Cold House Greenhouse

December 29. 

The salad I picked for supper. 

And yes! I still had to pick the slugs out of it. : `/

Can you believe it?

{Sun} Dried Tomatoes

We love sun dried tomatoes.

Our tomatoes are not SUN dried, of course,

but, neither are the ones in the store.

That's just what they are called.

Fresh picked basil

with

parsley

Cloves of garlic and olive oil -

a great use for the over-abundance of cherry tomatoes found in the garden

a tray ready for the food dryer

The perfect job for little hands.

**PS. Because botulism is a remote possibility I freeze my jars after they have marinated for a little while.

I know that will thicken the oil, but the oil in my jar of Costco sun dried tomatoes is thick after I put it in the refrigerator too, so better safe than sorry.  It takes less oil than I thought it would to pack a jar of tomatoes and herbs and we'll use that herb infused oil to drizzle on our salads later.

Time to Pick the Beans

This is the first time we've ever grown these daddy-long-legs.

Garden Color

Yielding it's Fruit

I love having our own fruit trees!

A Day for Thinning

Keep that beak of yours out of MY business...

Some birds don't learn

I Proudly Introduce

from our garden.

YUM!

Hang On a Second

Hang On a Second

While I bore you with my tomatoes....

We picked 13 five gallon buckets of tomatoes yesterday. Talk about blessings from heaven!  We're all set to go back to the market, again. After sorting out the blemished ones we canned a bunch. The girls finished doing down the nectarines and the peaches. I'm sure we'll be canning a lot more tomatoes, though.  Cindy, Becky, Katie, and Maria are all lined up waiting for my sos call to come and get canning tomatoes.

Market Day

Friday, August 19, 2011

James is enthralled with the Farmer's market.  He is a born salesman. He was all busy, busy constantly rearranging the table and trying to engage the customers in conversation and promoting what he thought they overlooked.. He let the people know that WE grew those tomatoes and he weeded that patch! It was so cool to see him display pride in our product.

It's a small market right in our town. There was a whole 3 other vendors,

and I can't say that there was a ton of customers,

but it was a learning experience all around.

Christina was learning to give change. I was teaching her to count up from the amount to the amount of cash given her. She was getting that concept down, but plopped the handful of money right into the lady's hand

and the woman said,

"Oh, now you have to count it back to me."

The lady proceeded to show her how it is done.

GOOD STUFF!!

There's weighing the tomatoes,

adding up the totals on the spot in your head,

there's helping customer's pick out the tomatoes they want,

as well as taking money and giving back change.

There was visiting with and learning from the other venders... pricing, scales, other markets, etc...

The guy in charge wants us to go to Thursday market in E. Town.

Everyone was amazed that we kept pulling out more tomatoes!

It's been an incredibly slow year for tomatoes.

Most people don't have any.

We were gently chided for not bringing our other produce...

but I wasn't sure how much you had to have, how to price them, etc...

In the end, we can only sell what we can't use.

Feeding this gang comes first.

Everybody thought the experience was kind of fun... 

except Steve thought we needed to add a little life to the party...

So, there's this guy in town that stands on the street corner with a pizza sign. 

He wears headphones and literally dances the day away with his sign on the side of the road.

We always laugh

and actually admire the guy

for sticking it out all these years on this crazy job.

He twirls and wiggles and it's comical to say the least

and he's one of "those nutty" people we would never, ever want to be!

Well, apparently Steve has been taking lessons.

He grabbed our sign

and the next thing we knew. . . . . . 

He had signed up the little people!

It actually does the trick, though.

Even the other venders commented that it brought the people in.

So, I guess it's now part of our job. ;-\

 On the way home Bri wanted to stop at a CUTE little restaurant just down the road.

She went in with a big basket of tomatoes.... but the place was like a bee hive

and she was asked to come back at 4 when things slowed down a bit.

She lugged her big basket to the car and turned around to find she had a following

of drooling restaurant customers...

We nearly sold out right there on the corner.

One lady bought $50 dollars worth.

We had to go pick more for the 4 PM appointment

BUT

She's got a buyer  and they wanted to know what else she could sell them.

It's all about LOCAL CROPS around here.

To Market, To Market....

Not such a gorgeous picture, but the reality at our house!

Gonna see how many we can sell tomorrow.

Scenes from My Garage

Scenes from My Garage