Our Life Together: All Lime, All the Time

Our silly season kicked off this week. Every day now until early fall we will be putting something in a Mason jar to store up for the coming winter. Lawman's school chum and neighbor and his family, the Halls, are fans of the site. They had some Mason jars they didn't use any longer and made a gift of them to us early on in the week. We swapped them some green beans for the empty jars, then we used them first when green beans started pouring in. But our pride and joy is lime pickles. Our first haul of cucumbers we made sweet pickles, just because we wanted to try the recipe. Our "go to" pickle is these green beauts.

They take almost a week to soak and prep, but there is nothing like them. At least we think so, you might not.

Crazy Granny, eat your heart out

Getting back to the green beans. Lawman picked the beans at The Acre early in the week. Then he strung and broke them, washed them and got them in the gift jars. The only way to get fresher beans is to eat them while they are still on the vine. We prefer this method.

Saturday morning we rolled on over to the barn garden and picked another bushel from that bean patch. We had those in jars by noon. We are a well oiled machine when it comes to canning.

We are almost up to 50 quarts of beans so far, and now we've started getting a little creative. We always add a bullion cube to our beans, this week we started adding a fresh clove of garlic to the jar. We will report our findings this winter.

Cupcake's favorite time of the year has arrived (until her next favorite time of the year arrives)

Fried squash.

We've been collecting blue berries, but this week they came in all at once. So we had enough to make both blueberry jelly and blueberry syrup.

Jelly pot

Syrup pot

Twenty five jars of jelly and four pints of blueberry syrup. We tried both over the weekend, and it was well worth the effort. We don't understand people who don't make their own jelly.

Now that blueberry season is over, blackberry/raspberry and red raspberry season is rolling in. Sunday after breakfast we started collecting those berries.

And we did it sporting our new headgear.

We're less "cowboy" and more "gunslinger." Since society seems to be leaning toward the days without lawmen, we're going to embrace the old ways with open arms.

We harvested three heads of cabbage this week (four if you count the one that went toward the jar barter)

We have been dying to try out our new kraut crock. That day arrived.