The Bean Story, Canning, and Corn

canning season is hugely underway....and close to being done!  we brought apples home from grandma's house and bentley rode my bike up with the bike carrier, chugging in the 90 degree weather just so he could borrow an 'electric' grinder from our other grandma.  the kids were lots of help though!  we hit our applesauce quota.

then corn came on.  one friday morning bentley was pestering his siblings and kind of getting himself in trouble.  later that afternoon, he said 'mom, i just need a project.  i have to have something to work on to keep me busy!'  so...after an early morning temple session, saturday morning, i picked up some poster paper and we picked several dozen ears of corn in the heat!

and there you have it, another job!  (and more work for mom:)  we started selling corn, with bentley as the main picker and seller and profiter.  bridon helped some too, and made some money as well.  i was proud of bentley, he did end up making a good amount of money from people who bought for freezing and such (we gave a discount for big quantities which he thought was terrible) but he gave $10 of his money to the jordan valley donations...more to come on that later.

we froze corn as a family and the kids were great helpers and then had some great fun as well with all their cousins!  one of the funniest things that happened was one of ben's cousins came into pick (and she is a little....interesting).  bentley was picking to sell and told me he had not seen her up in the patch at all but that her van was in the field, so where was she?  i joked that maybe she was picking cow corn.  that wasn't a joke.  she stripped out a full loader bucket of seed corn from our field without even a clue.  then re-picked again.  it was a little wild!

we have also canned peaches and dried them and made jam.  bentley is my main food processor man and does the jam and tomatoes and such.  i love it!  i hate doing that job... we ended up with 5 boxes of peaches, when one box was hard to get off the pit and smashed up, our neighbor replaced it with 3.  we should be good on peaches!

 the girls and bridon help too.  they picked all the tomatoes and we have continually picked beans.  ellee sometimes has to take a little break.  here she is reading to one of her tame kittens we gave to joanna.  we have also pickled beets and made dill pickles, and i'm sure other things i am forgetting.

but onto our bean story.  so, i found out half way through the season that no beans had been planted along the field.  kathy bought beans and julie came and they did tons and tons all at once.  i just couldn't bring myself to buy them when i had put a lot of time into the garden, i just knew the Lord would provide.  and He did.  we got 5 pickings of beans!  and  a member of our ward offered us more, which we took him up on one basketful.  we could have picked even more from the garden...but alas, both ME and THE KIDS were beaned out.  we picked and snapped and picked and snapped and listened to hank the cowdog books while we worked away to the point of them thinking they hate beans now.  but we'll take a break and they'll taste good this winter!  a funny story about the patio bean picture.  this was just after we had a huge crackup session over bridon being 'panhandled' by idaho (after he asked where lava hotsprings is, which i said was near pocatello...the big part of the state he got hit with.)  poor kid got whipped by a wooden idaho sign i had sitting by the back door when ben came home and thought he was shirking his bean picking duties and playing on the swather instead.  that is a story for the records!!  we were laughing at bridon's expense and ben can never live that one down.