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Saturday, August 19, 2023

Maters and Friends

55, cool, crisp, heavy dew. Perfect morning..

We made a quick trip across the Ohio River this morning to pick tomatoes. There are several truck farms over there, and acres of tomatoes. Acdes and acres. While the plants are blighted, they are still absolutely loaded with tomatoes. We got about 5 -6 bushels, which will mostly go into tomato juice, and some for pasta sauce. 

Tomatoes almost as far as the eye can see, and the same in tbe other direction.


I think I have my work cut out for me!


I played hooky from canning yesterday and spent the day with friends. I picked up Nancy, who is visiting from Arizona and we headed out on a daylong ramble. I met Nancy's husband Don when we were building our house, back in 1975. He was 19, I was 24. He had bought 23 acres od forest from a timber company that had divided a huge tract into parcels. The road was impassable, even worse than ours at the time. Don built a small cabin using vertical logs, coming back in summer months to work on it, but never really finishing it. His cabin is primitive, no running water or electricity, and down a very steep bank. Since he retired several years ago he and Nancy have come back almost every year, and he continues to work on his cabin. Tbese days the road is mostly drivable with a 4WD.

So, Nancy and I set off for Ravenswood to meet my friend Patricia. I had cabbage plants for Patricia,  and she had some Chinese cabbage plants for me. We met at the Sayre cabin at Ravenswood's riverfront park. The cabin is part of the museum; built in the 1800s, it was moved from a local farm to the park where it could be preserved. The museum curator has developed an interesting garden including flowers, veggis and herbs, so Patricia, Nancy and I had a good time exploring the small but well maintained space.



Nancy and I in the garden. Being an Arizona for the past 20 years, she doesn't remember a lot of our eastern plants.


Then we were off for a drive along the river, and over to a church-run thrift, where we both found some nice vintage linens.  By then it was lunch time, so we met my friend Rachel at Farmhouse Market Finds in Ripley,  where I have a booth. We browsed the store, had a nice lunch, then went to Rachel's to see her stained glass.  Nancy works in stained glass, and Rachel's late husband was also a stained glass artist, so they had much to talk about.

Finally we stopped at my friend Sherry's store, West Virginia Artisan Center, to shop a bit more, and then finally home. It was a fun day and I was glad to have this time with friends, something that gets more important with age.

Now I must get back to the kitchen. I have all these tomatoes plus our homegrown ones, a couple gallons of cherry tomatoes, yellow squash, peppers, some corn, wild chanterelle mushrooms we found the other day, and wild elderberries we picked this morning, all to get worked up and stored away in the next few days.
Wish me luck!

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

15 comments:

  1. Those tomatoes would cause envy in my wife. Her tomato plant this year produced only two big tomatoes and the other one only about a dozen cherry tomatoes. I'm curious about a vertical log cabin. Can't imagine that.

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    1. I will post some photos of the cabin, Catalyst. He chose that method because it was doable by one person. Of course, in the end he had made many friends, including us, and had a good bit of help here and there.

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  2. What a fun day with friends...and gadzooks, have you got a lot of tomatoes there!!

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    1. Yes, it was too many! I kept yelling Larry we had enough but he wanted to fill every container we had with us lol. So we gave 3 bushels to our young neighbor.

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  3. Oh my goodness- I can’t believe how many tomato plants there are!! Do share what you end up doing with them. I always like to see what other people do and how they do it. - Jenn

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    1. I canned 50 quarts of juice and 20 of pasta sauce, then gave away the rest! Tomorrow I hope to make your chili sauce again.

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  4. You had a good day, but will that cabin ever get built?

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    1. I kinda doubt Don will ever actually finish the cabin, AC, but it works as is for his needs.

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  5. You've got your work cut out for you with those tomatoes! Dons cabin sounds interesting, something I would like to see/work on.

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    1. I will post a couple photos of his cabin soon, Jim.

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  6. You found tomato heaven. :)

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    1. Truth! And we picked about 5 more bushels today, but these were for a friend who couldn't get out to pick them herself.

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  7. I have one very small memory of a tomato farm from my childhood. I remember the heat, being up on a pasture hill and tomatoes everywhere. Many had begun to rot in the heat and the sour smell of them was not pleasant either. But my Momma frugal woman that she was picked through them and loaded up many to can that year. She never did that again, but was content to grow more of her own from that point onward. She still canned them, but made sure they were well taken care of with no stench to deal with.
    You surprise me often with your posts, I find so many of my memories lurking around your paragraphs.
    I loved the garden photos too. I'd love the garden and the cabin to come with it.
    Annie

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  8. Goodness, that is a lot of tomatoes. You deserved your day out because you're certainly going to be busy processing so much. good luck.

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