Our Labor Filled Weekend

At the end of last week, I was going to post that my garden had about run its course for the year and I was fine with that.  Then my parents came for their yearly Labor Day visit and loaded the back of their van LOADED with produce.  Their garden is about 2 weeks behind mine and their produce would have rotten if they had left it behind.  

My basement quickly filled with 2 bushels corn, 25 pounds of grapes, 1/2 bushel of peppers, 15 pounds of tomatoes and 4 1/2 bushels of pears.

We started out Friday by processing the corn.  We put 9 quarts into my freezer and 40 ears into our bellies (over the course of the weekend).

Then we were on to the grapes.

My mom worked her hardest, but after school, I called in reinforcements. 

I think we lost a few pound of grapes to our many helpers, but they did get the rest of them de-stemed in less than an hour.

Saturday was spent finished up the grape juice.

I borrowed this juicer from my neighbor and it worked great!

This is the public picture I wanted to post of Chloe helping me.

  

Once we juiced all the grapes, it was on to cooking them before we jarred up the juice.

We also cooked up 7 quarts of tomato sauce.

The finished product.  This is highly concentrated so we mix the quart with a quart of water or apple juice before we serve it.

Monday, it was on to the pears. 

Chloe helped by eating as many as she could.  If you look closely, you can see the juice running down her face. 

 I took this video to show you how this machine worked (for anyone interested).

We ended up with 9.5 quarts of pear juice and 13 pints of pear sauce from 1.5 bushels of pears.

Then today (Tuesday), my neighbor told me to clean her apple tree off.  More work to do.

Oh yea, and I picked this whopper (16 pounds) in the garden tonight.  Praying its ripe or I may just cry.