La La La La La....

Annie Kelley picked a peck of pickled peppers....

 Beautiful sweet banana peppers, all ready for pickling.  Have I told you how much I love pickled stuff ?  Peppers, beets, green beans, okra, onions...green tomatoes,  jalapenos, cucumbers, mixed veggie pickles, garlic.  Yum.  I love it and I make it and I eat it. And I share it.  I'm always surprised by how much other people like it too.

 This was a beautiful harvest of peppers and okra.

I dehydrated some of it, to use all winter in soups and stews. And I pickled the majority of it, because that's what I love. lol

  I have been dehydrating lots of tomatoes and even some cucumbers. In fact there's a dehydrator in there right now, screaming to be unloaded and bagged.  lol  Sitting on top of jars of stuff that are crying out to be labeled and put away. There was a small bowl of carrots and onions sitting on the counter, but I pretty much got that taken care of.   lol

  The garden is winding down.  There is edamame out there drying on the vine. The butternuts are almost ready to be picked.  We harvested about a hundred and thirty pounds of potatoes  this week. They are all laid out in the garage on  big tables curing a bit. (AND--waiting for me to get that spare room cleared up. Arrgghhh...that's the room that turns into a big throw-and-go..a repository for everything that has no where else to go. And food storage. All the butternuts get laid out on cardboard and slid under the bed. The year's sweet potatoes go into wooden boxes and are stored in there, as well as the regular potatoes).  Good thing we rarely have company that needs to use that room.  lol There's another pantry in there that is mostly full of cleaning stuff and small appliances...the makings for laundry soap, dish soap, extra bottles of vinegar, and any other cleaning supplies I have extras of. Oh, and water storage. At any given time we have upwards of 40 gallons of spring water in there in gallon vinegar jugs in milk crates that we drink and rotate regularly.  There might be some fruit butters and pickled jalapenos in there...During the course of the year, everything in there gets tossed in, rummaged around,  and  generally made a big mess. So,  today I have someone coming over who is going to help me with a few projects over the next few weeks, and hopefully get some stuff straightened up and cleaned out.  That room is number one on the list.  I warned her. LOL  And she is still willing.  We'll see if she runs screaming from the building once she actually sees it.

  We live in the country in a 1400 sq ft doublewide.  It doesn't really look like a mobile home, but it is. It does have a big attached garage, and a 200 sq ft apartment on the back on the garage, both of which are on a concrete foundation.  I don't have a basement, or a root cellar (yet).  But it is 3 bedrooms, one of which is this office, which all have gigantic walk-in closets. The closets in this room and the spare bedroom  have both been turned into pantries.

 Both closets have metal food grade racks on one wall that I bought. This pantry has one full wall of shelves that my son built in for me, as well as a short wall of floor to ceiling wooden built in deep shelves.  

So really, lots of storage here, even without a basement. (Which is, of course, one of my dreams).

I also store a lot of dry goods, staples, like beans and flour and sugar and pasta and rice--as well as all the fruits and veggies that I grow and dry,  or buy at ridiculous sale prices and dry (pineapples at 59 cents apiece !)...

 And then a there are some canned goods, like tuna and evaporated milk and other stuff that I buy when they're on sale (never frivolous stuff...always food and ingredients with a mind to what I can use it for. Always nutritional foods, like canned fish and pumpkin and oats and stuff)  and there's a metal rack for that. 

  So...enough bragging on my stores for now.  Just know that if you really want to find places to store things, you can. There are all kinds of nooks and crannies in every home that are under-utilized or completely unused. My home will never make it into the pages of Better Homes and Gardens, lol,  but we LIVE here.  And we LOVE here.  And we can live out our days here.  And we are prepared for just about any type of emergency that comes along.

  At my age...that's more than good enough.  That's a wonderful life.




Bon Apetit !!