Dehydrating...

Ritch received an early birthday/Christmas present from us....a food dehydrator! He loves to make beef jerky in the oven and the kids love dehydrated fruit plus we often freeze or can the overflow from our garden which we then have to keep frozen when we lose electricity from storms...so a dehydrator as an alternate way to put away food makes sense for us.

Haley and Daddy broke it in tonight with some fruit, apples and bananas. They cut up the fruit and dipped it to prevent browning then stacked it on the trays.

Here's a full tray of apple slices....

Here's the dehydrator partially filled with apple.

                                                    Can't wait to try the results!

Fall Garden

 Fall is my favorite time of the year. The weather has been great....warm days and cool nights with little rain unlike our "summer of the rain." I haven't posted any pictures of our girls lately. We lost two this summer. Both died in their nesting boxes so must have been egg laying problems. We have a couple molting right now as you can tell by the near naked Americauna on the lower left hand corner of the picture to the right and the feathers all over the ground.

Their laying is slowing down with the shorter days.

This is our Phoenix chicken, Cleo. She's my favorite. She's little and makes the sweetest little sound. She is broody a lot and I often find her in a nesting box with all the eggs tucked under her little body. If I call her, she'll come out to eat a treat with the others.

Ritch decided to try another planting of some produce in the garden. He planted some more zucchini, peas, lettuces, and beans. He also tried some beets, brussel sprouts, and sweet potatoes. There are a couple tomato plants and potato plants growing on their own.

The garden looks great...way fewer weeds in the fall than in the spring! Now if the first frost will hold off until about mid-November we'll be good!

Here are our very first sweet potatoes! We're going to allow the other plants a bit more time to grow but we wanted to see what was down there.

                                                     Here are some beets and brussels.

Harvest Time...

 A few years ago my husband planted fig trees. The first set of trees had a hard winter. They were very small and the rabbits ate their bark which killed them. He planted some larger trees a couple years ago and wrapped them in the winter. They grew like crazy this year and yielded a bounty of figs.

Ritch has picked figs to eat and made fig jelly numerous times all with the figs from his own tree. He also made jelly from grapes he grew. Our grape plants are finally big enough to yield enough grapes. We had to plant them twice as well because the first grape plants we planted did not do so well.

FIGS!!!!

 Besides the fig jelly and grape jelly (not pictured because he made it the day after I took this photo), Ritch has also made peach and blueberry jam. We will have plenty of jelly/jam this winter and will have to eat it on everything!  The peaches and blueberries came from our local farmers. Hopefully our own blueberry plants will provide the blueberries next year.

Ritch has planted a second round of salad, kale, and beans. We enjoyed all those in the early summer. We also have some sweet potato plants growing and will harvest those when ready. We've eaten all the regular potatoes we grew this summer. We've had so much rain this summer. Some plants did better with all the rain and others did not fare so well...like the zucchini and tomatoes.

The humming birds came back again this year! In the early mornings and evenings there are at least 10 that fly back and forth for drinks. We have two feeders this size and they empty them every three days or so. We like to sit outside in the evening and watch them zoom back and forth.