{Reset} Since I started again last week, I’ll call this week 2.
Plant: Transplanted mostly lettuce seedlings in the old potato bed, but I’m afraid they drowned in last week’s downpours; luckily I didn’t put in all of them, and I have many more waiting on the porch. I did drop a tray with mizuna seedlings, but I planted more as seeds directly in the garden.
Harvest: More green beans, dry beans, many more tomatoes, 1 cucumber, most of the basil. Amie and I collected 2 bags of acorns from our garden and the neighborhood and will experiment with processing them soon – though they already seem to have been re-purposed.
Preserve: Canned 8 more pints of apple* sauce, 14 more pints of blueberry* jam, 5 more pints of fig preserve, 6 pints of basic tomato sauce (half the tomatoes from my garden, half from the Farmers Market), 6 pints of peppers*. Froze 5 pints of pesto. Figuring out now what we’re going to do with the many potatoes we’re expecting from our potato bins.
Waste Not: On his return from work, DH is picking up coffee grounds from the local Starbucks again. Cleaned out basement of cardboard boxes, freecycled all of them, but the moldy ones. Computed our Riot for Austerity (post coming tomorrow).
Want Not: Purchased First Aid necessities, enough for home stash and two preparedness backpacks. Purchased 2 large bags of baking soda and 4 large bottles of vinegar (as that’s what I’m cleaning with now), and 5 lbs of sugar (though most of that’s gone now, after making all that jam). I also bought 4 humongous bottles of Ecover laundry detergent (206 loads each!), because they were on sale and I had coupons, though I had also stocked up on washing soda, Fels-Naptha soap and Borax, thinking to start making my own once I ran out of my last bottle of commercial detergent; they’ll keep.
Build community food systems: Contacted a couple who have been keeping a beehive for the last 30 years, quite close to where I live. They’ll help me get started in the Spring, if I’m ready – that is, if the garden is ready (no flowers!). Got the ball rolling (some more) on a possible Transition Town in my town (about that later).
Eat the food: Ate some (or most) of everything in the garden, and those jars that didn’t seal (one because there was a nick in the rim – missed that one – and one for unknown reasons), and those jars that didn’t fill up totally.
* = Farmers Market.