"Steve" wrote in message ...
Thanks Linda,

Then what I remembered from 60+ years ago wasn't a flash back to 'Little
House'. That really was my Mother sweeting over the wood stove on a hot
August day after day after day.. Then going into tears when half the tomato
jars burst their top.

It is/was a rough life and I'm glad that I can now live in the woods, can't
see any utility lines (cause their underground), have running water from a
community well and with my social secruity and a small military pension I
eat very well without a garden.. Ya see I worked hard all my life for the
military and others and earned/paid into a pension plan that allows me to
retire in comfort in the woods.

Not to say there is anything wrong with hard work, but some of us are more
inclined to work in society and in the end have what we want while others
want to flee from society and work directly for what they want. In the end,
let's hope that we both can eventually relax and enjoy the fruits of our
individual labor.

Steve

Me, I would like to have my cake and eat it too!!!...Work for society
some 8-10h per day, then flee to my pieces of pasture and
oak-hickory-walnut woods (almost fergot the osage oranges!). While
I've put in my share of 43 hour days, I would retire if my age
qualified me and I had the resources upon which to retire!
Alas...another decade of toil for me.

Those canning memories are quite fresh for me, my mother of
seventy-something having canned pears this summer. Air conditioning
made a WORLD of difference from the days when my grandmother would put
up stringbeans - usually coming due in ?June or so (northern
hemisphere {{;-q ). She would work in the morning hours, since it was
a bit cooler, and we would have picked, and picked over, the beans the
night before. Hot, Hot work, sweat poured, frustrations eventually
erupted like a volcano, as you have described. And when those jars DO
explode....!! You best hope the cover is still on the pressure
cooker/pans, or a towel over the batch as it rests on the countertop!

It is nice to have the veggies and fruit in the dead of winter, I
agree. To have to depend upon this for my survival, though, is more
than my already decrepit bones can imagine. Automation and freezing,
I hope, will allow me to put in a garden next spring, maintain it, and
store some of the produce. If not, more able-bodied sorts will get to
help in return for produce!

ttfn....
Linda H., third generation gardener