Crazy Saturday

Our garden froze yesterday. That's not really that unusual in Utah for the first week in October although we have had times when we have been out picking beans and tomatoes for Thanksgiving dinner. The problem with that was that we already had a full day.

We started in the morning at 9:00 with the Home Depot class I signed up for two months ago. Then Bossy took Sport and Taco for their fitting for the Nutcracker. I think I told you they are both Party Boys while I went the other direction for the Flag Football game with Curly and Scout. They had pictures afterward and the fittings took longer than expected so when we converged again at the house we had about 5 minutes for Sport to throw on his football gear before we headed to Woods Cross for his game. After some quick instruction to the kids to pick everything in the garden and bring it inside for later, we got on the road.

I texted his coach on the way to tell him we would be about 10 minutes late for warmups. I didn't want our tardiness to affect Sport's playing time. They typically meet over an hour early so they can get ready for the game so he still had plenty of time before they took the field. I managed to grab a 20-minute power nap in the car before my sweetie and I moved to the sidelines to watch the game.

Sport did well and they beat their opponent 12 - 0. After the game we raced back across the valley. I called Princess and had her get the kids and the gift ready for my niece's wedding so that when we arrived we only took about 15 minutes to load everyone and get on the road to Orem. I was glad that Bossy offered to drive. I'm not sure I would have been a good choice. My sweetie wanted a box of peaches so we stopped at a couple of fruit stands where we met the Drama Queen. Then we all made our way to the wedding.

Half an hour later we were on the road again. We stopped by Hobby Lobby and picked up most of the beads I need for my scout meeting on Friday. Then we dropped the kids at Bossy's house to pick the rest of her frozen garden. The Drama Queen and I stopped at the grocery store and bought a 25-lb bag of onions and then we picked up some pizza. We met up again at the house and got started on the piles of half frozen tomatoes. It was 8:30.

My sweetie was able to cook down 2 pots full before he and Dog Walker dressed and headed to the stake center for the Priesthood session, so that gave us a good start. For the past few years we have taken all of our green tomatoes, peppers, etc. and turned them into green salsa or enchilada sauce. It's a great way to use what we've been given without wasting the harvest. Besides, it makes wonderful Cafe Rio-syle pork and we almost all love that!

Many hours later, all the sauce is in a huge pot ready to cook down. This community effort took nearly everyone. Little kids husked tomatillos and peeled garlic. Bigger kids washed and cleaned bell peppers and chopped onions. We wanted the majority of the work to be done on Saturday since we try really hard not to work on Sunday. We missed the morning session of general conference because of the games so we pulled it off of lds.org and listened to it while we worked.

About 12:30 went sent all the kids to bed including Bossy's. By 2:30 we were in a good place and Bossy climbed in her car as my sweetie and I climbed the stairs. We will just have to do a bunch of stirring today while we watch conference, in fact, my sweetie is putting the pots on the stove now. I will give you a final tally of the number of jars tomorrow. It takes 2 quarts to make a big batch of sweet pork for my family. I'm hoping we get enough to have it once a week for pretty much the entire year!

I'll let you know.


For Marci, from Bossy.  This is my garden in June.  Mine is approximately 30ft X 40ft. I think Mom's is about 30ft x 50ft.  I have my pumpkins growing in another place.  In this photo we have an open 6 feet between the corn and zucchini for additional corn we had just planted.  The closest fence has tomatillos (green husk tomatoes) which haven't come on yet.  The rows on the right continue up to the house and are roughly 12 ft long.