Sunday, January 3, 2010

The simple pleasure of bottling


Arnt these labels cute?? For the first time I bought the Homegrown magazine and have vowed to continue to uy it. This one was on tomatoes and it is a POWERHOUSE of information and has these free labels to boot!!
My peas are finished and my lettuces are doing great growing things in askyscraper direction. ut my tomatoes...it is there time to shine. As well as a few surprise seld seeded one in the front garden my Romas are looking healthy and gorgeous tho still green in the back garden. In fact they are positively triffid like! I am so looking forward to cutting them in half putting them in my underused dehyrator and storing them in olive oil as sundried tomatoes with a touch of garlic and rosemary. In this mood of tomatoes and preserving my GHIU reminded me that for the past five years we have several kilos of frozen tommies at the bottom of our deep freezer in the shed.!!! I immediately got to wprk and made two batches of pasta sauce using them. I used 10 kilos in all and there is now room again in the freezer (Interesting how much fish ait and UFOs I found in there as well!!)
Arnt they pretty??? Up the top is the strawberry and plum jam. We have so much jam now that Im going to go easy on it this season. I will put most of my energies into bottling the peaches and the pears instead, but they are a while away yet.
I have found this great new blog which I am going to visit often. It is frugal in nature and full of great tips , recipes and inspiration. You can find it here. This lady is also a designer. How di some people get all the talents? I love to sew and quilt and craft but I could never actually make something up from my head!
The weather has been unbearaly hot, flies are constant nusiances and we seem to be always out of flyspray and automatic ones seem to give up quickly..batteries?? Spray?? I give up..
Its such fun to read the American blogs ans see the snow and read how they are all copnquering the cold right now. it just seems surreal over here with the humidity and heat!!
happy bottling.
Loce Cherry

4 comments:

cottonreel said...

This is very impressive . Would you care to join me as a follower ? I can find you quickly then----cottonreel

free indeed said...

I just became a follower. I too do things the old fashioned way and love to live frugally. In the early years it was because I had to, but now, I just can't do it any other way!
I'm from northern Maine in the USA, and we are from the cold part of the country. Our winters are soooo long and summers sooo short! It's hard growning only short season things...frost gets things many years. Last year I lost my grapevine to winter kill...it was just too cold! The roots and branches below snow level were fine and it did get some new growth this summer, but no fruit this year. I love the grape juice we get from it! Anyway, it'll be fun to read how you do things on the other side of the world. Am looking for recipes and ideas!

free indeed said...

PS great looking pantry! Kudos to you for using up all those frozen tomatoes!

Fee said...

Love the look of your pantry - Thanks for following my blog.

Hugs - Fiona XX