It's Called Life

    

Purrball, Whitey and Little Gray up to no good.

Did you ever notice that life sometimes gets in the way of, well, life?  So to answer your many questions, yes, Part 3 of the Lowering Your Grocery Bill series is in the works.  No, I have not forgotten about writing on the blog.  And, yes, we’ve been rather busy lately if you couldn’t tell already.  So I’m here to quickly update you on the last 3+ weeks of our lives.

Go Green

      We’re going green, and no not in that way.  It’s been a very green garden lately.  Green with plants, produce and dare I say… weeds.  Oh, how I dread the weeds.  Three weeks ago the hull peas, mint, broccoli and black raspberries started coming in, and today I harvested seven heads of cabbage, zucchini and more broccoli!  It looks like both the blackberries and wineberries should be coming in rather soon, and we even found a few surprises in the garden as well!  Just check them out:

The sweet corn looking happy in the heat.

It's a cucumber!  We finally have our first cucumber EVER growing.  Each year our plants die from squash bugs, cucumber beetles or blight before we can ever see a single cucumber growing.  I'm SUPER EXCITED that we may be canning with our own cucumbers for pickles and relish this year!  

I wanted to take a nice picture of our tomatoes coming in.  I instead found a hornworm alongside our tomatoes, so it appears we will now be hornworm hunting this evening.

Our Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage looking beautiful despite some insect damage.

Canning

      Oh, the canning.  Apparently the last few weeks have been HOT.  Of course anything over a canner is no longer HOT, but ABSOLUTELY MISERABLE.  Fortunately, our canning shelves are now starting to overflow with springtime and summertime goodness.  The strawberry lemonade concentrate, raspberry lemonade concentrate, rhubarb sunshine concentrate, strawberry-rhubarb pie filling, raspberry pie filling, rhubarb jam and raspberry jelly are all done, but so much more will be coming in the next few months.

It's hard to imagine the ever shrinking pile of canning jars on the shelf to the left (yes, they are almost touching the top of the water heater), will soon be finding their way to the empty nooks of our shelf and cupboard with applesauce, peaches, pickles, relish and tomato products.  It seemed like canning season just started and in a few long weeks, it will be over again!  Where I will be going with canned goods when the shelves overflow, however, is still under debate.

Chickens

And I always looked at chicken coops with beautiful siding and decor and thought how impractical they looked.  I love my unfinished "impractical" coop already!   (P.S. - The chickens don't think it's too bad either, and since its been keeping the farm cats out, I might just have to start looking at beautiful coops as rather practical.)  

      This project is what has been keeping us from the rest of the work that desperately needs done.  I’m happy to say our seven chickens are happily and safely behind hardware cloth in their primary run and roosting nicely in the chicken coop.  Is it done yet?  Sadly, no, but we’re still steadily working on it, but finally since they are able to be in the coop and run, we can take some time to do the more pressing project of weeding the garden.  I’ll update you more on our chicken project on later posts, but for now I must figure out just what I am doing with all this cabbage!?