More Pickles and a Rhubarb Surprise

Good morning! What a day we’ve had already (it is 6:42 at the time of writing). Paul got up around 4:00 to bring a chair in onto the front porch and roll up the windows on the truck because we were having a pretty good rain. I had to use the bathroom about then and hadn’t been back in bed long before Joseph came in and wanted to know if he could ‘sleep with you?’ Well, who could resist a really cute 6-year-old at 4:15 am when I have to get up in about an hour anyway?

It wasn’t long before my phone bring bring bringed at me letting me know it was time to get up and take Joanna to Gardner. I had it set for 5:20 and it faithfully went off at that time. For some reason I looked at the clock anyway and decided it wouldn’t hurt to lay there for another five minutes. Yeah, right. Seven minutes later I opened my eyes and looked at the clock again, threw the sheet aside, and rolled out of bed. Sometime while I was getting dressed, Joanna sent me a text message. We took the Jetta in to Gardner and waited only about two minutes for Ruth (she’s Jared’s grandma and gives him, Joanna and Nick a ride to the Troop’s in Ashburnham for seminary). On the way home, I turned the radio on and heard my first official complaint about the ending of summer and beginning of the “dark, dreary mornings.” I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it enough. I absolutely hate it when people complain about the fall and winter. I love both and I don’t care to hear people complaining incessantly about the weather (even if I’m inclined to do it in the summer if it’s too hot and humid).

A flower awaiting daylight in order to be more cheerful.

The back field at about 6:05 am. It wasn't actually that light.

When I got back, it was 6:00 and the canine girls and I went out for a walk around the garden, barn and house. Because we go so slowly, it takes us ten minutes. We could walk around the whole back field, which is a quarter of a mile, in about ten minutes but I don’t think that is entirely conducive to their piddling and pooping. The usually cheery yellow sunflower-like flowers in the garden don’t look quite so cheery before there is much light to shine on them but it was a nice walk nonetheless. We came in and I got ready to go out and milk. The girls were awake and I wondered about quantity of milk as the day before had been down a bit and it was earlier today when they were milked. They also were moved to new areas for grazing yesterday and that is what made the difference giving us more milk than yesterday.

Trees to the east of the house.

Milk. with picles and rhubarb juice behind. You can see how light it was outside as well by the window in the background.

And I will be back, probably once children are on the bus.

As promised, I am back. It is 8:00 and I’m not sure if children are still on the bus or not but they are gone and I decided I should eat breakfast earlier rather than later because it just puts the whole day off if I eat it later.

Yesterday morning I’m sure I did something. Oh, wait, it’s coming back. With some good helpers, I labeled spaghetti jars and took them downstairs and put them on shelves. With some of the same good helpers, I washed peach jars, labeled them and took them downstairs and put them on shelves. That required some rearranging of shelves but that’s okay because it needed to be done. The only problem is that there are currently a couple of boxes on a freezer that need to go somewhere. I really do prefer to see shelves lined with jars that I’ve done rather than with cans bought from the store. It’s a lot of work, but I really believe it is worth the effort.

I wanted to do pickles yesterday but needed to get some dill of some kind first because the fresh I had petered out and was eaten by the goats many days ago and I didn’t have much weed or seed. So, to the store I needed to go. Amena wanted to go to Walmart to get tank tops. She ended up not finding anything she liked but I did get some flour because I was about out of white flour. While I was in the checkout, I saw a couple walk in and head for the rest room. They are friends of ours we haven’t seen for ages so when I was all done, I went over and stood waiting for them to come out. Karen came out first and was so happy to see me. Amena had taken off to look for something. We talked and talked. She said that since Jim is the branch president now, he is all the time either on the phone or at church and they have time to do nothing. They were on their way home from the temple in Boston and had been gone since 4:00 in the morning. She said that she was telling Jim not too long ago, “Remember Paul and Pam and how Pam stayed with us and then she and the kids stayed with us? We used to be friends with them.” Hopefully we’ll be able to get together sometime soon; in the meantime, I’m just happy that we were in the same place at the same time.


After that we went to Ocean State because she wanted to get some fake glasses for someone whose birthday party she went to months ago. She was successful in that. I got dill seed there and some vanilla because we’ve been out for a while other than some really good really expensive stuff that I only like to use for special projects. They sometimes have really good deals on clothes and I found a pair of new pants to use for walking at the gym when I start that again (I’ve been using the ones I have when I milk the goats and they’re no longer fit to wear in public). Amena also found a new pair of flip flops which made her happy.

When we got home, it was sort of lunch time. Some people ate, some didn’t, some just snacked, some grazed. The boys had supposedly been looking for a rod that holds the ramps on to one of the trailers. One of them was found in the woods down by the stream and the other one was nowhere to be found. They found it actually on the trailer which is odd because Paul looked there I think twice and I looked once and the boys looked once. Anyway, it was found and they are both back on the trailer where they belong.

After lunch, I did the pickles. I had Cedric peel garlic and Seth wash cucumbers. I had about a quart and a half of brine for both dill and half sours and decided to do as many dills as I had garlic to do which meant making more brine (which is really hard and time consuming and consists of measuring water, vinegar and salt into a pot and bringing it to a boil) to which I added the quart and a half I had. That and the garlic was enough to nine quarts of dill with a quart of brine left over. I then heated up the half sour brine and did three quarts and had a quart of brine left over. We’ll see how many more pickles we get this year.

Pickles before and after. I like the contrast.

Once the pickles were done, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do anything else because it was about 5:00 and everything takes time, including supper. Well, I decided to make rhubarb juice. I’d been wanting to try that since I had some about nine years ago. Until we moved here, I didn’t have any rhubarb so it was rather difficult to do anything with it and until this year, I always used it for other things. Well, we used all we had in the spring for pie and such. Then it started growing well again as the weather cooled off and we had quite a bit. The booklet that came with my juicer said that five quarts of rhubarb usually yields about two quarts of juice. I wasn’t too thrilled about the prospect of needing so much to make so comparatively little but still, I knew the end result would be good stuff. Seth and Cedric helped with the picking and cutting off of the leaves and bringing in of the rhubarb and Amena rinsed. I cut and we ended up with about 10 quarts in the canner. Since I was going to use it for juice, I planned to add sugar but forgot until toward the end. That ended up okay though. While the rhubarb was juicing, I got supper ready. We had leftover ham in sandwiches with sliced tomato, onion and cucumber. As everything was being put on the table, I drained juice into jars and we ended up with about four and a half quarts. The really cool thing is that the stuff left over in the canner is really good. It’s someone reminiscent of rhubarb sauce that Grandma and my mom (and I) used to make. It is less juicy and more solid but it tastes really good so we have an added bonus to the juice—the sludge! It’s great.

Rhubarb juice. I shook the one on the left just before taking this picture.

This is the surprise--rhubarb sludge!

While I was busy doing things, Paul went to Leominster/Fitchburg. He needed to get some pressure treated wood at Home Depot and since he had to go that way, he picked Jonathan up to take him around to apply for jobs. Many of the places Jonathan wanted to apply were closed but he managed to fill out and leave a few. When he got home, he went to work on the chicken coop. The foundation is almost ready for the coop. It will be so nice to have it done. I’ve never seen anyone go to such lengths for a chicken coop before so this one had better last a good many years and had better be rodent proof. The run will be next and is like to take a while so I’m not expecting to actually have chickens until spring. That will be very nice.

Today I need to get eggs, make bread and mentally prepare for the beginning of my semester which starts tomorrow. I have been thinking about seeing if I can take my honors English class online but haven’t done anything about it yet. Even though it really doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to get up to the college, it seems like it takes such a huge chunk out of my day to go for just one class and I feel like I’ll already be there enough going for phlebotomy every Tuesday evening. So, we’ll see what ends up happening with that.

Well, I’m going to download some pictures and get this posted. Have a wonderful day!