Pictures

Just thought I'd share a few pics with you guys form this past week. My mom and I made several turns of jelly last night, and I still have about 2 more turns to go this morning.  We did have fun.
I'm loving my bread maker!!! That thing is so much fun. I made my second loaf the other day. Its nice to have fresh bread for dinner, or to send in my husbands lunch for his work sandwiches.
Frank and I made pickled peppers this past week, and that was fun as always.
Fred is doing great!!! He's my favorite buck I think. I know, I shouldn't have favorites, but I do!!!!
Doris is doing well with her pregnancy. I've started doing the hay test with her and Ethel to see if they are ready for their nest boxes, but they don't seem to be yet. So far, they just eat the hay when I put it in there.
And finally my worms!!! I've this habit of feeding them, and then leaving them alone for about a month, or longer. I always seem to manage to get in there just as they are on their last little bits of food. As you can see, when we go to harvest, we are going to have lots of nice worm castings. I'm not exactly sure what we plan to do with our castings this time. Last time we shared it around with friends and family. This time however, I think we are probably going to try to put it into our garden.
So now, you are all caught up for the week!!!! ( for now)

Happy Saturday

Greetings everybody, from our little farm!!! As you can see, I now have a chicken who lets me carry her around the pen, and that makes me happy. I love having a chicken that lets me carry her around. She's one of Sinatra's off spring. One of the little gals that we hatched out back in the spring. She is by the way laying again.

Sam and Jasper are enjoying this cooler weather that we've had. This has in all honesty been a very cool summer. I'm not going to lie, I have been enjoying it greatly. It's been nice not having to feel like I need a shower when I go out and come back in from doing animal stuff. We've had little to no humidity.

Tonight, I'm going to be teaching my mom how to make jam. We're making black raspberry. I think she's going to have fun with that, although its a little odd that I'm teaching my mom, and not the other way around. But that's not how she grew up, and its not how I grew up. My mother in law actually taught me how to make jams and jellies, and my husband taught me how to can soups, and veggies and such.  I'm hoping to have pictures of tonight's adventures.

Quilt top, complete

Hello out there in Blogger land!!! As you can see, I've been diligently working on my quilt tops. Now, this quilt top isn't exactly a scrap quilt, but it does have some scrap fabric in it. The scraps, are the green pieces of fabric. I didn't really use a pattern for this, I just picked a block, and went with it. I'm hoping that the next quilt top I work on goes together as quickly and as easily as this one did.

I've decided that after I finish my next actual lap sized quilt, I'm going to start working on a couple of king size sampler quilts. I like a sampler quilt I think, because each block is different, and hard to get board with.

So, some more happy news. our Sausage grinder came in the mail today. Oh, how I love Amazon!!! This fits onto my kitchen aid stand mixer, which I absolutely love, and it was much cheaper to order it through Amazon, than it was to order it through the Kitchen aid site.

We will be doing another chicken butcher here in the next couple of weeks. We're going to go ahead and butcher the last of our older chickens, and then we will start on the 7 young roosters that we have in the grow out pen. I decided that I really didn't want to put them in with everybody else. I'm just keeping them in the grow out pen, until butchering is done. it will make catching them much easier as well.

Ethel and Doris are both due in exactly one week. Ethel is due the 21st, and Doris is due the 22nd. So, I guess not Exactly one week. I'll be giving them their nest boxes here soon. I'm thinking Sunday I'll give them the nest boxes. Ginger is Due on the 31st, so she wont get her's for a good week.

We say Goodbye

This is not something I would normally do. I'm not one who gets hung up on celebrity news, and gossip. But, sadly, the world has had to say goodbye to a wonderfully talented man. A man who many of us grew up watching, and loving. He was such a part of my childhood memories, that its truly like a part of my childhood has been lost. America will never have another friend like him. Goodbye Mr Williams, you will forever be missed.

Weekend Fun and more

Happy Monday!!! I hope you all had a great weekend!!! This weekend was the Rout 11 yard crawl. That's where there is a full weekend of yard sales that stretch across 3 states. We stayed here in Woodstock though. We went on Saturday, and found some fun stuff. My favorite find was a Bread Maker that I picked up for $3.00, and the best part is, it works!!! Frank found some guy stuff, oh, and I found a couple of Sammy Davis records.

Bella is doing great with the invisible fence!! She loves playing with her brothers. She will play and play, until she pretty much so comes in and drops. We are trying her again out of the crate at night. We are on night 3 with no accidents in the house. She loves to sleep in the bed with us. (Right now, she's laying on the giant dog pillow in the corner snoring.)

We have made a whole lot of soup over the last week. I didn't get any pictures of the beef soup, but we got 11 quarts of chicken soup and 21 quarts of beef soup. We have to call the coop to see when the guy is coming around that checks pressure cooker gauges. I have another pressure cooker that was given to us, that we haven't used. We need to get it a new ring, and get that gauge checked so we don't blow anybody or anything up.

Its looking like Ethel and Doris are both pregnant for sure!!! We still can't figure out how to palpate them. That's something that comes with practice from what I understand. Ethel is due the 21st, and then Doris is due the 22nd.  I'm not going to try to look ahead too far with Ginger, because of the false pregnancy she had the other month. Frank thinks that she is, and I'm thinking she is too, but, I'm going to wait. I'm going to give Ethel her nest box on Monday, I'll wait a little bit with Doris, because she likes to turn her nest box into a potty.

Hope everybody has a great week!!!!

Just a ramble

Sometimes I feel the need to ramble on. My Ramblings don't always make sense, and sometimes they do. I have moments when my brain is just so full of everything that I have no way to get it all out without everything just seeming jumbled. 

In all reality I should be upstairs in my sewing room working on the quilts, but I'm sitting here in the living room, listening to my husband in the bedroom sleeping. I am in all honesty the only living being in the house awake at the moment. Bella is in there with him sleeping. Sam and Jasper are here in the living room sound asleep. Jasper is gently snoring. Sometimes I just need to enjoy these most peaceful moments. Its not always this peaceful. There is always something that needs to be done, cleaned, gathered, washed, put away, etc...its just part of the life we have chosen I suppose. 

We are getting between 15 and 19 eggs a day right now. I have 3 full 18 packs, and 3 full 12 packs of eggs in the fridge right now. My mom is coming to pick up some eggs later on today. I volunteered to take them to her, but I think she just wants out of the house for a bit.  I'm thinking that this fall, we need to butcher some of our layers. We can just can the meat instead of freezing it. 

Getting ready for winter is a big priority this summer. I think we are a bit worried about what this winter will bring. Its so hard to tell the way the weather has been these past couple of years. One thing is for sure, we won't have to do much in the way of grocery shopping. 

alright, ramble is over, I have a few emails to answer, and then I should get to that quilting.

Have a great day!!!

Canned Soup

So, Monday morning we had to butcher a couple of our older Chickens. They turned egg eaters. That's never a good thing, so as you can imagine we are holding our breath hoping that nobody else is going to turn egg eater. Frank went ahead and just skinned them, and we threw them directly into the pot and cooked them down and off of the bone.  And then we turned all of that into soup, which we canned. We got 11 quarts out of that. This weekend we are going to make beef soup to can and put away for the winter.

My Easter Egg chickens that we got back in the spring should be about ready to start laying anytime now!! I'm so ready to see just what color eggs they will give us. The wait is getting kind of hard. I feel like a kid in a candy shop.

In the last picture here, are 2 of the 7 roosters from our last hatching. They are really quite pretty, but will be future soup. I think they need a couple more months to get some size on them, but I'm not sure they will get too much bigger than this.