Welcome to Autumn in Spokane!

 

 

 

Autumn means canning, preserving, putting up, whatever the term is you want to use. I know that for me it means rearranging the food room to find space for all the food stuffs we've preserved. That's what I'll be doing this afternoon.

We purchased 40 lbs. of chicken from Zaycon and it's now all in canning jars. I've got to find a spot for that! So I spent $84.00 on chicken in October plus $18.00 at Rosauer's this morning buying a roast and 10 lbs. of margarine that was on sale. I'll need it for holiday baking. So for October I spent $102.00 on groceries. Dad gives me $100.00 a month now because I said to put the other $100.00 he was giving me towards the 2nd mortgage which will be paid off this month!!!! I'm going to try to show my monthly expenditures because it's good for me to be accountable about my shopping.

Now this doesn't include things like dish detergent or other non-food items. This $100.00 is just food. My goal is to reduce that by half and live off what we canned and froze. Don't know if it will work but I'm willing to try. Our food room is full as is each of our freezers. Now to enjoy the bounty. Whoops, I forgot I still have pumpkins to can! I hope I have enough canning jars!





 



 

I love the Harvest Season!!!

 

Yes, this baby was grown in our garden out at Grandma Joyce's! We've never had a watermelon grow so big in a garden. All that heat did great things for our produce!

 

 

It looks like it isn't ripe but it was very sweet and delicious!

 

 

 

These are a couple of shots of our pumpkin harvest. Counting the 3 we have in the front for decoration, we grew 70 pumpkins!!! Oh My! The ones on the left are the pumpkins that will be flying their way to sweet grandchildren soon!

 

 

You can't really tell from this shot, but we canned 80 quarts of spaghetti sauce from the tomatoes from our garden. It takes about 25 lbs. of tomatoes for every 10 quarts of sauce. We had quite the tomato harvest, thank you very much!

 



 



We stored our onion harvest in the basement bathroom shower because it's cool and dark. This is only what's left after using a lot of onions in making the spaghetti sauce!

 

Blessings!

Yesterday we went to Green bluff and bought apples for apple pie filling that I'll can this week. And afterwards we went to Grandma Joyce's and Grandpa Dale's to harvest the pumpkins. We found a row of onions that had been hiding under the pumpkin plants! Our harvest this year has truly been bountiful. Grandma Joyce wonders if it's because of hard times ahead? I do too! But no matter what comes we're excited to plant another garden next year. Just maybe not so many tomatoes! I love this season of the year and express my gratitude for all blessings I've been given!