Summer Time Fun

We've had a wonderful summer to this point.  The garden has given us more than we had ever imagined in food to put up for the winter.  This year we've canned tomato juice, potatoes, stewed tomatoes and put up corn, zucchini and my hubby is taking care of his hot peppers.  I know this doesn't seem like much, but this is the 4th year we've had a garden here in this home, but in years past the garden has not produced well at all.  We've not had enough to put up, so we've had to buy at farmer's markets and stands.  This year, we've had the abundance and we praise God for that! 

Here are our potatoes, onions and a few tomatoes and zucchini that we began with this year.  We canned 18 quarts of potatoes for the first time ever!  What a blessing that was! 

The onions we tried to sell as many as we could with signs on the side of the road.  We sold about 20 of them and one of my Black-Eyed Susan plants.  We're continually amazed at God's goodness toward us. 

During a rainy day after dinner, we tried a new game out.  We looked up "edifying" words for the letters in each of our names that describes that person.  This is what we'd come up with.  It was a lot of fun! 

We've recently found that we needed to do some water proofing in our basement due to some black mold we found in the carpeting.  After getting all of it out of the house, my hubby dry locked the walls and we turned our attention to the outside front of the house.  Here in PA you have to call before you start digging, so we called and called and called.  Every one of the companies came, but the telephone.  They drove by and marked on the PA1 call that they were "all clear" when they really were not.  We were at a stand still for at least 2 weeeks.  Once they did come, we were clear to begin digging.

We had a gentleman from church come and help us with that part since we didn't have such large equipment.  Everything is dug out now, including the sidewalk.  My hubby has done the pressure washing on the outside and now we'll need to go buy the foundation sealer, more piping and gravel to make the french drains.  Slowly and steadily we're working on making our house better.  We're not really doing much by way of "improvements", but just replacing the old things with just a little better for energy savings and so forth.  We must take care of what the Lord has blessed us with and be good stewards of those things or they may be taken from us. 

Well, it's time for me to sign off.  My computer time is done for now. 

Have a blessed day!

Canning Day 1 Complete!

We now have 18 qts of potatoes & 2 qts of stewed tomatoes from the garden!  What a blessing!

One of my kids snapped a shot of me while I was adding salt to the jars.  We use Sea Salt which is better for those of us who have high blood pressure than regular Iodized Salt or canning salt. 

I enjoy canning for this reason.  I know what is going in to my food.  I know that we won't have to buy cans of prepackaged food.  This Momma is very happy with that thought.  So, we can, freeze and dehyrate as much as we can.

This is my oldest son DA.  He loves to help me do the canning.  What a wonderful blessing he is, especially when my back starts to hurt.  He just asks, "Mom, is there anything I can do to help?"  Now who can turn down help like that? :0)

Here is my precious daughter HJ who is intently listening while I explain what we're going to do while we can our produce.

These are a couple of our HUGE brandywine tomatoes we grew in our garden this year, by the grace of God.  This is our first year getting these and it has been such a blessing.  We love growing this variety.  They are so delicious with a flavor unmatched by any other.  My husband showed me this by having me eat a cherry tomato, then a brandywine.  Wow!  What a difference!

Just a little perspective on how big the brandywine is in comparison to our cherry tomato and a quarter.  :0) 

And my youngest son, JL who enjoys being goofy.  I just love this picture of him.

Preparing the Harvest

This past week, we had some hard working children who absolutely loved to do our harvesting for us.  Our tomatoes are starting to come on, our potatoes and onions are done for the season, zucchinis are still producing as are the varieties of peppers and cucumbers.  Today begins our canning season.  We will be canning at least 20 quarts of potatoes.  We're hoping to do a couple of stewed tomatoes too.  With those we just blanche the tomatoes to get the skins off, put them in a jar with some basil, sea salt, minced garlic and a few slices of onion.  For the potatoes, we're following the Ball Blue Book's guide on  pressure canning them.  We will be posting pictures of the process since we've never canned potatoes before.  Although it shouldn't be too hard since we've canned so many things in the past.  This morning we've already shredded and froze zucchini in 2 cup incriments, so preserving the harvest is nothing new to us. 

We're hoping to make some beef and deer jerky this year with the dehydrator as well, so that will be a nice treat for all of us. 

Until another time...

Blessings,

Good Morning!

I love getting up before everyone else does and listen to the birds.  This morning is no different in that aspect.  However, there is one thing about the morning that has caused me to look up the weather.  The sunrise is red.  True to the saying, "Red sky in the morning-sailors take warning..." we have rain coming.   As a result I will be drying the family clothes in the drier today.  Yesterday I managed to get 8 loads done on the clothes line which was astonishing to my kids.  LOL

We do pay attention to the weather here in our home.  We've done hurricane studies in the past and kept close eyes on those huge storms that would threaten to cover our loved ones.  Now, even though we still somewhat watch hurricanes, the more intriguing part for my oldest son is to watch for rotation.  He is checking the weather on his own most of the time and watching for how systems move and grow or disipate before they get to us.  Why rely on a TV weatherman/woman when you can research it on the computer?  Here are a couple sites we use~
Unisys
Wunderground
Weather.com
Intellicast

All of these sites allow you to see the storms and so forth in a storm tracker fashion.  Weather.com has a neat feature where you can see the track the storm will take just by clicking the "future" button.  Since the weather can take turns that the weather people don't know about, it helps to know where you can find it yourself to see if your plans need to change. 

Speaking of plans, we had intended to go blueberry picking today, but with the weather coming we'll have to change it to tomorrow instead.  We only have until the end of this month and the first week of September to get the blueberries picked.   The patch is in the national forest and located inside a primitive campground.  It closes on Labor Day, so we need to get what we can now.  I like going on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Many campers go to pick on the weekend, so whatever isn't ripe then...by their picking...is ripe on Tuesday.  That's the same for Thursday as well. 

The blueberries are the size of grapes!  This is much of the reason we go picking up there.  It's about a half an hour from our house, but that's ok.  We enjoy picking out in the woods and walking the trail to get there.

This is the blueberry patch.  It's a half an acre of purposely planted blueberries.  It's been there since the national forest service planted it in 1990.  What a blessing!  An even greater blessing is that they do not spray these bushes with pesticides or use chemicals on them.  They're thriving and growing naturally organically and look at how well they are doing!

Well, it's time to get moving on more laundry, get my children up and get chores done.  Today starts day #1 with switched chores.   More on that later. 

Have a wonderful day!

Blessings,

Bounty

I don't think there has ever been a time when I've enjoyed watching our garden than I have this year. Of course each year has been like that though. This year is particularly true because we have tomatoes! Yes, we have quite a few other things in there too which makes things so much more enjoyable, but at last, we have our tomatoes.


This is our fourth summer growing things here in this house. With each passing year it has proven to be quite a challenge to our gardening skills. Each year we've started seeds early, with the exception of this year. This year the only thing we've done differently is purchase plants from an Amish farmer not far from our home. We planted 44 tomato plants on purpose. I say that with tongue in cheek because our last year's compost pile has yielded so many more tomato plants than we ever thought were possible! At my hubby's last count, there were 72 plants! Yes! I said 72 plants! He lost track of where he was at that point and decided to stop there. What a blessing!

Another thing we were going to just ask around for is zucchini. I've never had to grow it because it is such a voratious grower that people always have plenty. This year we have zucchinis growing in the old compost pile! I asked once for zucchini, received 2 and now we've found it growing in the garden! Now we can harvest it, peel and shred it for zucchini breads and zucchini lasagna! Yum-O!



We've also thought we had watermellons growing in there as well, but found that these huge oval things were not watermellons, but pumpkins! Wow! We have these HUGE things growing and they look absolutely fabulous!
Of course our 4 rows of sweet corn is doing wonderfully as well and I believe is very close to needing harvested. I don't know if we'll be able to blanche and freeze any, but it sure will be nice to have some of our own home grown corn to grace our table with.


Potatoes! Yes! We have potatoes coming out our ears! The funny thing is that with every 4 to 5 plants, we harvest about 10#'s of potatoes. What an especially blessed season we've had!

Our onions are ready to harvest as well and although they're not as big as we'd hoped, they've still grown and we've learned quite a bit from growing them this year. I know that onions may need a little more room to grow, much like the potatoes did. We may make mounds for the onions like we did with the potatoes. We'll see though.


One thing I've learned this year~weeds are a blessing! Yes, I said it! Weeds to a certain extent are a good thing. Now, let me clarify. We have made sure our plants have plenty of horse poo mixed with course saw dust around them and no weeds directly around the plants. However the weeds are allowed to grow where there are no plants. The reason for this is that we do not use pesticides on our garden. If we did, it would not give us the rich and healthy crops we pray for and work for. We've experimented this year and last year and have noticed an interesting trend. The bugs really like the weeds that naturally grow in this area, but the flowers and plants that we plant here are not dined on quite so much. As a result, we have allowed the good Lord's creation to do it's job better than we ever could by providing food for the bugs to dine on so they don't dine on our plants! For example, my roses have been so beautiful with blossoms as big as a tea plate. Like the one shown below.

This one is not completely out, but it was beginning to show such promise. The Japanese Beetles were so voratious last year that they ate my roses and their leaves down to the hips and the veins. I put out traps for them, but they still came to my roses....and my flower bed was weeded! Fast forward to this year and I've only weeded before Vacation Bible School at the end of June/beginning of July. After that, just a little here and there to make sure my herbs and flowers have sun. The Japanese Beetles came in full force this year and ate the weeds! Now, my husband's raspberry bushes are another story. Those poor things have been eaten down to the veins. So, we're going to strategize a little better for the sake of raspberries for next year.

This year has also brought some interesting monkey wrenches in to our plans. We are going with the flow though and just adjusting our plans as God changes them for us. I can look out the front window and see the entire front of my house that is dug up. We'll be having a gentleman come within the next week to help us dig up the rest of the front of our house down to the bottom of the foundation. We want to make sure the foundation is fully water proofed and there is little to no moisture getting through the walls. We would seriously like there to be NO moisture getting through, but honestly with the pourousness of the cement foundation there could honestly be just a wee bit of moisture, unfortunately. But thankfully we're fixing the problem now so that we won't have to deal with it later.


A positive result of all of this is that we're putting up a new wall in the basement once the waterproofing is done. Thus begins the remodeling of the basement. This means no more paneling! Hooray! Here is what the basement looked like when we moved in and there was a mouse dancing around in the basement kitchen. LOL


Of course if you've been to our house recently, it no longer looks like this, nor do we have the big blue couch. The wall that we're water proofing is to the right in this picture all the way around to the fire place.


This is what the basement wall looks like now.

My dear husband has been working on it as time allows and as the wall dries out with the dehumidifier and fan blowing almost non-stop. What a blessing he has been!

I will be entertaining suggestions for what to do with the carpeting and how to recarpet the 6' x 22+' area that needed to be ripped out. I was considering buying 6' x 6' square carpet pieces from Ollies or maybe redoing this entire area with an entire piece from Ollies. I'm not sure yet. I'll discuss any and all options with my hubby and I'll be happy to post pictures through the entire process.


In the mean time, please pray for me. I need more grace, mercy and peace through all of this. Things don't move fast enough for me, so I have a tendency to let things raise my stress levels, which isn't good for my blood pressure. One of the things that is bothering me is the increased amount of dirt that seems to go with this project. While I wait for the next step to occur, we'll be concentrating on schooling, so that will be helping me to keep my mind on other things. I'm organizing my sewing room more every day too which will help.
Thank you so much for your prayers!


Blessings,