Success!

It has been a good deer season for us this year. First my dh got a his first deer by bow a couple of weeks ago.

Then he shot this buck on the second day of rifle season.

I cooked the deer heart for the first time. I made it two ways. The first heart, I butterflied and stuffed and then pan fried. The second I pan fried in butter and added a dash of Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice at the last minute. Both were very tasty.

Timber!!

There are a group of us trying to take advantage of each others' strengths to teach our children or at least expose them to different experiences. Since we have the woods, we invited them out to watch a tree being cut down and to help split and stack the wood.

My dh holding court before lots of admiring children.

He begins to cut down the tree...

... and here it goes.

He's using what he calls a "monster maul" to split the wood.

Everyone had a chance to try it out. Most needed help. But they were great at stacking the wood back at the ranch.

Afterwards we had dinner at the house and had a bonfire. It was an amazingly warm 62 degrees in November. This weather is just crazy. First a cool summer, then a warm fall. My dh thinks that winter will hit us like a brick. I must admit that I have enjoyed this warmer fall.

Chicken Coop Cleaning Day

Yesterday was a cool dry day and we cleaned out the chicken coop in preparation for winter. Though we've had such a warm fall that it doesn't seem like winter is coming.

We had some friends who wanted to come help us. My children were amazed that anyone wanted to come help clean out the coop. But it did make it more fun and it went much faster with more hands.

We took the dirty litter and spread it on the garden for next year.

Deb and her friend posing once they saw I was taking pictures.

And now for the best part! Spreading the new litter makes the coop smell so good.

A chicken checking our her newly cleaned coop.

Sunset pictures

Deb came running in last week and asked to borrow my camera because the sunset was "so pretty". And she was right.

Her picture is above and mine is below. Not bad for a 7 year old.

Two Fun Field trips

We've been to a number of great field trips this fall. We went to a local apple orchard that features a craft making time (see great pumpkins below)...

... a teaching time (we learned about the history of apples)...

... how to make cider ...

... and then time to play on their playground before cider and donuts.

This was a very cool thing they showed the children. The apple folks put stickers on the apples when they are green and leave them there. When they peel back the stickers - viola, the words are there in green! My children got lots of ideas for our apples for next year!

We also toured our local Cold Stone Creamery which was very fun. They showed us how they make the ice cream each morning.

Then we got to all make our own ice cream creations. The children thought that this was an awesome field trip.

The Food Processing is done!

It is finally finished. I canned my last batch of pickled carrots on Tuesday. Hurrah! Now I can enjoy the fruits of my labors.

The day before we had our first really hard frost, we brought in all the vine crops that were close to be ripe. This is a Moon and Stars watermelon that looked great on the outside and even seemed to exhibit the signs of ripeness, but it was still underripe. It was a bad year for watermelon. We only got 3 edible Charleston Grays out of five watermelon plants.

My peppers did very well and I ended up drying a lot of them in my dehydrator.

My final two products, pickled carrots (a new one for this year - we'll see how they taste) and some applebutter.

More Fall Fun

Some friends of ours own an apple cider press and invite us to press cider with them. We pressed about 10 gallons that night. Good thing we have so many strong arms.

Only Deb and Aaron wanted to carve pumpkins this year. Our pumpkin crop was pretty small both in size and in quantity. Aaron carved the moon and stars and Deb's is the face.

Enjoying the Fall

My sister-in-law came up for a visit and we took her to a local "pumpkin patch". We went through the corn maze. It was amazingly warm for that time of year as you can see by the sweatshirts. I think last time we went through with winter coats! anyway, we cut our time to only 1/2 hour this year.

Then we had a good time on the other fun things to do at this pumpkin patch. The bouncy things...

... the wet bumpy tube slide...

... and the rubber ducky water race.

Balloon Fest

Our town has a Remax Balloon Fest each fall. This year, we woke up early, grabbed some donuts and headed to town to chase balloons.

We found where they were throwing down sand bags trying to get them to land closest to the target. If you look closely, you can see the bag and streamer going down.

I never get tired of watching balloons. Or taking pictures of them.

Why I haven't been Posting Lately

First, one more shot of the grapes. I picked them almost all of them on Friday before the weekend of frosts came and/or the hornets ate them. It makes it pretty exciting to pick grapes and look for hornets at the same time.

I'm up to 90 quarts of tomatoes or tomato sauce.

We had a lot of grapes and I decided to make grape juice with the grapes I picked on Friday.

My dh and Deb picked all these peppers out of the garden today. We had a frost last night and so we had to get everything but the root vegetables out of the garden.

And last but definitely not least, today was applesauce day. 39 quarts, count 'em, 39 quarts.

Nathan was my helper today. He ran all that sauce through my strainer. It was a cool day to be processing on the porch - the high was 54. Note the gloves.

Just call us Little Italy

The grapes are ripening now and are not only wonderful to eat but beautiful to look at.

Now on a more practical note. Which looks more impressive (not artistic) - a 5 gallon bucket of grapes...

or a basket of grapes? Same amount of grapes, just a different presentation.