Around the Homestead - Week of July 25th - 31st (including Home Preserving Log)

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Gardening Report:

• Rained on Friday for about 30 minutes...We didn't have to water Yay!
• Saturday -- Woke up to a wet garden and yard so it must have rained again during the night ... didn't have to water the gardens again.  Woohoo!
• Finally got to a point where we could do some more plantings (specifically from the free plants we received). We planted:
  • 6 eggplants (one pot had 2 extra plants in it)
  • 5 dill plants (one pot had 3 extra plants in it)
  • 2 chocolate mint plants
  • 4 lemon thyme (the 3 other plants were dead and beyond resurrection) -  they got tossed into the compost pile
  • 9 Provence Lavender - 4 of the other plants looked like they may have enough life in them to resurrect them, so fingers crossed
• Dh made me a couple more rows in a new part of the garden, extending it little by little
• Dh and ds#1 cleaned out the old goat pen and put the manure into the compost as well as mixed it into the new garden rows.
• Dh and ds#1 added goat manure to the "new" raised bed that the children and I worked on earlier this week.
• Rained twice on Saturday too!  yeehaw!
• Saw some sunflowers have popped through
• Rained on Monday (twice)  YES!
• More sunflowers are up.  WEEHOO!
• We planted before it rained on Monday - put into the garden were:
  • 1 big beef tomato plant
  • 4 Roma tomato plants
  • 1 Jet Star tomato plant
  • 32 cucumbers
  • 2 watermelon plants
  • 9 Sweet 100 tomato plants
  • 2 jalapeno plants
  • 9 anaheim pepper plants
  • 1 Habanero plant
  • 1 Tabasco pepper plant
  • 1 Pablano pepper plant
  • 8 sweet peppers
  • 10 red hot cherry peppers
  • 20 cowhorn +1 iffy that may or may not survive
• Tuesday - Rain and Rain and Rain
• Wednesday - Rain  -- picked 4 tomatoes
• Thursday - Rain  so I did inside work -- although the boys staked the 100+ tomatoes before it rained

Dh also took down the enclosure from the old goat stalls and turned that area into a place to store the riding mower, tiller, wheel barrow, etc.  This area is off to the side of the chicken coop and run.

 

Harvesting Records for the week:

• 2 eggs
• picked a handful of blackberries while checking out the briar patch on the way home (Saturday plans involve blackberry picking... woohoo!)
• Saturday - picked just a tad more than a quart basket of blackberries.. may get to pick more in a day or so.
• 7 tomatoes + 2 that had a bird pecking at it or some kind of bug
• 1 lone cherry tomato (yum!)
• two okra pods
• wild harvested some mullein leaves to make tea for (good to rid yourself of excess sinus mucus)
• 12 pickling cucumbers
• 2 hot red cherry peppers
• 2 cowhorn peppers
• 2 jalapeno peppers
• 2 gypsy peppers

Home Preserving Log:

Canning

• 3 quarts & 2 pints of Pumpkin Butter
• 5 pints of  Cold Pack Cucumber Pickles
• 6 quarts of salsa
• 7 quarts of beef-vegetable soup (all because two jars of salsa blew their lids and after I got all the jars, lids and rings out, I tossed in some bouillon cubes, put in the big container of frozen veggies (leftovers I save for soups) and made soup to can -- we tossed in the leftover steak from supper too).  I also got 1 pint that went into the fridge as it didn't seal.

Freezing

• Friday -- Froze the handful of blackberries in the pint bag that we've been filling up over the last couple of days.  I've closed it up to any further berries.  Time to start a new one!
• Saturday froze 4 pint bags (1 quart) of blackberries (we went pickin!)
• Saturday - froze 3 pints of pumpkin puree
• Tuesday - 3 gallons of blueberries to freeze which equaled out to 43 bags of frozen blueberries (I put 3 big handfuls into the bags... enough for muffins, pancakes, or blueberry buckle) 
• Wednesday - 5 dozen ears of corn (cut in half so I got 10 dozen mini ears out of these and thus double the amount of meals).
• 1/4 of a baggie of okra from our garden (will freeze until there's enough for a meal for us)

 

Dehydrating

• took the dried lavender leaves off the branches that dh had cut off the big plant while tying it up.
• dried wild harvested mullein leaves

Inside Work:

• Saturday - dd#1 made up the Amish Friendship Bread and forgot to keep out batter for the next go around... LOL! 
• Saturday - I processed the Summer Pie Pumpkin that dh bought-- I made a pumpkin cheesecake, two pumpkin pies, and put 5 batches of Pumpkin Butter in the crockpot to cook and thicken up (in preparation of canning pumpkin butter) as well as froze 3 pints of pumpkin puree
• laundry, laundry, and more laundry along with cleaning
• Wednesday - DD#1 moved the kitchen stove out and cleaned that area and mopped it up as well as cleaned the sides of the stove down
• I made cornbread mix up while she was doing that... we grind wheat berries and regular popcorn to make cornbread mix (add in baking soda, salt, baking powder, dry milk or dry buttermilk, and sugar)
• ds#2 helped me make Cold Pack Cucumber Pickles
• The children shucked the corn I bought yesterday so I could blanch it and freeze it.
• cleaned out our file box
• boys vac'd and dusted the living room and master bedroom while the youngest napped and I worked on blanching & freezing the corn.
• Thursday - stove repairman came (again - third time ...ugh!) - Hopefully this fixed the problem

 

Menus:

• Friday Breakfast: Granola & Fruit
• Friday Dinner (Lunch): Bean Dip & Tortilla Chips And/Or egg salad sandwiches  (depending on who wanted which one)
• Friday Supper consisted of  Fried Green Tomato Parmesan (tomatoes given to us),  Garlic Bread (no knead bread given to us), and Homemade Rhubarb-Strawberry Pie (using the fresh rhubarb our garden).
• Saturday Breakfast - deviated from the menu and we had Granola and fruit with milk or Yogurt
• Saturday Dinner (Lunch) - leftovers
• Saturday Supper - homemade pizza, leftover rhubarb-strawberry pie (amazing we had almost a whole pie left from Friday night)
• Sunday Breakfast -Baked Oatmeal with cranberries and coconut
• Sunday Dinner - Beans & Cornbread, Zucchini Relish, and Homemade Pumpkin Pie for dessert and/or Homemade Pumpkin Cheesecake  (I made both late Saturday evening)
• Sunday Supper - sandwiches after we got home from church as we needed to be back at church early for the men's meeting
• Monday Breakfast: Muffins and fruit
• Monday Dinner:  hot dogs (found a deal on them for 2 packs of turkey and cheese dogs for 2/$1)
• Monday Supper: Beans, Rice, and Cheese Tortillas
• Tuesday Breakfast - granola and dd#1 found a bag of cereal in the cabinet that I had bought not long ago with a coupon at the store... Malt-O-Meal Golden Puffs I think
• Tuesday Dinner:  A treat to McD's after picking blueberries in the morning.
• Tuesday Supper: Salad, Garlic Bread, and watermelon for dessert that hubby brought home last night
• Wednesday Breakfast - Muffins and Fruit
• Wednesday Dinner - Fried bologna sandwiches
• Wednesday Supper - Noodles and sauce, salad
• Thursday Breakfast - Cereal and Fruit
• Thursday Dinner - cheese quesadillas
• Thursday Supper - Steak (bought on markdown), green beans (from neighbor),

 Other:

Sunday, a friend at church gifted me with a bag of clothes for me.  There were a total of 18 pieces of clothing in the bag including jumpers (all but 1 was denim), a couple of denim dresses, a denim jacket with a brown/white sweater made into it (love it) and many blouses.  Only 1 jumper and 2 dresses did not fit me. One of the blouses puckers but I have a way of fixing that. It's not tight so I can fix it and wear it.  I just sew down the button sides.  Makes it a slip on but it works.

Another friend at church gave the two youngest girls three dresses. The girls are close in size so they can share these. 

A friend of dd#1 sent her some skirts and shirts via her parents (she's married and moved away now. :-(   So she sends things to dd via her parents when they visit. )

and you can read the  Tuesday Sweetness post for more tidbits of our day on Tuesday.

Thursday a Friend called for me to come over and pick up bread that was given to her. She had an abundance of it and was sharing. I picked up about 7 loaves of bread (good for French Toast), 4 packs of dinner rolls, 2 packs of hamburger buns, and 5 boxes of hostess cupcakes.

Neighbor came over bringing a bowl of green beans she just cooked.

 

What blessings!

 

Don't forget you still have time to submit something for the The Carnival of Home Preserving!

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