Today for me Is - "No canning day"

But officially today is mail order catalog day! Who Knew?   Here's what I found about this obscure holiday:

AAAAlthough Benjamin Franklin has a good claim to be the world’s first mail order entrepreneur, it is the anniversary of the first Montogomery Ward catalogue of 1872 that has provided the date for Mail Order Catalog Day. Over the intervening years, it grew from a single page of products to a monster capable of striking fear into the stoutest of postal workers!

Alas, the Montgomery Ward behemoth is no longer with us, having faded away in 1985, but stalwarts such as Sears still carry the torch, whilst the catalogue with the longest run to date, the Hammacher Schlemmer, still plies tools and building materials (no doubt including torches, should Sears ever drop theirs).

Celebrate the day in style by signing up for a few mail order catalogues and ordering some goodies. Running shoes are a great place to start, especially if your postman is not of a forgiving nature.

I've been looking at numerous things online today (and bought nothing) but try to get as few catalogs in the mail as possible, so hopefully am still in favor with the mail-persons. 

I've done very little today except pick some things from the garden. I've decided I cannot/will not can everyday for the rest of my time here. I should have done numerous other things today but didn't do those either.  But here's some pictures of the condition of things since last report.

West end of porch today

The Porch is on hold for the moment as the brake for doing siding is no longer available, but hopes are high it will get done before next summer. However it looks really great right now.

2011 picture of west end of porch

East porch with just decaying wallboard removed - see it on left?

East Outside new siding

East Porch Today

East porch after reframing

I need to get out there and do some scraping and painting of a few places on those windows that couldn't easily be sided.

Aside from the house, pretty flowers and  lots of stuff from the garden

Another gift from Dorothy-
it just got a major haircut

Side garden snapdragons-
thanks to Luci for starting 

Basket of snapdragons - thanks to Luci

Lots of fruit and vegetable processing last week. Continued with canning peaches - those are all gone now thank goodness; They aren't freestones so take a lot of work to use them. Besides canning made jam, peach butter, many peach desserts, peach chutney, spiced peach pickles, sauteed them, used them in recipes and gave a fair amount away.  Also continuing to make Apple sauce - one of my neighbors is anxious to get rid of some of their apples - think they have 7 or 8 trees - and I have some of my own. Since this is so simple to make, I always help them out.  This week my sister-in-law brought me Asian pears. Have been trying out things with those too - eating is good but also using in salads, cole slaw, pear cobbler, and made pear sauce (like applesauce but harder to do).  

Tomatoes about to be canned

Have pulled all the cabbage and have sauerkraut fermenting. Will can that at end of week. Also have a head tightly wrapped in refrigerator and one in the freezer that I hope to make cabbage rolls with when I get back to FL. Will be interested to see how that works out; many folks on the internet are doing it.  Eating lots of homemade cole slaw too.  

Canned my first tomatoes and some donated by my sister-in-law since our are very slow in turning red. Have made a couple batches of salsa when had a few ripe tomatoes, but never enough to make it worth canning tomatoes until got some extras. Also canned some hot pepper jelly and some cowboy candy (sweet jalapeno pickles). 

Yellow pepper and squash soup

Still getting yellow squash - making the squash with the stuffing as well as trying new recipes.  And get zucchini from various friends and have ma zucchini bread, zucchini chocolate cake, zucchini curry soup, and zucchini oatmeal cookies, along with zucchini casseroles.

Also made two different squash soup recipes and eating and freezing those as well as some vegetable soup I made. Also eating and freezing green beans. Nelson eating lots of white corn he's grown - I get an ear now and then. Have frozen some green peppers too - hope to make stuffed peppers with them once back in FL.

Been a busy few weeks...

And Ugh, ugh, ugh - I discovered this afternoon that there has been some rodent activity again that wasn't there Saturday.. so had to work on cleaning up everything that might have been touched..   I knew there was at least one up in the attic and put some "get rid of rodents stuff" up there last week, but hadn't seen any sign of them downstairs since beginning of July.  Seen none in person downstairs since then. Hoping to see no more signs.