September Review

Just the other day I looked at the date on my last post here and realized that it was the end of September and I didn`t post once in the month.

These are a few things I did in September.

Starting first with some canning.  I had received from mother-in-law who did a lot of canning over many years, her canning equipment.  

We bought 20lbs worth of peaches and decided to give it a go.  My husband gave me a hand and it was definetely a two man job.   I had followed instructions as per my mother-in-law, as well checked out some websites.   The first time it seems like you have so many pots and equipment going on at the same time, but I could see this being enjoyable once you know what you are doing.

We blanched the peaches and removed the skins packed them in the sterilized jars and then poured a syrup in the jars (2 cups of sugar to 4 cups of water)  I put my syrup in a kettle on the stove, it made it much easier to pour into the jars.  We used pint sized jars,  as it suited  our needs better.   We made approximately 18 jars in total.  Which I`m sure  will be sharing.

We had planted  approximately 12 tomatoe plants in the garden this year.   We had a couple cherry tomatoe plants as well that gave us lots of tomatoes (all at once of course), but the regular tomatoes took a long time to blossom and then to ripen.  We brought all of them in recently and put them in a box covered with newpaper.  Also lined our kitchen window with some that were nearly ripened.

This Sunday I decided to give canning a try..   After checking out some sites on canning, I found that it was recommended after removing the tomatoe peels to put the tomatoes in a pot and bring them to a 5 min boil.   Since I had never canned tomatoes before this is what I did.    We put as many  tomatoes we could in a jar along with some hot tomatoe juice and lemon juice, it was starting to look more like tomate sauce.     Next time I will cook down the tomatoes and make tomato sauce.   Ideally the best tomatoes would have been Roma tomatoes for this, but that is not what we had.

All in all I`m very happy at how much we made.  Not sure how many pounds we had, maybe 8-10 lbs.  

Onto some knitting.   This is Current.  I have had this pattern for awhile and once I had the right yarn I decided to make this for the summer.  It`s a super light summer weight  and the only thing I can say about it, is that I have to stop knitting cardigans in light blue colours in Madelinetosh yarn. This one looks so similar to this one.  

This is one pattern that I had made many times.  This I made for my nephew`s  5 year old daughter`s birthday this summer.  I had made her mom one and then her oldest sister, so it seemed  right that she would get one too.  These bright colours were exactly what  she liked.   I found one skein of yarn that had them all !!!    The family was so impressed that I had all her favourite colours in that one beret.   Here are my notes.    

I could have shared all this with you in one month instead of fitting it all on day, but like they say `better late than never`   Today is the first of October so I`m starting my month in a good way.   My first post.

Alice