Start of the Summer

Saturday, 5/31/14: U-Pick at Fulton's. 3 buckets (12 quarts?) of strawberries took me 1.5 hours. 11:15-12:45 gave me just a bit of sunburn (nothing unbearable). Also bought 2 lbs. of rhubarb and 4 lemons.

Monday, 6/2/14: Put 1 bucket at a time of strawberries in the sink and covered them with enough cold water to be able to swish them around to wash them (Bob didn't like this method, saying I was "washing" them in a dirty sink, even though I scrubbed the sink before using it). As I washed, I cut up enough of the smallest berries to make 2 pints of strawberry syrup and 1 pint of strawberry lemonade concentrate. This took about 3 hours. Put the washed, uncut strawberries back in the buckets in the fridge. Also squeezed the lemons to get 1 c. of juice.

Tuesday, 6/3/14: Canned the syrup and lemonade concentrate using the water bath method, but in the pressure cooker pot. This involved cooking the previously-cut strawberries, then squeezing them through a colander, and saving the "mush" for later. Cut tops off of the whole strawberries and laid them on waxed paper on trays for freezing. I used the big and little cookie sheets, a casserole lid (plastic), the gingerbread cookie sheet, and the broiler pan and top (6 trays in all). It took about 20 min. per tray, so about 3 hours again. I also froze a few of the "bad" berries to get seeds.

Tuesday was a productive first-day-of-summer (had to work Monday a.m.) I also:
* started a new yoga workout, geared toward weight loss in the tummy (my old workout was an intro to yoga, and was getting too easy)
* did a load of laundry and hung it outside to dry, and later folded it and put it away (gasp!)
* planted my potato planter
* put the strawberry and lemon seeds in a plastic take-out bowl with a wet paper towel and a lid, and set it outside to see if they will germinate
* made a jug of sun tea
* used the leftover strawberry "mush" to make an awesome strawberry bread in the bread machine (that I don't think I've used since we moved here 11 years ago!)
* tried my hand at building a solar oven. It didn't work because a) I started it too late in the day, and b) it needs some design kinks to be worked out. Put the soup (which is in mason jars) in the fridge, to try again. The soup is: 1 can each of peas, corn, green beans, mixed vegetables, turnip greens, and diced potatoes, and 1 box of beef broth. It makes exactly 4 qts.