If you are not someone that has their own goats and chickens, then you will probably find that you have a lot of apple cores and peels left after making applesauce. And even if you do have farm animals that will happily devour the leftover scraps, you still might find that you have too many for them to handle. Apple leftovers are highly perishable, and when you’re making your way through 100+ pounds of apples, it leaves you with a…
Remember a few weeks ago we went apple picking and brought home over a hundred pounds of apples? Last week we went back and picked another 60! We now have enough applesauce to have it with dinner twice a week from now until March, and fillings for 14 apple pies. We love pies, but I don’t love how labor intensive they are. So this year we decided to mass produce crusts and pie fillings. We prefer the taste and texture…
We haven’t taken on many new projects as of late; as I wrote about recently our focus has shifted to doing fewer things well. We are continuing to milk the goats, tend the chickens and rabbits, and homeschool. We also homestead in other ‘little’ ways. We cook from scratch, we knit and sew, we cut our boys’ hair ourselves …. anything where you’re not hiring someone out or buying something pre-made is certainly homesteading. Rachel has been a rockstar in…
Things you don’t know until you have a homestead: it’s amazing what a relief it is to move young poultry out of the upstairs bathroom and into the barn. They’re not exactly smelly, but the odor from their food is kind of odd, they kick shavings around, and they take up space. And the bathroom is an awfully private room to have to share, even if they are just chicks. This is the fourth (ish?) time we’ve had young poultry…
This past week we went on our first of 2 apple picking trips. In about 10 minutes, the boys picked 108 pounds of apples. No, I am not making use of hyperbole – the cashier weighed it out and we have 108 pounds of apples. To be sure, we usually pick a good 50 or 60 pounds every year to make apple sauce, and it’s usually over the course of (what seems like) many hours of whining, weedling, and trips…