Susie kept telling me she was tired of looking at the old farm fence on the back of our property. She wanted me to take it down.

It wasn’t high on my list of things to do, but she kept reminding me, so it was moved to the top of the list.

I didn’t want to waste the fencing, so I decided to make it into tomato cages.

I borrowed some small bolt cutters from a friend and started cutting the fence into sections about five feet long. I cut the section while still fastened to the metal post to help hold it. Then, I cut the fastenings at the post. We did this for about 100 feet. This gave me 20 sections.

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I then took a section and rolled it until the ends met. I would hold it together and Susie would take some hog ring pliers I found in the shed and fasten a hog ring about every foot apart where the ends joined. This formed one tomato cage. We continued this until all sections were completed. This left us with nice cages for next growing season. It also left me with sore fingers and bloody scratches from the cut wire.

After finishing this job, we went to the Pendleton Farmers Market in the park to see if anyone had anything I needed but wasn’t growing myself.

I saw some great-looking baked goods, but I can fix my own. Nothing else grabbed my attention.

So, we headed to Needler’s to pick up a couple extra Times-Post papers. It had my treasure hunt column and Benjamin wanted a copy, as did a detecting friend of ours.

While there, I received a call telling us the 12 dozen ears of corn we ordered were ready to be picked up.

I headed home, got out of the car and into the truck and returned to Huntsville Road to pick up the corn.

We spent an hour shucking about half, then returned to Pendleton to have lunch at Hacienda Vieja.

Back home, we finished shucking the corn. I brought it in the house, while Susie was getting the water boiling to blanch the ears.

I helped wash the corn and checked it for any bad spots. We only found two in the entire 12 baker’s dozens of ears.

Suzie started loading them in the water, while I started putting dates on all the quart freezer bags.

We do this to keep track of the few we had left from last year. (We do this on the lids of our jars of green beans also.)

The ears boiled for four minutes, then were transferred to cold water in the sink to cool. I put a half-gallon block of ice in the water to keep it cold and did the same in the other half of the sink.

Meanwhile, we had the counter top clean and ready to start cutting the kernels off the cobs.

We stood on either side of the counter and started cutting. When we had a couple paper plates full of corn, we started filling the quart bags. Two heaping cups almost filled a bag.

While I was sealing the bags and carrying them to the freezer, Susie started the next batch on the stove. Each load yielded about six or seven bags.

This continued for almost five hours. We ended up with 43 bags in the freezer and a mess in the kitchen.

I started wiping the counters and stove, Susie began washing the equipment, and Oso Blanco, our American Eskimo dog, helped by cleaning up corn we had dropped on the floor.

Exhausted, I was too tired to cook dinner, and most restaurants were crowded at 6 on a Saturday night, so we returned to the Hacienda for a great meal without waiting in line for a table.

So far, we have canned 25 quarts of green beans. We will probably get the final picking tomorrow (No. 5) from our six rows of bean plants and will pull them.

In that spot, I have beet seeds and peas to plant for a fall crop. We still have eight rows of beans starting to bloom, so we should get many more jars of those to can in a couple weeks.

I picked up 10 pounds of blueberries from Needler’s and am planning on making a lot of jelly, a few pies and some lemon blueberry bread and freezing the rest for future recipes.

As the raspberries, blackberries and grapes come on sale, I will purchase them to use in my jelly maker.

The zucchinis in the garden will be processed for later recipes, and I will slice a bunch with my meat slicer to fry zucchini for Susie.

The tomatoes are doing great, peppers are starting to come on, the lima beans have small pods and the two melon plants are still growing, but I’m starting to wonder if they will bear any fruit.

With all of this to take care of, I hope Susie doesn’t add too many new jobs to my list.

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