Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Here I come, with a sharp knife and a clean apron



Since the brambles at the beginning of July, I've addressed peaches (60 pounds for slices and nectar,) beets (15 pounds of beets for pickles and 6 pounds of greens, because they're my favorite greens,) and tomatoes (25 pounds for crushed.)

I'm done for the season only because I've run out of cupboard space.  This is too bad, because the apples are coming in now, and a dozen jars of applesauce would be welcome over the course of the winter.

If the title of this post seems vaguely familiar to you, it's because I borrowed it from "Here I come with a sharp knife and a clear conscience," most recently seen in several of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin seafaring novels.  It would appear that he found it in Volume 8 of The Monthly Repository (published 1834,) in a description of life aboard ship.  The boatswain and his mates sang this out as incentive to get sleeping sailors out of their hammocks before being unceremoniously dumped out by having their hammocks cut down.