Kind of productive weekend, and chicken counting.

[ritaxis]

Tomorrow I get my students back, and their babies.  Rumor has it I will have two new babies -- possibly more later?  I looked at the class list with the teacher of recford but she has an ELD (English language development, pullout support for second-language learners, what we have instead of bilingual education nowadays thanks to the Texan influence on education)  class on the same roster and she didn't know who was who, and she was told she had six teenaged mothers out of the lot.  I recognized two returnees, of whom one has her child in preschool.  I also know I have three babies who aren't in her class, so four babies and also one girl I think is supposed to be on that list but I don't recall seeing her name (hmm.  She ought to be on the list).  She was sort of frantic because she also has two thirty+ -student classes in the same room and it was currently set up with one big horseshoe table which could fit maybe twelve students.  It's big enough for the desks she needs but as of Friday it needed a lot of work to get there.

So Saturday Frank and I stripped the plum tree.  I decided against making wine this year because the plums didn't get all that sweet or flavorful.  But when I started processing the plums for jam, cans, and drying, I noticed they were pretty good.  Just as well about the wine though because by the time I did strip them there were not enough good ones to make a whole batch of wine.  But now I have eight jars of tremendously wonderful almost black satsuma plum jam -- tastes more like blackberry, really: six pints of canned plums to eat with cottage cheese: and five trays of dried plums.  Also a plum clafoutis (kind of.  Sliced plums, a tad of thinned plum jam as a kind of gklaze, topped with a thin layer of custard that turned totally magenta in the cooking and a sprinkle of almond meal and a tiny bit of sugar)and a jar of plum syrup and another bowl of plums.  Also I made banana bread with three of my frozen bananas and a bunch of last year's dried fruit and mostly almond meal and a but of that weird "white" whole wheat flour (not very good flour, but it's okay in banana bread where you don't notice the flour anyway).

This year I have also canned eight jars (mostly 24 ounce jars) of tomatoes and three pints of tomato juice and five jars of escabeche (chiles and carrots in vinegar --mostly carrots because that's the part of the escabeche I actually like) and eight jars of peaches and ten jars of pears, and I have dried several batches of other sorts of plums and four trays of pears. And I made eight little jars of "wild" plum jam (the tiny yellow round ones from around the corner) I want to do another six jars of tomatoes and probably half a dozen each of bread-and-butter pickles and garlic dill pickles.  Then I think I'll put up a dozen or so jars of applesauce and maybe apple juice as well.  I'm munching on the dried apples I made a few years ago: they have softened some and now they're suddenly delicious, so maybe I'll dry some of the apples too, just not make them as crispy as I did before when I decided I didn't like them.

Also.  Got my friend Paul over and we pruned the apricot tree to a faretheewell because it hadn't gotten pruned properly in a while and it only fruits on new wood.  Hopefully we did it soon enough and there will be a lot of apricots next year.  Mostly pruned the plum tree too.  Have to bite the bullet and spray everything really well this winter.

And.

I got the loan on the house restarted and it looks very good indeed.
.

And interest rates dropped again since January so even though I think I'm tacking on Frank's tuition for this year the whole thing will still cost less, and will result in lower monthly payments especially after I immediately pay off every last debt I have.  And Zack will start building as soon as we have the money for materials, and will move in during the spring, and that will be a load off my mind.

And -- as usual -- the loan officer's daughter was a classmate of Frank's.

Today I am officially off work but I am finishing putting my room together for tomorrow!  Also getting my whooping cough booster and mailing that damned Clue game to Glen.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

You've been productive!

I'm always impressed at the jam and canning and general preserving projects. Minnesota is not as awash in fruit as California, but my innate laziness is the biggest reason I do so little. (Although we haven't gotten a tomato off the plants yet this year; they got planted late due to a snafu with plans for getting seedlings from a friend, and have not prospered; other gardens are producing tomatoes).

[tavella.livejournal.com]

How often do you prune around here (well, you are in a more maritime part of this area than me, but still close?) My landlord's gardeners have been pruning the peach tree multiple times this summer. I didn't say anything until a couple of weeks ago, when they started pruning off some of my lovely not quite ripe peaches. I got them to stop, but now I'm wondering what I should instruct them to do later.

Where I'm from, you only prune a fruit tree once a year, usually sometime after the fruit has been picked, and you definitely don't prune during the summer once the blossoms are set, that's the time for the tree to put nutrient into the fruit and its root system. Is it different here, or different for peaches?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Summer pruning is your friend in California, but several times in the summer indicates to me that the gardeners don't actually know what kind of thing they are pruning. Especially since they wanted to prune off the fruit! Once when you're thinning the fruit to get rid of wild sporty sprouts, and then once when the tree is done and all the fruit is off is good. And thinning shouldn't be done by cutting off the twigs but by twisting off the fruit.

Apricots especially do not want to be spring pruned at all, because they bear fruit on the newest wood (I just relearned this and I think that's why I haven't had a heavy year lately).

The other fruits almost all bear on two or three year wood, so they like a bit of winter pruning.

In our area, anything in the rose family, if it thrives at all, must be summer pruned at least a bit or you will be living in Sleeping Beauty's castle in no time.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

That sounds a lot more reasonable. They seemed like they were just trimming it to be neat, not treating it as a fruit tree. They seem to be basically mow and trim the bushes type gardeners, more lawn care than anything.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Wow, what a lot of work, and lovely things to eat! I'm so glad the loan will work out.