A Small Time Laundry Delinquent

It had to get done.  There was no question about it, really.  I simply had to bite the bullet and fold the massive amount of laundry currently forming a gigantic clothes mountain in the middle of my living room floor. 

Don't get me wrong, the clothes are clean.  I am not a laundry hoarder...just a small time laundry delinquent.  And I do like some parts of laundry.  I actually quite enjoy hanging clothes on the line.  And I don't mind so much folding one small load at a time.  But I massively detest folding a large amount of laundry all at once, lugging it all upstairs, and shoving it into drawers.  I just hate doing it.  I must be missing the gene for laundry proficiency.

But as I often tell the boys, sometimes you have to do things that you don't like to do - like make your bed or eat your brussels sprouts.  Today is one of those days for me.  I have avoided it for long enough, I have to fold the laundry.

So, Alistair and I got to work.  He seemed happy enough with our task...

but he certainly made the job more difficult.

I am relieved to report that Gael Glen Farm's Great Clothes Mountain has disappeared.  If only I didn't have still more laundry to do. Sigh.  Will it ever end?!  No, no it won't... Cry.

No Grasshoppers Here

It has been a long and glorious autumn, but as the days get shorter we are becoming more and more preoccupied with preparing for winter.  I like to think of us as industrious little ants...or even better honey bees.

Alistair and I prepared another round of sugar syrup for our real honey bees today.  They had sucked their feed buckets dry.  With nothing left to eat outside, the ladies were happy to accept another sugar infusion to add to their pantry.

Now that our canning is mostly complete, I also did a quick reorganization of our pantry.  It is looking good.  All like items are grouped together with the oldest jars at the front for easy grab and go!  I am confident that we have enough to make it through the winter.  

We have: stewed tomatoes, tomato sauce, pasta sauce, deer stew, vegetable soup, turkey stock, salsa verde, cowboy candy, apple sauce, apple butter, stewed peaches, canned pears, sweet zucchini relish, pickled beans and garlic scapes, pickled beets, pickled daikon, pickled turnips, and one last jar of pheasant stew.  We also have a huge variety of jam and jellies, to which this year we added: sunflower jelly, queen anne's lace jelly, and raspberry jam.

All that I have left to preserve are some sweet onions from the garden that will not keep long term.  I am thinking of making them into onion soup; that is always a popular choice for an easy holiday meal.

One things is for sure, though, there are definitely no lazy grasshoppers here.  With the snow just around the corner, we are busy, busy, busy preparing for winter.

Enough is Enough...Get Canning!

At some point I think it is reasonable to say "enough is enough" of a million green tomatoes.  They were taking over my living room and it just had to stop.  I kept a tray full of the largest, nicest ones.  The chickens were the lucky beneficiaries of the remainder.

With the somewhat ripe tomatoes, I squirrelled away one jar of stewed tomatoes and whipped up a delicious meal of cheesy sausage and tomato pasta with the rest.  It was a crowd pleaser for supper with enough left over for two large Tupperware containers full for easy meals from the freezer.

Likewise, I am tired of turkey.  So, I made turkey stock.

I canned 14 one litre jars of stock, with a 15th going directly into my fridge to be used for supper tomorrow.

I am also tired of seeing pears on my counter.  So, I cleaned and canned six more jars of pears in light syrup.

This should pretty much do it for preserving the autumn harvest.  I think I might actually be done canning for 2019.  Woohoo!

*Believe it or not, this was only half of what I got up to today.  I still did not get around to folding the mountain of clean laundry on my living room floor, though.  That is a job for tomorrow...or the next day...or the next day.  Man, I hate folding clothes and putting them away!

Our Anniversary Rocks

For our ten year wedding anniversary this month, Ian bought me not one, but many, special rocks. If you are envisioning a spectacular diamond ring or bracelet, you could not be more wrong.  No, I got five tonnes of 3/8" clear stone and I could not be happier about it.

This type of gravel is used for drainage; which we desperately need in our barns to stop water from pooling around everyone's hooves.  Last year the flooding in new donkey barn was so bad, we had to re-locate Charlie and the sheep into the old barn and put Martha and Mellie in the chicken coop.  We are hoping to avoid a similar situation this winter and so are being proactive about raising the barn floor six inches to hopefully keep the animals drier once the wet weather comes.

Alistair loved the dump truck.  The sound of the brakes made him jump about a mile but he was all smiles after that.  

Now I have to move this new five tonnes of stone from my driveway into the barns.  I have been having nightmares about having to move it with a wheelbarrow with Alistair strapped to me.  I keep having flashbacks to when I moved a full dump truck load of triple mix soil from the driveway to the back garden when I was pregnant with Alistair.  It must have been a hundred wheel barrow loads. I will be eternally grateful to my Dad for stepping up to help me.

It is one thing to push a wheel barrow full of dirt, it is another thing entirely to push one full of rocks.  And though I am still carrying him around with me wherever I go, Alistair weighs substantially more now that he did 18 months ago as a fetus.  Furthermore, unless this task warrants divine intervention, I am not holding my breath for my Dad to show up to assist me this time.  And so, I have asked for help.  

I reached out to our next door neighbour who owns a much larger farm than me.  While my request to borrow her tractor for an hour was politely declined, she did generously offer up an hour of her time to help me move the gravel with her tractor sometime in the next two weeks.  I will take it.  My back and my peace of mind are both preemptively thankful.

A Trick or Treat Snooze

My neighbourhood friends, Ms. Kerry and Ms. Michelle, kindly invited our family to attend their subdivision's pre-Halloween parade.  So, we baked an eyeball cake to share, 

got all dressed up,

and off we went.

The boys loaded up on sugary loot and ended up walking a really long way!  Alistair only made it part of the way before he decided to tap out and take a snooze but he sure seemed to attract lots of attention -  even when unconscious.

We had a lovely time seeing old friends, meeting some new neighbours, and enjoying the fresh autumn air.  A big thanks to our good friends for the kind thought to extend this invitation our way; it was nice to be included.

Crime Scene Kitchen

For our Halloween-themed Saturday we went all out.

Aren't your kids too little for blood and gore, you ask?  Yes, yes, they are.  They are also scaredy cats; they found the Halloween Paw Patrol episode too frightening to watch.  They are not too young for beets, though.   And it is garden harvest time! 

Besides, Liam and Seamus love pickled beets and sweet onions.

Non-scary Halloween crafts are much more Liam and Seamus' style.  When we were not outside, we spent much of the day getting crafty and decorating the kitchen.

We were productive today on many fronts.  All that is left in the garden are radishes, parsley and brussels sprouts, the boys have eaten their quota of fresh garden produce (I am hoping to counter-balance their upcoming Halloween treat consumption by pre-filling them with healthy stuff) and our kitchen is about half decorated. 

Liam and Seamus plan to spend tomorrow morning going through our Tickle Trunk in the basement and deciding on their costumes.  Alistair is going Trick or Treating as a frog. 

By midday tomorrow I am confident that all three boys will be more than ready to attend our neighbourhood's pre-Halloween parade.  Liam and Seamus are really looking forward to it, especially because it happens in the sunshine-filled afternoon and promises not to be the least bit scary.

Wintergreens

I know I might be a little bit crazy but I can't help myself.  I love growing things.

I also hate paying $5 for a tub of salad.  So, I transplanted some of my beets from outside to inside under the grow lights.  I will wait for them to grow some new roots and then plant them in soil.  My hope is to harvest beet greens from them all winter long.

I also may have planted a whole tray of swiss chard seeds and foraged my breakfast for tomorrow.

Fresh eggs and Coprinus comatus (shaggy ink cap or shaggy mane) mushroom.

Before you say it, I know it costs money for electricity to run the grow lights all winter.  But since they are on anyway for Liam's transplanted cucamelon plant that is flourishing (I think it is planning on taking over the world), I figured that I might as well take advantage.