Your Friday Rumination

Only good things are coming your way—and you deserve every one of them.

—Puck, who loves the sweet summer clover and really wanted to say hi when he was done chowing down

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Here’s What’s Happening At Good Spirits Farm

For a hot second, I had dreams of going to the nearby county fair tonight. I love marinating in the pure Americana vibes, seeing all the livestock and crafts, and licking the powdered sugar and grease off my fingers post funnel cake. But then I remembered: It’s canning season. I need to be in the kitchen tonight. (And tomorrow. And Sunday.)

The apple trees always drop their apples way too early. It’s some sort of blight that I haven’t found an organic treatment for. So: All the too-tart apples need to be gathered off the ground and processed into sauce and apple chutney. I may dry a few for throwing into oatmeal this winter, too.

I live for pickled peppers, so the banana peppers will get chopped into rounds and canned in bracing salt and vinegar for spicing up meals all year long. The tomatoes, which are abundant, are a winter canning project. Years ago, I learned the ultimate tomato canning hack: Put your sauce tomatoes in freezer bags as they ripen for canning during the slower winter months. This solves three big problems: First: all the tomatoes are rarely ready at once, so you end up hauling out your canning pot 3-4 times a summer. Second: August is an outrageously busy month, and making sauce is a CHORE. Third: As the frozen tomatoes thaw, they shed the water you’d normally have to boil off while making sauce, and they slip right out of their skins. Seriously, if you’re a tomato canner, this trick will change your life!

I know these crazy long work days won’t last forever, and soon I’ll have cans of food in the pantry to pull from when summer’s abundance has evaporated. But the grind to get through these last busy eight weeks or so is exactly that—a grind.

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Here’s What I Loved This Week

This volunteer sunflower growing out of the poo pile. Even the bad things in our lives can contain little bits of beauty.