So much to harvest!

 It is the harvest season for sure! Here is some of the harvesting we have been doing this past week:

FISH
A friend of my parents has a trout pond which they drain for the winter. She let my parents have the fish. So they invited us over to help with the cleaning of them. So last Thursday morning we cleaned a whole bunch of fish!

 Jonathan was the official person to get them out of the tub of water and cut their heads off. He did a very good and efficient job of it. Mom and I were doing the gutting of the fish and we couldn't keep up with him. Dad was in charge of filleting them and he couldn't begin to keep up.

 I tried to help with filleting one but I butchered it so badly and took forever so I gave up on helping in that department. Dad didn't fillet all of them as they also enjoy eating them baked so for that he leaves the skin on and doesn't cut them up.

 It is such a blessing to have many meals (for both households) of fish in the freezer for this fall and winter.

GARDEN PRODUCE
Our garden has still been producing well- especially cucumbers! We have been enjoying eating a lot fresh as well as canning and freezing quite a lot. I also was able to barter some cucumbers for some apples which I was quite happy about. We are also trying to make sure that we have plenty of our herbs dried so we can have tea and seasonings all winter long.

HONEY

God really did bless us with an abundant harvest this first year of our keeping bees. Harvesting has been quite a bit of work so we have just been doing a few boxes at a time. So far we have harvested over 200 lbs and still have more to harvest.

I am taking all the honey from the bees and then we will be killing the bees off. I really would have liked to try overwintering the bees but that isn't something that is very easy to do in our cold climate. The man that is mentoring me does not advise trying it at all. I still do want to try it sometime but Ken and I decided that this first year at least it probably made since to follow his directions. When I am more experienced with beekeeping in general then maybe I can try overwintering them.

Last week I did get a little scare when I went out to harvest. I opened up our biggest hive and it smelled funny. I had read that American Foulbrood has a weird odor and so I got scared that they might have it. But I checked online and they said that when bees are harvesting goldenrod and asters that the hive can also smell weird then. Les, my mentor, told me some ways to check for sure whether they had foulbrood or not and they didn't. Praise God! We had done some praying about the situation and I am thankful that it worked out the way it did.

The kids running the extractor.

   Well we need to hurry and harvest a bunch more today as it is supposed to frost tonight. I had better go get busy!