End result of hard work

The boys worked hard in their watermelon/melon garden this year, they got a lot of watermelons and we froze a lot of melons for eating later.

Team work!

Slicing open that first watermelon

Pure yumminess!

Blackberry jam

A friend was nice enough to invite us over for a morning of blackberry picking.  We picked.. and picked... and picked.

And made 7 lovely jars of blackberry jam :)

Butchering Day

Time to butcher!  Our Cornish X chickens were ready to be processed.  We set up some stations beforehand to make things go a little smoother.  We had a slaughter area (not pictured), then a dunking station, defeathering station, gutting station, cleaning station and then the cooler boxes to put the final product in.  Our family is pretty good at working together.

Everyone helps - even the littlies.  They can do the final plucking and making sure everything is clean.

Implements for gutting and cleaning (mama's job!)

The biggest job is the plucking.  Many hands make light work!

Dunking station to help loosen feathers before plucking begins.

It was a LOT of work, but it was good to have our own homegrown chickens in the freezer.

Tomato seeds have arrived

Today we finally received our tomato seed order from Seven Acre Seeds. I placed the order towards the end of March and they shipped in a timely manner, and I waited.. and waited... Finally after about 10 days from the shipment date I wrote and asked if I should be concerned that my order hadn't arrived yet. They very quickly shipped out a new order, which arrived today! I should add that we currently have temporary mail carriers and the mail delivery has been.. interesting. I am left wondering who got the original order of tomato seeds.

Unfortunately I had decided that it was getting too late, so last week I started tomato seedlings with seeds I already had on hand, so these will probably have to wait 'til next year. I specifically ordered crack free/resistant tomato varieties since so many of our tomatoes cracked last year. Some of the varieties I already had on hand we never planted last year, and they're said to be crack resistant, so I think we'll be okay. We planted out 105 tomato seedlings. According to MO's extension site that should be enough for our family for eating fresh and processing.


Tomatoes should be planted out about May 10th in our area so I'm off to a bit of a late start this year.

Kudos to Seven Acre Seeds for their excellent customer service, as well as for the free seed packet (Golden Egg) which was included in the order :)

Today is a really gloomy day, the ducklings are outside and loving it though! Tomorrow we hope to get Pasture 2 electric fenced so we can get the pigs in there and out of Pasture 1. We will have to move their shed, but that's relatively easy. Right now they have taken over Butterbelle's shed and we need to have that available to her when she calves at the end of May. We still need to get the milk stanchion made and get her used to it before she calves.. so much to do!!!

I also got another package today.. watch our Etsy store for new arrivals happening soon!

Dandelion Jelly

We picked oodles of dandelion flowers and made this beautiful jelly. We loosely followed this recipe. The natural color is lovely and it tastes very similar to honey. Lots of work, but sooo good! The oldest two girls have already picked me another quart of blossoms to make another batch!

Dandelion Coffee

DD14 has been using her foraging book she got for her birthday and tried her hand at making Dandelion coffee. It came our really well, and tastes quite nice. It does have a bit of lingering bitter aftertaste though. Maybe we can work around that somehow.

Final Summer Squash Harvest?

With the temperatures dropping we headed out to the garden to pick all the ripe tomatoes and summer squash we could find. As you can see, we still had a LOT of squash out there, the yellow crooked neck squashes are really only good for Fall decorations now. The patty pan squashes will be cut in half and baked in the oven, pulp removed and frozen. The zucchini will be turned into various delightful zucchini concoctions :)

And the beans! This is our first decent bean harvest, and we got two baskets full and still a lot of smaller beans out there waiting to grow a wee bit more before we head out to pick them. Today we canned 5 more jars of zucchini relish (the kids love it!) and we canned 8 1/2 quarts of green beans. For this I used the pressure canner for the very first time (yay me!) To say I was nervous would be an understatement! Everything went very well though and the weight jiggled like it should and we had no mishaps. Now I have a bit more confidence and will try out some of those yummy recipes like stew and soups.

As you can see we also got a lot of tomatoes, the children have already finished off a lot of them on sandwiches, but I want to dehydrate some more for "sun dried tomatoes." I need to get a decent food mill so I can more easily make things like pasta sauce and other tomato recipes.

BUTTERBELLE & PIGS

In other news, Butterbelle's next heat cycle has come and gone, and she didn't bellow or run the fence at all, so it looks like we have a pregnant cow! Wooohoooo!!!! :) Her calf will be due towards the end of May.

Also, in mid October we will be going to pay for and collect our Mulefoot boar piglet. The Ossabaw and Mulefoot cross should make a nice meat pig. Our pigs are getting very friendly and enjoy being scratched and patted when we take them their food.

Apples & Peaches

We bought 1/2 bushel peaches and 1 bushel of apples for processing from a local orchard. We bought some for eating too, and they are so good!





1 bushel of apples cost $10, a really good deal compared to grocery store prices.

It took a lot of work, but we got 7 quarts of peach halves, 6 quarts applesauce and 7 quarts of quartered apples.

Zucchini!

This week we've made:


Zucchini bread (only a pic of grated zucchini, not the bread, sorry!)


Dried zucchini in the dehydrator...




.. and Zucchini Relish. The relish is surprisingly good. I used the recipe from the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving. It's very watery though, so next time I'll be trying out a different recipe.

Our mandolin comes in very handy with all this food prep. I have been very impressed with it so far.. quite a nice kitchen tool for a decent price. I like how you can wash all the parts and then put them all in the storage box and put that in the drying rack and it air dries in there. That definitely saves us from accidental cuts.. those blades are SHARP!

Our cup runneth over!

Squash, squash, and more squash! They're overflowing our house.




Two bags of summers squash, one of potatoes. Yes, we re-use our empty feed bags.

We've made everything imaginable with summer squash and still have so much more. In the next two days I will be making zucchini relish, zucchini pickles and zucchini bread and butter pickles. I'm also going to be drying some zucchini and will use my handy Foodsaver Wide Mouth Jar Sealer which will be arriving in a few days. That way I can dry the squash and then store it in canning jars. I will also be receiving this Polder Strainer which will make the job of blanching vegetables so much easier.

Everybody really enjoyed the zucchini bread I made the other day, sorry no photos! I'll take some next time.


Even the chickens enjoy the zukes :)

We planted about 8 lbs. of potato seeds and harvested almost 50 lbs. of potatoes.



It's not as good a return as we would have liked, but we were late getting them in and they got attacked by potato beetles. So we're thankful for what we did get. We planted Kennebec (and a few Red Norland) and they are some of the creamiest, tastiest potatoes we've ever eaten. Of course 50 lbs. of potatoes won't last our little family very long, so we plan on planting much more next year.

Our tomatoes are doing great, but while we're getting enough to eat, we're not really getting enough to can.





Next year we need to do a better job at our tomatoes. We were so rushed to try get everything in and done, so the tomatoes are not caged and they were not mulched and the weeds really took over. Trying to turn pasture into a vegetable garden is not the easiest task in the world.

Did I mention that we're getting overrun by squash? They are really doing well and they're like the energizer bunny.. they just keep going! Look at those flowers.. still more squash to come!





Thankfully there are so many ways to prepare squash and everybody likes to eat it. We've frozen some for the winter and will be freezing more soon. And as a side note... zucchini cherry milkshakes are really good!

We have tilled up the garden the potatoes were in, and tonight and tomorrow we'll be planting our fall garden.



We are right at the very tail end of this, but still within limits. We'll be putting in some bush beans, beets, a few leaf lettuces and some spinach.

This was my view this morning while reading my Bible. I get up before anyone else is up and enjoy the peace and quiet and cool morning air. These are our neighbor's cattle.




Cute, what!?

It would be so easy to look at what we've accomplished this year and give ourselves a big pat on the back for it. It was very timely to be reading in Deutoronomy 8 in Sunday School:

7For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills;

8A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey;

9A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.

10When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.

11Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day:

12Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein;

13And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied;

14Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage;

15Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint;

16Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end;

17And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.

18But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day.

Thank you Lord for our very, very many blessings.

Jam, jam, jam!

We made some blueberry jam and raspberry freezer jam today, eight jars of each.

I love making jam, it looks so pretty in the jars and tastes so good! I can't wait until we're growing our own berries instead of having to buy them.