This part of summer overwhelms me. There are so many other things I have done over the last few days – no time for pictures. Forty pounds of peaches, sliced and frozen for winter; twenty pounds of peppers turned into relishes, pickles and sliced for freezer camp; five pounds of ginger peeled and pasted and frozen and put away; more peppers (lovely lunchbox types we grew) pickled for future estate pimento cheese; three gallons of milk turned into yogurt and pressed paneer cheese; more cucumber pickles. And there’s more to do today – pounds of garlic to peel; fennel to harvest and freeze (meatballs require this herb); and so on and so on.
I sometimes really have to wonder how these social media homesteaders have time for all the lovely photos and videos with text overlays and editing and music applied. I don’t want to accuse any of them of being fake as all getout.
It’s in these days that I feel completely ill-equipped. A failure. I wake up feeling like a failure, I go to sleep feeling like a loser. It’s not a matter of comparing myself to these glamoursteaders (yea, that’s right I made that up just now), it’s a matter of comparing myself to myself. An endless list, that I never really get on top of. I guess I could just hang it up and go to Walmart and eat out of boxes like feedlot cattle. And there’s my answer. So I continue on as best I can. Moo.
I do wish that someone could tell me how a 25 year old with a baby grows an acre of food, makes it into all sorts of lovely things for her freezers, then turns around to make homemade pasta and use the pesto she just made on that pasta. All by her onesome. Oh and filmed it too – and edited, and produced and then social media-d herself into the perverse ecosphere we’ve all contributed to in our own ways. I wish someone would explain this to me in a way that was plausible.
But this little gal didn’t say where all that parmesan cheese she had scattered on a hand-hewn cutting board came from. Pre-grated Tillamook, anyone?
Friday is apparently a little peeved.
Off to go re-adjust my attitude.