Green Beans and Tomatoes

 I planted one garden bed of green beans, and while it has produced abundantly, I jumped at the chance to go pick more to freeze for the winter. I took eight kids and nine ice-cream buckets and we headed to pick on our way to the water park. After our nine buckets were full, we had probably only picked 1/100th of what she wanted picked.

I headed to the van and found a new Costco bag that happened to be in the back; we all dumped our buckets and started over. Once our buckets were full a second time, we called it quits.

 I decided that a whole shelf of green beans in the freezer warranted the purchase of the Food Saver that I've had my eyes on for about three years. We delayed our arrival at the water park to stop at Costco to buy it. So you don't feel sorry for the children, they got a pizza lunch out of our stop. The excitement for me is that is was $20 off this month (which almost paid for our lunch).

  
We got to work that night cleaning, blanching and freezing the first several buckets. While we were working, my friend showed up who had finished picking the green beans but didn't want to deal with them.

 So, we added this many more -

 I did give plenty away, but we all worked hard to put them up over three days. Turns out that four and six year olds can cut green bean ends with small paring knifes. The first day was all fun, the next day Elijah complained that it was too boring - we compromised with 15 green beans.

Elijah learned to seal the ends of the empty bags and James took over sealing the full side. 

  
All the while we worked on green beans, my third round of salsa making tomatoes were turning red on the vine.

  
So, on Sunday, I finished green beans and added more jars to the salsa stash.