Red Gold

We are still awash with tomatoes and sales have been good, eating them has been good, and canning them in different ways has been productive.

One days picking...about 60lbs. These are big juicy tasty tomatoes.

We decided to make Basil Garlic Tomato Sauce....we grew the tomatoes, the onions, the basil but bough the garlic...haven't figured out how to grow that well yet. After washing them thoroughly we cored and quartered them....about 20 lbs worth.

Then you take a cup full or a little more of diced onion and 8 cloves of garlic and saute them until translucent, throw in the quartered tomatoes and simmer for about 20 minutes. Then you puree the whole thing in a food processor and strain out the pulp and seeds. Then you take the remaining liquid add a quarter cup of tightly packed chiffonade of fresh Basil, some salt and pepper and simmer until reduced by half.

Put in a water bath canner for the amount of time for your altitude....

And poof you have delicious tomato sauce for those cold winter days of marinara, soups and stews.

The chickens are laying pretty regularly and even in this heat we are getting about a dozen and a half eggs a week. In this case we were fixing breakfast and had two eggs with double yolks. Once they start producing more we have customers already lined up to purchase...at $1.25 a dozen. Look at those dark yellow yolks standing proud in the bowl...you wont find that from store bought eggs and lots of folks don't know the eggs you buy in the store can be up to 6 months old...Google it.

The Brown Leghorns are the ....brown chickens in this photo and they lay the white eggs, the black and white chickens are Barred Rocks and they lay brown eggs. So far we have gotten all brown eggs until...

Today when we got our first white egg. Do they taste different? Nope, but its kind of cool to have two different coloured eggs and its fun to tell city visitors the brown eggs are just not washed.

For some reason with this drought we have been over run with Wild Turkeys and they come right down by the house, run around the pasture and their tracks are all over around the pond. We sure have been enjoying their antics and if you ever get a chance to just watch them they are pretty entertaining.

We are also in the middle of the water melon (these are Baby Sweets) and cantaloupe harvest and they taste so much better than anything you can buy in a store. We have to be a little selfish at times because everyone wants to buy them and sometimes we have to stash a few and claim we are out.

And an update on the tractor tire issue, both rear tires on the IH 424 have now been changed and we are back in business. We are being very cautious right now running anything around here because of the fire danger but we will be ready.

And so the sun sets on this post...tomorrow we harvest apples and pears and can salsa...spicy salsa.