August 8, 2018

I am so proud of us for all of the preserved harvest this year!  Our pantry looks lovely with all the fresh, chemical free food that we have to last us until next year, and to think it is not even over!  Our favorite tools this year have been: 1) Again, the fish fryer on the front porch for canning with the propane tank to keep the heat out of the house.  2) a little food chopper we found at Aldi's for $9.99 to add tomatoes with green chilis to our food repertoire.  It lowered our time from hours of chopping tomatoes to minutes!  What a joy!  3) our Victorio apple peeler to peel the asian pears for canning in a very short time (Just move the corer/slicer out of the way)



 4)  Learning to use emptied spice containers for saving seeds from this harvest 5) Using our greenhouse again for dehydrating large amounts of spices  (It is one goal to have all the spices that are in my cabinet be home grown)  6) Our improved chicken plucker with more rubber fingers and using Cornish Cross with less feathers and cutting them while processing to make the chicken more useable.  Life is good!





As we had finished the extension on our calf barn, we had to find a way to keep the door closed in a way that the cattle would not push it open.  We are hoping this way will work.


We finished our summer project to get an automatic cow waterer set up in the center pasture by the barn, set up a hydrant and sink within the barn (for things like bottle washing, and perhaps washing up a future dairy animal), and getting a hydrant out to the growing area for watering the garden!  Yay!!  That was a lot of trenching, laying pipe and covering it back up.  We can now truly let our cattle graze in a rotational pattern, now that their water in centrally locate

We have really enjoyed my husband's experimentation with high/low growing.  We partnered up the okra and sweet potatoes again this year.  We also added growing the Roma bush beans in between the rows of tomatoes.  You just have much more room to move around in and are much less itchy when picking.  

I finally found a catsup recipe that tastes like catsup!  I got the recipe from The Up-With-Wholesome, Down-With-Store-Bought book of Recipes and Household Formulas.  We put up 8 quarts of it!  Our Asian pears turned out lovely also.  

Lastly, we have a very tiny chimney sweep that has been visiting our wood stove.  This is the third time this year he has come down our stove pipe.  We were able to catch him with some tulle leftover from our daughter's wedding in order to take him outside for release.  As he has such an attitude, like the world's tiniest bully, we have named him "Biff" from Back to The Future.