Ugh! I’ve had such a case of writer’s block when it comes to this blog!
Grampa and I are currently exercising our immune systems. Seems we picked up some horrible flu bug. I can’t do much of anything so I thought I’d better at least post!
We’ve been getting some frost here. My parsley really loves this weather and the cilantro is coming back nicely. If we were still going to the farmer’s markets I could sell some of it, but that’s about all we’d have to sell and even with the drop in gas prices it wouldn’t be enough to make it worth it.
My October was spent finishing up my assessing job. Grampa spent it cleaning up around here waiting for it to stop raining so he could get in the fields. Normally, they are done with the harvest around here by now, but it’s been to wet! Oh well, he’s gotten a lot done around here. One thing I really like about him working at home is that our place gets a lot more of his attention!
Then the first week in November we went to the small farm conference in Columbia, MO. We’ve gone down there for a day every year for a while now, but this year we decided to go for the full 3 days. We learned all about marketing, chicken breeds, sheep, honey, etc … as well as getting to meet so many people like ourselves. We may be crazy, but we’re not the only ones!
Since then I’ve been putting up apples. We had a wonderful apple crop this year! A lot of it went to the sheep and chickens because I was to busy with the assessing, but I’ve made about 4 gal. of apple juice and 40 quarts of applesauce. I was planning to put most of it into apple juice but the juicer I snatched out of the garage sale gave up on me. I’ve got 7 more 5 gal. buckets to go. They will all be applesauce. That’s way too much applesauce for us, but my bees will like it.
The standard practice in the honey industry is to harvest all the honey and feed the bees corn syrup over the winter, but we’re not real crazy about that. We decided to leave the honey this year and supplement only if we needed to. Then I was reading that bees liked rotting fruit. Then I saw a bunch of them on some apples on the ground. I decided to see if they’d like apple juice and they loved it. Since my juicer quit, I think I’ll put ½ applesauce and ½ water in the jars. They ought to like that. The chickens will love the treat when the bees get done with it too!
God Bless You All!
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