So I have had most of a week pretty flat on my back. They did an epidural on Tuesday which is supposed to make things work better, but I had been told that the spinal injection would make things worse in the short run, so I did a batch of red sauce on Monday in anticipation of not being able to process tomatoes for the rest of the week.
I had a couple of gallons of Terhunes, which seemed a shame to just turn into sauce (downright blasphemous) so I did cut a center slice out of each tomatoes leaving me and Patti with a huge plate of tomato slices to enjoy the rest of the day. To go along with that was a few gallons of Riesentraube, Joe Lauerer, Nell’s Sweetheart, with a few Galina cherry tomatoes.
To add to the decadence, I cut, de-seeded, sliced, roasted, and pureed a couple gallons of Jimmy Nardello sweet Italian frying peppers which were added in as well. Finished it was 14 pints of sauce. The injection the next morning left me hobbling with a cane for most of the rest of the week, when I was upright at all.
So, instead of just doing nothing, I shelled beans and corn. In anticipation of not having a lot of processing time due to the baby, I grew a lot of beans meant to be harvested dry and used for soups or baking. We really do love beans this way anyway, and this year we probably have more than we can even possibly all eat over the course of the winter. While lying in bed, I worked my way through a couple of grocery bags full of them. Just mixed pods and not worrying about separating by type. I have saved seeds from most of the ones I plan on growing again, with only a few types left to segregate including some experimental types. They really are pretty just to look at.
I even started shelling some of the ears of corn. Just Wamneheza and Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara White. Both are flour corns, with the Wamneheza giving a light reddish/purple flour, and the white, well, white flour. Both are nice and sweet, though a pink or purplish cornbread can take some visual getting used to.
Most of it will say on the ears a little longer, especially the cobs I have selected for seed, to prevent damaging the seeds when shelling them. I harvest them from the plants as soon as they start to dry down to prevent loss to animals other than us. It can take a while for the central cobs to dry down completely and allow the kernels to be easily shelled from the cobs without damaging them. Not something I am worried about too much with the ones just used for grinding, but more of a concern when I want them to germinate in the future.
Well, that was as much as I could get done while laying down this week. My leg is coming back with the increased pressure from the injection going down and I am hoping to get out this weekend and get some more picking done. Today, finally, my leg is not worse than it was prior to the proceedure, so my hope is that tomorrow it will be actually better than it was and the thought of walking and picking up something will not be a horrifying prospect. There is a lot of squashes I should start pulling in, and I need to get back to the Arikara sunflowers, and Victor Kucyk corn here at some point, if just to select next year’s seed if nothing else. We need to get that harvested in bulk and hauled to David’s where we keep the chickens, since that is where we plan on having most of it converted into eggs. Lance Ness will do the same with his share I assume.
