The valley is filled with smoke this morning, making it difficult for me to do what I need to do. Even masked up and trying to work quickly doesn’t stop it from triggering my mast cells to activate but I was able to pull a nice haul of carrots before I was forced to give up and come back inside.

A few years ago we invested in a medical grade quality air filtration unit for our furnace and it definitely helps but with this much smoke, there’s no way to completely block it out. 😣

So yay me! I have a lot to do and not much time to do it, either. I’m going to blanch and freeze the carrots after I dice them up and I still have to get to all these apples…

Hopefully I’ll feel up to that today.

At least there’s plenty of time to get to the pumpkins. Like the onions, they have to cure for a couple weeks before processing or storing them. I sat them out by the little pond in the front yard so I don’t forget about them.

Curing them hardens their shell and helps them last a lot longer. I also learned a trick to keeping them even longer and that’s to give them a wash with bleach water which kills the mold and bacteria that can make them rot before Halloween. This works on both carved and uncarved pumpkins.

Of course, like with smoke, my immune system reacts badly to bleach, so I’ll have to let the hubs handle that chore.

You can also rub them with vaseline, or so I’ve read.

We are in the process of collecting all of our Haunted Halloween display things for this year and I really want my white and black pumpkins especially to hold out until then. Yesterday I drove into town (a rare treat for me still) and enjoyed walking around a few stores, checking out their Halloween decorations.

Big Lots has some great stuff!

So did our local party supply store. But I ended up getting the best deal at Goodwill where I found a ton of foam tombstones for super cheap and all of them are in near perfect condition so I was glad I popped in to take a look.

We still plan to make some ourselves but since we’re doing a haunted graveyard theme, I’ll take all of them I can get! 🙂