Okay, I just have to admit it. I have a new flower I love. Zinnias. I never knew they were so pretty and colorful and long lasting! I think it’s official, I’m going to be a zinnia freak. I plan on saving as many seed heads as I can this year and then also be on the outlook for them in my winter seed catalogs! I just think they are beautiful.

So I have sunflowers, zinnias, lilacs and of course Japanese and Siberian Iris as my most favorite flowers! Next year, I’m going to have zinnias growing in the all the raised beds. I noticed that in the beds with the zinnias, the veggies did awesome and had very little bug damage! Now the poor zinnias get eaten up, but they still bloomed beautifully and seemed all to be okay with the bug lunch fate they earned.

I just simply adore that weirdo sunflower that grew up next to my table. We love to sit at the table in the afternoons or evening and having a multi-flowering sunflower right there at the table is delightful. It must have come from a little bird friend since it’s not any that I planted this year. Thank you little friends!

Got this great little suntea jug at the store, marked down to next to nuthin’ because the little plastic flippy lid that covers the pouring hole is gone. Now, mind you, the large top cover is there, and the little bottom spicot works just fine… just that little quarter sized flippy lid is gone. So… I just cut a little square of duct tape and poked a hole in it (so that there will be air pressure to make the bottom spicot work) and cleverly covered up the pouring hole. I suppose that I could have left it open, but I didn’t want any little buggies to decide to visit and get into my tea.

Have made at least 4 or 5 jugs full already and it works just fine. I love ice tea… drink it all the time. A cheap and easy drink. I sweeten mine a bit… I add a scant cup of sugar to the whole gallon jug. It’s probably more like 3/4 of a cup. It’s just perfect. And three plain old Lipton tea bags.

You know, I have a bunch of teas, some from here and there and I like to fool around with hot tea adventures in the winter a bit… but when it comes to ice tea, I just like it simple and plain. Good old blended tea I believe that’s what Lipton is. I read somewhere that Lipton is designed to always taste like Lipton tea. They have taste testers that insure that the mixed blend of tea always stays the same to taste. That’s why you can count on it being the same every time. I kind of like that in my ice tea. Sometimes I do put a teeny bit of raspberry syrup in the jug if I’m feeling a bit adventurous!

My sunflowers are finally blooming and I am so happy. They are so beautiful. I wish they transplanted easier… I would start a bunch of pots of them early so that I could have sunflowers in July! This drought has been super hard on them. My corn is doing lousy and my sunflowers are very straggly looking. But they are trying hard to bloom and they are doing a lovely job.

Jessy took this picture and I think it’s absolutely beautiful. I could be on the cover of a book. Or a print, framed. Or maybe a greeting card. Yeah…. beautiful.

Since our own corn was a bust, I turned to a local farmer’s market down the road and we got 60 ears of corn for $10. How can you go wrong with that? So the girls and I gathered around the sunflower table and began shuckin’ the corn and shootin’ the breeze. I love these times with my girls… with the three of us, it didn’t take long, the old many hands make short work and all that. But it’s fun to just chat and work to preserve some great corn and just do it ourselves.

Once we were done shuckin’ and cleaning it, I got started cutting it from the cob. I’ve never done this before but after reading up on it a bit, the feeling most veterans had was that it was a lot easier to do before you blanched the corn then after. After, the cobs were hot to hold and just messy. It took me a ear or three to get the hang of not cutting off toooooo much of the cob with the corn. Or vice versa. Too little and the stuff was a juicy mess, more like creamed corn. Too much and you had to pick out a bit of cob. I was surprised that after a few, I had it down pretty easily, and all was well with the world. It took me about 2 hours to cut all 60 ears.

While I was cutting, Maggie was blanching and getting it ready to bag. We found the perfect recipe for it. 4 quart of cut corn. A quart of boiling water. 1/2 cup of sugar and 4 tablespoons of salt, added to the water. We got the water boiling with the sugar and salt, and then dumped in the corn, stirring it up all good for 10 minutes. Then, drain and we laid it on a cookie pan to cool. It’s a lot of corn, so we took a stick of butter and cut it into slices and laid it on the hot corn. Then she would lay the pan in the freezer to chill and stop the cooking process.

Sounds like a lot of work, but in reality it wasn’t bad at all. I cut, she processed and it took us a little over 2 hours to end up with 17 quarts of sweet corn for the freezer. It was so good that we were all snitching little bits like it was candy. Sweet and fresh corn but with a hint of butter and salt, it was perfection.

This is the cookie pan with about 3-4 quarts of corn on it. Ready to go into the freezer for a little quick chill. Once we chilled it for 15 minutes or so, then Maggie would ladle it into the freezer bags and laid them on the table to cool just a wee bit more. Laid out flat, so they would freeze that way and take up very little space.

Now we had a vacuum bag sealer, but the darn thing croaked. I bought another on eBay for a sweet price, but it’s not here yet. Should be a few more days. We’ve already eaten like 3 or 4 bags of the corn, its just so good… so we’ve decided that probably this week we’re going to go get another 60 ears and stockpile up. It’s a real good deal… $10 for corn, maybe $1 for the sugar and we ended up using 6 sticks of butter, so $5? We got 17 quarts of corn for less than $16. And judging by the quart of corn in a bowl, it’s more than a can… and this is premium stuff, let me tell you. It is so flavorful and good tasting, I haven’t had a single can of corn that tasted this good. If you could get corn this good in a can, you’d have to pay at least a buck fifty or more. And we’re making it for about 50 cents a “can” equivalent.

Plus, I’m quite sure it’s going to be delightful about the 8th of January when we’re missing summer…

Yep. That’s one day’s picking. And that is a big tub… but that’s another post…