September on the Homestead

Butternut growing like crazy.

Helping with Grace.

Armed with Zucchini!!  Look out!

Getting over abundance of food. 

Snacking on some green beans.

Canning green beans.

Having really good zucchini sticks. 

A really good harvest.

Ethan working on his birdhouses.

Lily petting the cow.

Evan cutting up wood for kindling.

Evan helping Dad build the gate for the cow shed.

Cow shed progress.

Painting the cow shed barn red.

Honey harvest.  It is interesting that the honey seemed to be darker this year.

Lily is helping feed Gracie a snack.

She only missed a little bit.

May Happenings

We were helping some friends one Saturday on their 22.2 acres, hauling branches to burn piles, burning and also loading up a trailer of firewood. It was a lot of work and they all were sore the next few days, but they had a great time serving others alongside their friends. Working with good friends is always more fun and goes a lot faster. We enjoyed a wonderful meal for dinner and then the kids all had fun playing a game of something that they made up, but kind of like freeze tag. Ev was running along and jumped/tripped over a branch that was on the ground and hurt his knee pretty good. He was out the rest of the night with his knee up and ice on it. It was swollen soon afterwards so we knew he did something to it. On Monday he was still in a lot of pain so we took him in to his Dr. who then sent us to an orthopedic surgeon on Tuesday. X-ray's came back looking good but it was just a good sprain. Bummer. It would be a good 8 weeks to completely heal. WOW! 8 weeks to keep an 8 year old boy from doing to many crazy things let alone not run on it for at least 3 weeks. That has proven to be a challenge. He is completely off of the crutches now, doesn't complain of it hurting, and started riding his bike again. So life is starting to get back to normal. Which he is very thankful for. And so are his parents!

Lily finally got the courage to ride in the tractor. 

And loved it!!!!

The new honey bees and their new location. For some reason, unknown to us, our whole hive died by early spring. Maybe to cold, maybe mites, maybe chemicles from the berry field that they were close to. We are not sure. But now it is next to the chicken coop, sheltered more from the strong winds we get and from the chemicals that get sprayed on the berry fields. Dave got the hive all set up, but no picture yet, and the bees seem to be really busy. That is encouraging.

Mia working hard shoveling sawdust for our berries. It is always safer wearing a helmet too!!!!

Pictures of bugs, insects, and reptiles that we (mostly the kids, sometimes Dave, but never mom, which is fine by me) find. 

Here is our Northern Alligator Lizard that we seem to find every year in the Spring time, basking in the sun. 

Rubber Boas!! Yuck!

Our second Honey Harvest

Home school lesson. We invited a few families over and the kids had a great time playing together, more then watching the harvesting. But it was fun all the same.

Honey and biscuits. YUMMMM!

Our final product. 4 gallons!!!!

Harvesting our first crop of Honey!!!

Our bee's were already done with the first box of honey for us. They were working hard. Here is Dave and Mark starting to take the frames out. They are all nicely capped.

Dave always takes a helper down with him and it was Ethan's turn this time. The kids have no fear of the bees. It is amazing. Ethan has gotten stung once but not by a honey bee. So it still doesn't bother him at all.

Here they are brushing the bees off of the frames.

The precious frames full of honey just waiting for us.

Ooooh, ahhhhhhhh!!

Dad and Mark cutting off the caps to reveal the tasty honey.

Look at all that golden honey.

Using Mark's nifty contraption for extracting the honey from the cell's. Dave is coming up with a design of his own to use later at the end of the summer when we harvest again.

Look at all that honey spraying out of the cells. WOW! I loved this part.

The final steps. Pouring into storage containers.

All of our honey.

And it is so good.

Another gorgeous weekend gone

I thought I would just take a minute to throw up some pictures from the weekend. Unfortunately my lovely wife is not feeling well, possibly got what the kids have been fighting. I put her to bed early and tried to clean up the kitchen to the best of my abilities. Saturday was initially spent getting the chicken coup ready for the chickens as they were quickly outgrowing the nursery.

Ethan and Mia fed them from their hands today, and they seem to be pretty happy with their new house.

Chicken boy! It is extremely important to always have a bike helmet when handling poultry.

Ethan has gotten pretty good with the gas weed wacker and can really do some damage (to the weeds).

Today we worked on getting the garden ready. A while back we purchased some heavy black plastic to put down and then held it in place with some tires. By the way if you want to try it, I can hook you up with some tires cheap. Our property came with a nice pile of them, BONUS. And you can not burn them like your tree trimmings, they frown on that. Here is what it looked like this morning, at least the main area.

After:

You can clearly see where the plastic was and then the area that I got rototilled. It was so easy to rototill with no big clumpy weeds, I am now wishing I had purchased more plastic. Hopefully we will be able to stay on top of the weeds more this year with some experimental tactics, like newspaper mulch and straw.

Later in the afternoon I took a break to check on the bees. I took a helper to snap pictures of the frames and he also refilled the feeder with sugar water while I inspected the frames.

Here is one of my frames with the bees starting to work on it. Thanks to Ethan for the photo!

After dealing with the bees I needed to relax so I rode bikes around with the kids. We also set up a tetter-totter. I had ridden on one once before when we went to Blackrock freeride park with a crazy guy named Cliff. The boys did pretty well on it.

There is so much to do and so little time. I had really wanted to get a couple of weaner pigs this spring to butcher in the fall, but it has just not worked out. Right now my focus is on getting the garden going and checking on the bees, and in our spare time trying to clean the place up.