While I was on a high adventure hike in the Uintas, Diane was home drying some beautiful appricots she picked. As Aprilyn mentioned, it is time for fall canning/drying once again. I don't know if my kids have good memories of canning season at our house or not, but we put up several things including green beans, peaches, pears, corn, tomatoes, grape juice and of course, strawberry jam. We probably still have some of those jars of food buried deep in our storage. We probably even have some jars of food DuRell put up years ago. Since eating was a family affair, we thought canning should be a family affair too. It was usually long days and in to the night before the project was complete, but together, we put up a lot of food. If you counted the cost of your time, perhaps it was not "profitable", but it was something we could all pitch in and do together. Perhaps lessons were learned in the process. Perhaps not. I still have good memories of sitting around at Grannie's home in the summer snapping green beans for canning. Neighbors would drop in and pick up a bowl of beans and start snapping as they visited and caught up on the news from each other. I learned that what I considered hard work was and enjoyable social experience for others.

I can see it all now if families were inclined to do home canning. Each person would have an IPOD plugged into their ears listening to their own music. This senario misses out on one of the blessings of canning together as a family.

The Uintas are still as beautiful as they always were. Nathan and I took off Friday after work and backpacked to long lake just as it got dark. Surprisingly, on August 16 there was heavy frost covering the tent and all the grass when we woke the next morning. Nothing a blazing camp fire couldn't take care of until the sun came up and warmed everything. We had a great time hiking and rock climbing.

Watch out kids at Wasatch Elementary School. Mrs Hatch will be teaching all these lucky kids music this year.

Congratulations Stefanie for successfully completing your degree at BYU. Now on to bigger and better things!

Pumpkin Update August 7 2008
As you can see the pumpkins are continuing to grow like crazy. There are two that are 57" around already. If they keep growing, who knows how big they will get. We are not competing for the biggest pumpkin at the fair, but it is fun to grow such a big one. There are probably 20 others started.

Now the real garden story for the week. Notice the corn patch is looking pretty good. We planted four rows every 2 weeks so we would have corn over a longer period of time and the first four rows I planted a early variety that only gets about 4' tall. Well as the ears were beginning to ripen, some animal went down all four rows and peeled the husk back and ate some of the tender corn. Almost every ear was ruined. We just figured it was a raccoon and expected he would be back for more of our tender corn. Mack decided he would put a stop to that so the next night he brought a spot light and his shotgun as well as a variety of other guns to see if he could eliminate the varmit before he destroyed the rest of the garden. I know it is difficult, but I would like you to picture this in your mind. Mack is sitting in his Suburban down wind of the garden so the corn destroyer will not pick up his sent. He is lying in the front seat with the seat reclined as far as possible. He set his watch to vibrate every 20 minutes and placed it on his forehead so it would wake him. I only wish I had a picture of him. That is dedication to the garden. Lucky for the raccoon, he did not appear that evening.

Now for the rest of the story:

Talking to a neighboring gardner down the road he is told there were two raccoons thrown in his dumster by someone. He was also told that the real corn killer might have been starling birds who also love corn. This reminds me of another story, but it it too long to tell tonight.

We have been enjoying a ton of squash, beans and swish chard. The tomatoes are just starting to ripen and I ate one of them tonight for dinner. It is nice to have fresh garden tomatoes even if we don't have very many yet.

Thank you Mack for your dedication to the garden. If we could find someone as dedicated about killing the noxious weeds we would have a beautiful garden. Any volunteers?

Fireball

I have considered creating a blog just to promote fireball activities, but I don't have very many pictures. If anyone has pictures of our fireball activities, would you please send me a copy? It is still unbelievable to most people I mention it to even with the pictures. Have you ever heard of anyone else who does such a crazy thing?