- School has started! We truly school all year round starting from when they are first born as life is a school (We do work on our History, Science, Bible, Music and more all year round) but workbooks like Math, English, Copywork and Spelling are special treats for the school year. We started up last Tuesday and the first couple of days we had a special guest joining us as her mother had jury duty. She was very fun to have around.
- We have so many beautiful flowers blooming (we threw around zinnia, marigold, cosmos and some other seeds this Spring and we are loving the results now!) and I love being able to cut and arrange them and share them.
- It is honey extracting time. We use a big drill to run our extractor with on it's very lowest speed. Well this year something happened to make it not go into low speed any more. Well it said it did but it wasn't. I was running the extractor and I was really concerned I might break my wrist any moment, it was so powerful. Some of my frames were blowing up in the extractor because of it which was making a mess. But I am a little stubborn and figured since we had been using the drill other years it must be fine this year too I just wasn't getting the hang of it. Mara kept saying "Mom, we need a different drill!" but I kept at it until it whipped out of my hand and I bruised up my hand and arm at which time I did go dejectedly to Ken to see if he thought there might be something wrong with the drill. He came to check it out and gave it one little try and said "That almost broke my wrist!" Well that made me feel better. I guess I wasn't such a wimp after all. So we decided to use a less powerful drill. We are a little concerned that it might burn it out but Ken said it was cheap so it isn't a big deal. We got our least amount of honey ever this year but are still feeling very blessed.
- Earlier this summer Megan and Aaron found monarch caterpillars and brought a couple inside. We put them in an old glass fish tank with a bunch of milkweed leaves and a piece of lace over the top. They made chrysalis and then one day they came out. Watching that happen never gets old!
- We continue to work at harvesting and putting up for the winter every day. Lately it has been quite a lot of stuff each day. I wish the days could be longer but am working to make do with what I have!
I hope you are doing well! I would love to hear about what is going on in your life.
5 comments:
Your kitchen looks quite lovely in the photo above. I rarely comment on anyone's blog, but I just wanted to say that I truly enjoy reading yours, and find it quite inspiring at times as a christian, homeschooler, and believer in the simple life. I hope you continue to write, and may God bless you and your family.
So much neat stuff. Do your bees survive the winter? We've never taken honey from our bees because we don't have enough for them to survive on. We are trying to mix two hives this year to see if they will survive the winter and maybe we'll get honey next year. I hope. We always hatched Monarchs too. Just loved that part of schooling. They are beautiful.
That sound like a fun thing to do, hatching out butterflies!! Great home school project! And that seems like a lot of honey to me. I would love to raise bees to get my own honey. Well God bless
Kelly
We're in the middle of moving and doing some renovating on our new house. We're starting our official schooling (other than the life part) in October this year due to moving.
How neat that you have monarchs. They haven't been seen in my area for many years now. There are efforts to restore milkweed in my area. Hopefully then they will start to show up here again. I'd love to watch some caterpillars change. We only found a species of tent caterpillars and I didn't want to have to deal with that in captivity so we observed them and let them go again.
I thought I had replied to these comments - I apologize for not doing so sooner.
Jodie, Thanks so much for your comment. I do so appreciate hearing from readers from you from time to time. It is a blessing to know that God is in some way using me to encourage others.
Jennifer, I have never had my bees survive the winter yet. Even though I have left them plenty of honey some years (they didn't eat it all). This year I didn't even try to overwinter them. Next year I am hoping to try carnelian bees instead which I have heard are hardier than the Italians.
Kelly, Thank you so much! We were blessed with the honey. It is down from other years for us but still truly quite a lot and we appreciate it so much. I encourage you to look into getting bees. It can be very rewarding.
Nola, I hope you are now off to a great start with your school year! We are blessed with quite a lot of milkweed around here so the monarchs are pretty abundant as well. They are so pretty! :-)
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