meat grinder with a juicer attachment. He is so sweet.  It won’t be here in time to save me from the latest batch of tomatoes, but there is a lot of time left before the frost comes.

I’ll add more pictures soon of our canning progress.  The jars are lining up on the shelves nicely.  Although I feel that I was about 12 quarts short of the amount of sweet corn I needed. I would have like to have had about 60 to get us through the winter.  There is still time though!

Blogging may be sparse currently but I promise I’m saving some good writing for when the physical labor of homesteading slacks off a little here.  All those beautiful fall evenings are just around the corner.

New Life

I keep insisting that I am not a crazy chicken lady!  (And yes, I am usually saying this with an exasperated emphasis)  But, the inexplicable giddiness I felt yesterday as the first egg in our incubator pipped belies the truth.  I in fact am a crazy chicken lady.

Oh, how I have scoffed when reading about others who sit up all night the first day their chicks are due to hatch. . .how they can’t move away from the little plexi-glass window of the incubator. . . how they whisper words of encouragement to the little peeps they here from inside the shells.  Now, that looney-tune is me!  I had an entire 5 gallon bucket of green beans to snap yesterday which I made dismal progress on because every time there was a peep or the sound of pecking from the incubator the kids and I were huddled around it watching, hoping, and praying that little chick would pop out!

Just one, I just needed one chick to actually hatch.  After our first failed attempt at hatching out eggs in which I’m pretty certain I cooked the eggs (ewww…go ahead say it out loud).  I decided to give it one more try before I gave up on hatching all together.  For one week we took 4 eggs and placed them into the incubator, each day in its own row, by the end of the week we had 28 eggs of every shape size and color lined up in the egg turner.

Let me just say I would be terrible at hatching eggs if it were not for the egg turner.  I could barely remember to check on them and the temperature once a day let alone if I had needed to turn them 3 times a day!  We borrowed our incubator from the kids’ kindergarten teacher, but the same model is available at TSC.  The incubator kept a very constant temperature and needed no adjustment once the initial temperature was achieved.  Just remember to make very slight turns of the knob and wait for the temperature to adjust before walking away!

We did try candling the eggs this week. . . thank you google images for helping us decipher the varying shades inside the egg!  It looks like we should have at least a few more hatch, fingers crossed.