Excellent Lunch + Diseased Trees = Life As Usual

My breakfast/lunch yesterday was: one homemade pita slathered with yogurt cheese and topped with caramelized onion and roasted tomatoes from the freezer. A damn fine repast! I will be making a donkey load of the roasted tomatoes next summer.

I have also come to realize that my tomato canning may get a whole lot easier next year if I use my Kitchenaide food strainer which I used to use for applesauce. It removes the skin and seeds while plunking your pulp in your bowl- brilliant! Why did I waste so much time blanching and squishing the seeds out by hand?

Speaking of tomato sauce...for those of you who are aware of my dissatisfaction with my marinara sauce made with home canned tomatoes (although plenty of tomato flavor, it lacked sprightliness and always turned out dull compared to the sauce I make with commercially canned tomatoes) I followed some suggestions and added some red wine vinegar to a sauce I made a couple of days ago and it turned out great! I think the home canned are just too sweet and they need more acid added to them to really shine.

After last week's Master Gardening class I made a courageous decision to be brutal in my garden and not suffer super weak and diseased specimens to linger for years in hopes of rehabilitation. The weak plants get shovel pruned. I had in mind my Pink Pearl apple tree which has been showing distressful signs of disease at the bud union. I think it's apple canker, though I plan to get some official help from my mentor in the class. After taking the above picture I examined all my young fruit trees and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them is showing signs of disease at the bud union. If I am right about what they have, then chances are good that all of them will have to be destroyed and some major amendment will have to take place in the soil before replanting. A new strategy will have to be employed.

You would think this would distress me. It actually isn't much. I mean, it's an awful waste of a couple hundred dollars, but I want to do it right. I want the best plan possible for the long term. So a chance to do it right is not a bad thing.

I found the deed to our property yesterday while doing some clean up and discovered that our yard isn't 10,000 square feet, it's just over 14,200 square feet which means it's just under a third of an acre. That's really cool! I have always wanted to describe my yard in terms of acreage and be able to say "I have a quarter of an acre" but never thought I'd be able to.

Yes, yes, I am very shallow. So sue me.

(That's such a nineties expression huh?!)

Well, I'm off to the psychiatrist to report that I'm still quite tired all the time but at least I've cut my beer consumption by 75% for the last two weeks. Anyone who knows us knows what a tremendous accomplishment that is.