Garlands on…. Bottom one of ribbon made by me as a child
On Thursday the work on the tree continued in the morning. My helper friend was going to be here, so while I worked on the tree, he had a few jobs to do.
We have 4 large freezers, 3 mostly with meat. In the event the power goes off for an extended time, I’ve laid in kosher salt. I’ll be able to salt the meat down to save it. I put in the first lot of salt storage back when we had 2 freezers. I wanted to have more on hand, now there are 4. So he went to the store and got 30 lbs and put it into the gallon water jugs I’d saved and dried for the purpose.
Next he went out and dug the last of the parsnips and washed them up.
I have had very good results from storing carrots in the drawer in the fridge in vacuum sealer bags I’ve made. I do not seal them, but cut 3 small holes across the width about 3” apart each way, up the length of the bag. If you look hard you can see them in the above photo.
So I thought I’d do an experiment with parsnips and see if they would also store. Then he was to dice up 3 quarts of them for making hash. But plans change.
Once the garlands were on, I had gotten the ornaments unwrapped and hung on the hangers.
Glass bead ornaments on left by the bear from grandfather
Some of these ornaments came from my husband’s grandfather’s and my grandmother’s collections.
The old fashioned wire ones center right above pillow from my grandmother
Others, like the construction paper ones were made by me and my son as small children.
I had plenty of supervision during this process.
But later on she decided I was taking entirely too long putting her tree up, and if she couldn’t sleep under it on the skirt…. There’s always complaints about the service around here….
Tarps with parsnip row in October
After lunch he was finally going to get the soil test samples. It occurred to me that he could not do this with the tarps on the small garden. All the leaves and acorns were off the tree, there was no standing water on the tarps, so this would be the ideal time to get them off that garden.
The problem was that when we have taken them off in the past, they are pressure washed and hung to dry. I have been able to do this in the yard because the leaves have all been removed to the layer pen. But not this year… In the end we decided to just fold them up, put them in the Tonka garage until we could clean them and hang them to dry.
By the time we’d done that, I was exhausted, so no more work on the tree. He set about getting the soil sampling done.
So that was Thursday.
