Fixing up a Gift Basket (And happy Autumn to you all!)

We had a beautiful day for the first day of Fall up here- how about you? Our day was a busy one filled with cleaning, helping my parents butcher their chickens, laundry, having an appraiser come to see our house in hopes that we can refinance, putting up corn and zucchini and doing lots of sneezing and blowing the nose since most of us seem to have caught a cold.

  Last night I had fun fixing up a gift box that will be sold at a silent auction/fundraiser that Ken and I are attending tomorrow. Quite a few people (from our local republican group) contributed items that represent the area where we live and I had the fun of putting everything together. 

 We were going with a northwoods theme so I went out and picked some evergreen branches to go in the basket and then I nestled all the items as well as some pine cones in amongst the greenery. This basket is filled with a bunch of local food items as well as some other local odds and ends and some vintage memorabilia. 

Gift baskets are quite fun to fix up, you can figure out any sort of theme that you think the recipient would enjoy and then start putting them together. Maybe some homemade bread and jam with some of your own herbal tea and some honey or maybe several craft items that they would have fun using. Gift baskets are an attractive way to present items that you may have picked up second hand but you know that they would still be appreciated. I had fun fixing up this gift basket- have you ever had fun making one?

Harvesting at my parents place

 Last week we had scheduled a day to help my parents butcher chickens but when frost was predicted for that night my parents asked if we wanted to help harvest the produce instead. They have several large gardens and lots and lots of produce. We had fun going out and helping and they shared a bunch with us too. Here are some photos of that day.

The boys and I went to work picking green beans and got close to 5 gallons.

They planted the climbing bean named "Blue Lake". It is a very nice producer and very yummy.

Aaron is a good bean snapper. We canned around 7 quarts and then had quite a bit left to eat fresh. (Mom and Dad sent home that whole picking with us, they had already frozen a bunch and already given us and others a bunch as well.)

 This is one of the many, many tomatoes that Dad picked.

 Mara had fun picking grapes.

The grapes are a northern variety so it is smaller and tarter than normal grapes but it makes a yummy juice!

 Mara took all the stems off and also got rid of all the moldy grapes that were in there. My parents have had troubles with the grapes molding lately. They think maybe they need to have a better support system for the grapes so they aren't so bunched together.

I canned a gallon (I found these fun 1/2 gallon canning jars at Mom and Dad's too) of grape juice. I sweetened it with honey. It was pretty yummy so we drank a bunch too. We also have some juice set aside for making jelly with.

 While we were there Dad picked 5, 5 gallon buckets full of corn which we then husked, cooked and cut off the cob to put in the freezer. That wasn't all their corn, they were really blessed with a good crop this year. They blessed us with a bunch of meals worth to put in our freezer.

Harvest time is working time but it is a time when we feel overwhelmed with God's blessings.

I just thought I would share some of the projects I am working on too:

 My ski hat is close to completion. I think it will be fun to wear this winter.

While we were camping this weekend a bunch of people were having fun carving things (You should see my younger brother carve- he is good at it!) and I remembered that I was wanting more wooden spoons. I decided to give it a try. I am not very good at it and I am not done yet either but I have made progress. I don't think it will look very professional but I think it will be fun to stir up bread with something that I made from an old tree limb.

What sort of homesteading things have you been doing?

You are there

 "O Lord, You have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

You understand my thought from afar.

You scrutinize my path and my lying down,

and are intimately acquainted with all my ways.

Even before there is a word on my tongue,

behold, O Lord, You know it all.

You have enclosed me behind and before,

and laid Your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;

It is too high, I cannot attain to it."

Psalm 139:1-6

This is such a comforting, faith building verse for me. The realization that God knows every single little thing about me (and about you- about everybody!), that He knows when I am incredibly weary, when I am ecstatically happy, whether I am crying for joy or sorrow and He knows the answers to every single jumbled question in my head. Isn't that so wonderful that we have a God who is there and who cares for us completely?



Making presents interesting with stuff we have on hand.

Fall is birthday time in our family both immediate as well as quite a few of our extended family. With birthdays come presents. I think it is fun to wrap presents and make them look interesting and fun for the recipient (though sometimes I run out of time and my presents look pretty blah!) but I don't like using a lot of brand new paper, ribbons and such which will most likely just end up in the trash.

So we have fun being creative!

Last week was my sister Keren's birthday and I was wrapping her present when my girls came in from outside with some little people that they had made from acorns, sticks and wild cucumber. I asked if I could have one for the present and they gladly let me. I thought he looked so cute tucked there on top.

A closeup of the wild man.

Today I had some more presents to wrap (for nieces and a nephew that we will be seeing) and we had fun using some odds and ends to make the packages more interesting. We used: bits and pieces of ribbons that I had left over from my floral work and other projects, feathers, An oak leaf, acorns, raffia and wild cucumber.

 It is rather fun to fix up some packages to give away!

Another post where I talk about food and gardening. Someday there will be more to life. :-)

  We woke up this morning to see a very thick frost outside. We were expecting it but it is still always a little bittersweet. Outside our bedroom window there were icicles hanging from the oak leaves because the sprinkler system was running during the cold of the early morning. I forgot my poor geranium out on the deck. I tried to cover my tomatoes and peppers and Aaron's watermelon and that worked for some of them but some parts of the tarps blew off and so we had some poor frost bitten tomatoes.

 I am attempting making vinegar. The instructions seem pretty simple. I am wondering if it will really work. Obviously I am not making very much this first time. I would like to know how to make it as then that would be one more thing we wouldn't need to buy. Have any of you ever made it?

 Today I made some yummy "Cracker Jack" popcorn. Just mix together 1/2 cup melted butter and 1/2 cup honey and pour over 3 to 4 quarts of popcorn. Brown in a 350 degree oven.

We have been enjoying the lovely sunflowers in our garden. We brought some in before the frost but these actually survived fairly well. We will see how they do after tonight's frost.

 We do actually have more to life than food and gardening but once and a while lately it doesn't seem like it. Are you busy with harvest too?

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!