hail storm

There was a big hail storm yesterday. At first I was worried about our tomatoes. It turned out that all the large tomatoes were fine, but a bunch of the still-green pear and cherry tomatoes got knocked off their vines. We'll have to pickle them or something. The real damage was to the chard, as you can see above. This compelled me to harvest much of the chard: a total of 5 lbs.

This much chard fills up our 16 quart pot. I'm getting pretty good at quickly blanching and freezing large amounts of chard:

1. Rinse a large handful in a large bowl or bucket.
2. Chop with knife.
3. Put in pot with a few inches of water.
4. Steam until soft, stirring often.
5. Rinse in cold water.
6. Put in freezer bags (in sheets for breaking later)

freezing spinach

I froze some of the spinach from our garden so we can enjoy it in the winter.  After picking and rinsing it, I chopped the spinach roughly, steamed for 2 minutes, quickly transferred the hot spinach to an ice water bath, removed the cooled spinach from the water bath, removed as much moisture as I could (with a salad spinner if you have one; we don't yet so I spun the wet spinach in a tea towel round and round over my head), spread the spinach out in a freezer bag, and put it in the freezer.