On Monday morning I was up at 6AM and started on the photos for the post. My sister was here and with one thing and another I didn’t get very far. I got the kitchen cleaned up and laundry started and at 9AM headed out to the garden to harvest the celery.
As I explained in my last post the celery hadn’t done well most of the summer. I harvested the first more westerly row first. The zinnias had covered it for the end of the summer and I’d not done anything about it as it was doing so poorly. So I pulled all the plants just to get what I could off them.
Then I moved over to the more southerly/easterly row, above.
Once the trailing nasturtiums were removed, everything in this area did well for the rest of the season.
I had filled one tote from that first row. The second row filled 2 more packed totes.
Not many of the leaves would be usable as they were pretty buggy. And I figured I’d dispose of at least half of the stalks as they were poor from the early summer.
I had brought in entire plants, roots and all, essentially cleaning out the row. So there was a lot of bad stuff to discard along with root balls.
This is what we ended up with that could be made usable. My sister worked with me on the cleaning.
I set up and started washing the leaves and stalks. Once that was done my sister started cutting the stalks into pieces my Oster blender could handle and cutting away the bad bits/buggy areas. It was around 3 PM by now.
Around 3:30PM the contractor arrived. I had just put the last load from the washer into the dryer. He finished putting the old washer back together and got it upstairs and in the laundry room. I went to help him play Tetris to get it close enough to hook up hoses. We got them on and filled it and it started to run. But it started clanking when agitating and I quickly shut it off. Then it drained fine.
So he’s back to figuring out what the clanking is, and it now resides in the kitchen. I went back to chopping celery.
It was after supper and about 7PM when we finished the chopping and I started making the slurry for dehydrating. I had 3 big bowls of pieces and leaves and 18 dehydrator trays…
I also only had 12 or 14 silicon mats. I had some mats a friend gave me but they were not so great to use. I ended up doubling those up for the last few trays and I managed to get all the celery into the dehydrator.
Then I sat down and rested for the hour the dehydrators had to run at 145F. They would run all night at 125F and I would empty them in the afternoon on Tuesday when I had finished windows. I was finally in bed around 9PM. I left the mess for the morning.
On Tuesday my window cleaner would be here at 9AM and my helper friend at 9:30AM. I would have to move furniture and prep the big windows in the office. I’d also decided to do the door windows in there too. I hoped to get all the windows in the office done, maybe another storm door, or maybe the 2 windows in the bedroom.
I had my helper friend set up to do errands and work in the Big garden cleaning it out. My sister is heading to CT for the next 3 days to be with my mom. Another busy day.