harvest time

Some days my children are real blessings and some days I would like to send them far, far away. Right before we left for Virginia to pack out I stopped by the local wild blueberry grower and bought a 15 pound box of berries to freeze for winter. I also have been shredding carrots for carrot cake, putting up green beans and broccoli in the freezer, and cooking up paste tomatoes to freeze as well. A trip to Sears to buy a chest freezer has been in the works, but in the meantime I put all this produce in the freezers in the house and apartment. Well, you likely can figure out what happened this past week.

Will was attempting to be frugal by seeing that there was nothing in the apartment fridge and turned down the dial inside, ruining all the food inside the freezer: 3 huge ziplock bags of blueberries, 3 bags of shredded carrots, and a couple of bags of green veggies. He was very apologetic, but I made him bag it all up and bring it down so I could take it to the dump. All that time I spent planting, weeding, mulching, harvesting, washing, and blanching were wasted. You can't buy blueberries now, the season only lasts a few short weeks in August. Luckily we still have plenty of green beans and broccoli left in the garden, some carrots still in the ground and some of each in the house freezer. We still have lots of pumpkin to eventually roast and freeze so a big free-standing freezer is not a waste, but I'm very disappointed that we won't be eating homemade blueberry muffins all winter like I planned. There is always next year and I think Will learned his lesson, but I'm sure this won't be the last time one of the children acts like a thoughtless child.