Yes, I’ve been absent a long time again from here. The owners of our new house had a couple of plum trees that they offered us, so we picked them over the past two weeks. I bottled a lot, froze some, and cooked a lot down for juice and fruit leather. Yum! 
A local farmer, cousin to our current landlord, raises peas for seed. He called us a week ago to say that we could pick what we wanted for eating, from the edge of the field. We spent three days doing peas from there, picking a couple of bushel a day, then shelling them all, and blanching and freezing. I just finished blanching and packing the last ones while I got all these blog posts up. I use a large steamer to blanch them, putting them in boiling water for 1.5 minutes, then set the steamer down in cold water. Then, I drain them and put a kilogram of peas in each bag–that’s about what we eat in a meal. During the 2 minutes or so it took for the water to come back to a boil each time, I was able to work on blog posts. We have a total of 44 kilos for the freezer–it is so nice to have them for all winter!
This is how Mom shells peas! I read aloud while we shell them, to keep the crew happy and busy. This little fellow had just fallen asleep on me, and ended up in that position for awhile!
The final product.
