You know you're gettin' older when ...

you're excited to be canning salmon on a Friday nite.

It was good luck in the dipnetting department.

Then on to the preservation of the delicious stuff ... all 40 pints, 12 quarts and 16 nice frozen fillets.

Pure scrumptious!

Our pressure cooker is not the oversized variety.

We can manage 7 jars at a time and it doesn't matter if they are quarts or pints.

No stacking pints in our cooker.

So it took a little longer than anticipated ...

and we ended up finishing it this morning rather than my last nite's cooked up dream.

We even canned a few fillets that were in the freezer from last year.

I might want to warn you.

We filled many of our jars with extra stuff.

I did label them ... and you can see the extra stuff in the jars if you're really worried.

Thank goodness.

Because the silver got some serious help from Jari.

Plenty of hot chili peppers tossed in these jars.

Enough that the salmon started cooking before it hit the pressure cooker.

It starts to give me a belly ache just looking at it.

Can't hardly believe that he's a Finn.

We're working at becoming self sustaining. (Is that the word?)

Not this winter yet.

Maybe next winter.

Can you imagine a life where you bought only a very small amount of things at the grocer? The rest was grown, fished, hunted, canned, frozen or dried at home? All while working full time seems a bit daunting.

I make routine trips to the greenhouse.

Some of the trips are to water and fertilize.

Some are to lament at the state of my cucumbers which are having issues this year.

Other times ... I just go count tomatoes.

Serious.

I don't dare count blooms ... I might get really confident if I did that.

Tonite there were about 59 of these little green things growing.

Anything round and green counts when I'm counting.

They certainly don't need to be a certain size to be proud of them.

They just have to exist.