Girls coming home tomorrow

I have really started to miss them this week. Apparently Miriana reciprocates. She has been calling us each of the last 3 night at bedtime just to hear our voices. She also likes to read us a story over the phone. Anyway, they'll be back tomorrow, and I can't wait.

I picked green beans yesterday and ended up with a heaping colander full. With just us here, that's way too many to eat in the next couple days, so I decided to try out the 23 quart Presto pressure canner I bought last year. Everything went smoothly and easily. It took a total of 1 1/2 - 2 hours to go from fresh picked beans to 6 jars of sealed and preserved beans. I was able to do it all myself very easily and I think I actually prefer the pressure canner to the water bath canner. There seems to be a lot less mess for some reason. The biggest thing is to make sure that the pressure gauge get to and stays at the correct pressure the whole processing time. That means that I had to make minute adjustments to the heat settings throughout the 20 minutes that the jars processed.

The tomatoes are starting to finally come on decent. I had to boost them with some general fertilizer which helped a lot. However, they hang directly above the pepper plants and so any excess water from the buckets drips onto the pepper plants. I did not think about that when I also fertilized the pepper plants. So the peppers got direct fertilizer and indirect fertilizer and now they are dead. Oh well, this is my 3rd year trying to grow peppers and my 3rd failure. Maybe I'll skip them next year. I seem to be good at green beans and tomatoes, so I'll stick with them for now.