I doesn’t pay to take a day off, I get so far behind I never seem to catch up.  Wednesday I picked the raspberries and got two quarts, I took one to the farmers market to give to the gal I trade with for brocolli and I kept the other to make some raspberry sauce.   We did a little shopping while in McMinnville.  We have a Tracfone in the car so if we get stuck out on a back road we can call for help and every three months we need to get more prepaid minutes so while we were at Walmarts we tried to get a card but we don’t know how to put the time on our phone so we had to ask the clerk to do it for us.  Usually the gal who is there does it with no problem but this time it was a new person and neither he nor the other girl there knew how to put it on our phone because the phone is an old model so he told us we should get a new phone and save money because we would get double minutes with a new phone.  We finally decided to do just that and we spent the rest of the afternoon trying to activate the phone and failed.  The guy at the store said it was simple but not for us.  We got on line alright but got lost trying to transfere the minutes from our old phone to the new one and that messed up the activation.  Finally we gave it up and had a drink.  Then on Thursday we called for help.  A very nice girl helped us and got us all activated and straightened out.  When she finished we had to make a call and check to see if the minutes were on the phone so Norman had to go to the top of the mountain and call me to finish the activation.  You see we are in a dead zone here and you can’t use a cell phone.  This new phone is much easier to use and we are very pleased with it and we will be able to put our own minutes on from now on and will get double minutes for the next year and a half.  I guess we will use the cell phone when we go to FL even getting a new phone makes it cheaper than signing up with AT&T again and paying them $50 just to sign us up for the 3 months that we are there and then pay more a month than the cell phone plus with AT&T we had to pay for all long distance calls.  Then we did some gardening, I picked and canned green beans, we dug and canned more potatoes and Norman planted more beans.  Norman’s back is much better and if he stays away for washing dishes or lifting anything heavy he is fine.  There is something about washing dishes that really hurts the back, I found the same thing when my back was bad also so it didn’t surprise me.   Today Norman watered the new plantings and then washed the beets for me.  I picked two armsful of a beets.  After Norman washed them outside he brought them into the kichen in the cellar where I cut off the beets, then cut the stems off and put all the leaves into a large pan.  I froze four quarts of beets.  I don’t do anything to them except wash them well, bag them and freeze them.  I then cut the stems into 1 -2 inch lenghts and froze a gallon and a quart of those for soups and stews.  Then we blanched the leaves and I got four quarts for the freezer.  Then we scraped potatoes until it was time to get dinner.  After dinner we canned 7 more quarts of potatoes.  I got a little weeding done but still have not finished the spinach row and I don’t think I will get it done tomorrow either so it will be next week before that is ready to plant.  We did get some wax beans to put in there and we want another small patch of lettuce.  We also got some mustard seeds to plant as we have not been able to get any at the farmer’s market.  Oh, on Thursday we picked a quart of blueberries and I made some blueberry sauce which come out great, it is so good on our breakfast oatmeal.  Torrow I must pick raspberries and blueberries again and we want to check the wild blueberries and dig the last two rows of potatoes .  This is all besides the regular garden chores such as watering, tieing up tomatoes,  and picking off suckers. checking for squash beetles and picking our dinner vegetables so I don’t see time for any weeding.   Next week we will need to freeze more beets and can more potatoes and finish the berries.  It is a good year everything except the grapes are going great.  Oh, the tomatoes are forming, most of the plants have at least one cluch of tomatoes on them.   Have a great day.