Saturday Exhaustion

I, we, spent the day pulling corn from our little corn patch.  It's pretty amazing how much corn we picked--about 40 dozen, we think.  Richard pulled only about half of the patch, but I dared him to pull any more till we'd get this cleaned, cut, cooked and in the freezer.  After all, he's good about getting the stuff out of the garden, but then he tends to abandon the fun when he gets tired of the activity.

Thank goodness he did help to shuck most of it.  Lane, our grandson, also helped but still 40 dozen is 480 ears.  Yeah, that's a lot of corn to shuck in this Louisiana heat.


So, after getting it out of the garden, pulling the leaves off each ear and picking off most of the silk, the next step is to scrub the little bits of silk off the ears and wash them.  That was my job.  In fact, once the corn came inside, everything became my job.

At one point I had to go outside and pry them off five gallon buckets next to the pond.  They had decided to take a break.  The best place for a break, apparently, is near the water.  And, well, if you're going to sit near the water, you may as well hold a fishing pole or rod and reel.

In the meantime, I'd washed, bagged the corn that I wanted frozen for corn on the cob, cut the rest of the corn and started cooking it down.  Crazy guys, laughed because they'd been caught fishing instead of finishing up the corn.

Of course it would mean fish for supper if I weren't so tired.  And if the kitchen weren't such a mess.  Cutting corn and scraping the milk out of it is pretty messy since the milk tends to fly everywhere.  Now that I've cleaned up, I definitely don't want to make another mess by cooking supper.

In anticipation of having lots of veggies to put up, I picked up a Food Saver vacuum sealer to put food away in the freezer.



I really like this system.  The food is sealed in heavy duty freezer bags and since the air is vacuumed out, it won't freezer burn as quickly as when I've used regular bags.  One of the problems we've had is that we can't used the food quickly enough and moving it around in the freezer while looking for other items occasionally breaks a seal or makes a small hole.  Then we're forced to toss out items that, hopefully, will now last longer.  The bags are more expensive and, of course, there's the added cost of the machine, but if meat and veggies, last longer and taste better as a result, it's a good investment.

 I certainly hope that is the case, because I've invested much more than just money......my time and work absolutely count for something, especially when I'm this tired from being on my feet all day.

And especially since I spent yesterday picking green beans--we call them snap beans here in the South--breaking off the ends, blanching them and bagging them.  So I'm putting lots of faith and effort into vacuum packing my summer veggies.

Of course, I did do some homework and had spoken to a few people about the idea.  Since those I trust highly recommended that I use the vac/seal system, I considered it a good investment.  Right now, I'm hoping that I'm right, because goodness knows that I don't want to do this much work for naught!

Share your story.  Do you have a garden?  What veggies do you grow, and do you put up any of the vegetables?