I will be very happy when..........

canning season is over. Don't get me wrong. I love canning. I love that we have the opportunity to have all these wonderfully fresh local vegetables all year round. We are so very fortunate to be able to do this. But dudes, canning is a lot of work!!!! I spent Saturday cleaning off the space over our kitchen cabinets so that we could put some cans up there. We have a lot of stuff going to the thrift store as a result (our local thrift store supports our local Humane Society so we try to support it as much as possible). Here is what they look like right now:

Here is the side of our kitchen island (Slim added himself for scale):

Wayne and I spent Sunday doing this (pay no attention to that Bailey's in the background):

Those jars are full of roma tomatoes. I made some into sauce with garden fresh things like onions, garlic, eggplant, zuchinni and herbs. Most of the cans are just crushed tomatoes for soups and such.

Rest assured that if you are a family member I feel certain that you see a holiday gift or two on those shelves!! We haven't done a final count of everything we have canned but it would be interesting to count it all up and see how much we have done.

I am really excited though because our goal was to can enough stuff so that we didn't have to buy any canned goods at the grocery store this year for our soups over the winter. I think we are pretty darn close to that goal. We shall see. When it is cold we almost always have a pot of some sort of homemade soup going on!

Yesterday we planted beets, collard greens, brussel sprouts and spinach. We planted this in the lower garden so we'll go do more work in the upper garden probably next weekend. All of this gardening is a huge learning experience.

We have a trip to Atlanta planned for this week. I am going to Emory School of Nursing to help do some teaching for the new nursing students at orientation as they invited some of the alumi back to help. I am really excited about being able to do this so it will be fun. I love to teach and I love to help answer questions for the new students because they are always so excited and overwhelmed about the journey they are about to embark on. While I am there Wayne will run around town and get our shopping done. I better go through some closets and dig up a lab coat!!