Starting September right!

The timer just rang, announcing that the last canner loads of applesauce are done! What a fun day and it's not even 4 p.m. yet! Since my mom admitted to me, upon receiving yesterday's blog, that she was going through "blog withdrawal" in August, I better up my game! Don't want to disappoint my greatest fan (and honestly the person that often makes it possible for me to carve out time for blogging)!

Yesterday, before we hosted 40-50 of my work colleagues, students and their family members, my parents dropped off 3 boxes of wild WV apples for us to add to the bag previously delivered to us for sauce making. What abundance! So today was slated for doing up apples and also picking all our remaining grapes for juice. But we first enjoyed a lovely evening with all corners of our home filled with amazing people, little and big. I got some amazing baby snuggles from the youngest guests, 2 and 5 month old baby girls. That helped fill my tank! We were also so grateful for the weather, with the thunder rolling in right as folks were finishing eating and the rain just spritzing until all the guests had left and then it poured. Maybe we won't have to get the irrigation hoses out quite yet as we got about 3/4 of an inch.

As soon as I woke this morning, after not the most restful sleep as Terah didn't sleep well for some reason, I got apples cooking (chopping them with still slightly bleary eyes but thankfully no mishaps)! Now at 4 p.m. those 4 vessels of apples have turned into 50 quarts of applesauce - delicious and flavorful with 1 ingredient!! Jason got chores done and then picked grapes so we could get juice started simultaneously.

Emily and Ivy came over for a few hours this morning to play, chat and help. It really is my favorite kind of day. The cloud cover made it cool and comfortable to work with windows open. There were kids having fun all around us. It's a great food processing task for a group of people and doesn't include a lot of thought so good for conversing while working. The limiting factor today was decidedly the number of burners available. I had both propane burners on the porch going almost continuously and then had 3-4 of our inside burners also occupied most of the day, with pots in the wings waiting for their turn.

We got 9 quarts of grape juice from Tangly Woods grapes - a first for us to have enough grapes to juice - and 2 containers of grape pulp for the freezer. As of today we are out of narrow mouth quart jars so any future food processing will have to be in pints, wide mouth quarts or our 1.5-2 quart jars. It's that time in the food processing season - canning shelves mostly full, freezers filled to the brim, and things still coming in for fresh eating.

So today's team effort has paid off and we are done in time to head to friends' for a house concert tonight. So this day will have a little rest in it after all! But first another load of dishes and a shower...