Harvest and wells

Its been a hectic few weeks here at the homestead. Its been a lot of harvesting and preserving and then theres the fact we haven't had water in over a week. Lets start with tomatoes and preserving.

Mabel with a days harvest

I have been harvesting more tomatoes that anyone could imagine. But you would have to expect that after planting about one hundred plants.
For times sake and when I didn't harvest large amounts I did small pickings and threw them in wal-mart bags and put them into the freezer until I had enough to make it worth processing. This works very well as the tomatoes let off a large amount of water when they thaw so that means less time cooking down. I do suggest that if you do this to core them first, it makes it easier. I always use the skin since I puree and I like to think you get some more nutrients out of them this way.

Some tomatoes thawing out

I have mostly just been cutting up the fruit taking out the seeds and gel, pureeing, cooking down and putting into quart freezer bags. I end up with large bowls of the gel, seeds are cores that make for quite the tasty chicken snacks/drink. They seem to enjoy this very well.

Tomatoes processed today

All 75 lbs. pureed down

The last processing that I did was also a batch of tomatoes and then some butternut squash. I also dried some tomatoes in the dehydrator, not too many but I filled it up and ended up with a nice baggie full. For the squash I cut them in half, baked until tender then I pureed and added some spices and onion and made soup to freeze, tasty.

The days yield

On to our well pump madness. In case you ever run into it and just to tell a story. We noticed for certain last monday that the water pressure indeed was getting to be pretty weak. By tuesday we had no water and knew the pump needed pulled. What we think may have happened is that our pressure tank was slowly taking a dump and in that process was making the pump work extra duty and wore it out finally. So, husband rigged up a support brace across the small space up high and fitted the winch on it that we had on a four wheeler. Then made a tool so we could clamp it to the pipe and pull up about 2 foot sections at a time.

Fine engineering on display

This had to be done as there was no way to do it by hand because it was way to heavy and the pipe was super slippery. We had it coming up pretty well when it started to get pretty tense. The rope and the wiring that were coming up along side the pipe had stopped so we knew it had to be caught up on something. So about the third day in of working on it the mother load of snags came up.

Yay! But only for a few minutes until I made the winch pull up instead of down and caused the well cap to fall into the hole. (Very sad time.) This whole time we are pulling the pipe out we are taking it out the basement window and laying it in the yard. 

Finally we see what we think is the top of the pump and then it stops. No more pulling up, its stuck really well. We dumped buckets of water in on top to clear some of the mud around it when we realized that it in fact was the pump because we could see something shiny. We took one last tug with the winch to see if it would move at all and the whole shebang came down. Really stuck, called it a night. The next day, of corse when I wasn't home to see it happen, husband got the pump free and pulled it up. 145 feet is the total length of our well. Its amazing to see it laying in the yard knowing that it goes down that deep into the earth to get our water. Now over a week without water, the new pump is on order and we should have water hopefully by this weekend. This time we are going with a type of pump that can sit at ground level so if there are ever problems again we don't have to dig to argentina to take care of the problem! 

Thats all for this week, remember to appreciate your plumbing :) And thank you gram and gramps for letting us use your water and shower!