And there's more!

Finally we got some Amish Paste tomatoes that are as big
as advertised. I kept the seeds from that really big one, let's
see what we can do next year!

The Pumpkin weight training schedules continued this week as the pumpkins have been moved in and out of the greenhouse several times in order to dry them off in the sun. Hopefully that way they will last a long time. Added to the tomato challenge - lugging several kilos of tomatoes up three flights of stairs, it all has just got to be good for me, if I don't perish in the effort that is. The end is in sight for the harvesting though, all the carrots are now up and in the process of being got ready for long term storage (small ones dried, juiced or added to chutney, large ones to go in baskets with sawdust), and some of the tomatoes got some blight on them so they were pulled up - green tomato chutney anyone? That leaves the Borlotti beans, French beans, runner beans and beetroot to deal with soon, along with the hamburg parsley but there is no rush for that yet, it will stand a little frost. It does feel like a mammoth task at times, as we are stood over the sink sorting the veg out, but it will soon be over. Once those temperatures dip below freezing we will be just about finished for the year - well food wise. We have until the snow comes for me to do some observations and data gathering on wild boar activity for my course and Ian will be sorting out the woodland again, that should keep us busy for just a bit longer.

Sorry the picture is not so good as that is in our barn on
my camera phone. This makeshift shelving holds our larger
carrots

We have had a bit of an exciting time this week. We are in the process of making the access road onto our land legal, which involved one of our neighbours helping us to fill out forms at the office dealing with roads for the area, and then we had to drive the lady in the office to our land to look at the access road and then drive her back to her office - a round trip of 90 km, not exactly a little jaunt. In the process of driving the lady backwards and forwards, we also gave a lift to another neighbour of ours who also had to be in Madona. It all got a little complicated, but it worked out in the end and everybody was happy, including the lady from the office. She didn't speak a lot of English but she declared the siting of the road was "good." The next part of the process is to get it sorted out and accepted by the local council offices but we were a bit too busy to sort that out this week.Okay that might not sound too exciting to you but getting everything legitimate is important to us.

And errr... there's some more, and doesn't
include the bag full of small ones we dried.
juiced and made into chutney. We really
need some animals next year to help us out.

Unfortunately though in the process of doing all that, the gorgeous morning turned into an afternoon of rain which scuppered any chance of getting in some more buckwheat, we had to wait until the next day to do that. We still headed out to the land though after dropping our neighbour off so that we could pick up a spare windscreen wiper, which just happened to be in our workshop out on the land, as the one we were using was driving us mad with the noise it was making. We were only on the land about 10 minutes before driving off, but in the meantime three cars had parked at the bottom of our road. One was a police car, one was a national tv car (LNT) with camera crew and another turned out to be the bomb disposal squad. We had found a grenade with a pin in it and our friend who was visiting us over the weekend helpfully phoned the police for us and told him about it. About an hour later he turned up and saw it and told us he would bring the bomb squad out to get it at a later date but we didn't need to be there. Funnily enough the policeman was dressed very smartly the second time we saw him, unlike the casual attire he was wearing when he came to make his initial inspection. Wonder if it was for the camera crew? They even interviewed me in English, very funny but I hope they didn't really show it.

This weeks's harvest of tomatoes. 

Well this is a short and sweet blog this week (do I hear my kids saying "thank goodness for that?") but it has been a busy morning continuing processing tomatoes and getting our home in some semblance of clean for a special visitor. More next week.

And yes there are still more to ripen