Sunset Meadow gets fancy

We picked some of our root vegetables from the garden to create sushi.  Inspired by a few friends to make this at home, we tried it out with all the vegetables coming from our garden.  I also made salmon, tuna, and chicken just for fun.  The kids loved it, especially the wasabi and soy sauce.  I made extra to put in the freezer and have later this winter. YUMMY!

Apple Apples Everywhere

We were offered these apples for free if we picked them and of course we couldn't pass up the opportunity. We worked for 2 weeks peeling and chopping these apples.  I have no idea what kind of apples these are, but they are wonderful!

We were able to make 24 pints of apple butter (Devin's fav), 45 quart of canned apples (for apple crisp, Chris's fav), 45 quarts of apple sauce (Lexy's fav) and 6 quarts of apple cider for these cold winter nights (Jenny's fav). This picture actually only shows about half of the apples as we were midway through them by the time we thought to take a picture. I think we are set for this winter.

It is getting colder!

Chris was all excited that he was able to cut wood for our wood stove. We tried out the new outdoor wood burner with some wood he cut from our property on those few nights that it dropped down to the 40's.   We have several trees down in our pasture area and hope these trees will give us enough fuel to heat the house for 2-3 years. The wood stove works great, but unfortunately the indoor boiler needs some work.  Right now it is nice and toasty as we sit with our hot chocolate and good books!

Grape Juice

This is what we spend a few evening working on this past week...grape juice.  A friend of ours gave us several boxes of grapes that were too small to make jam, so we made juice.  Pretty simple with just 2 cups of washed and stemmed grapes and 3/4 cup of sugar to a 1/2 gallon of water, process at 10 pound pressure for 15 minutes.   You need to strain out the grapes when you drink the juice, but it is very yummy.  We canned 26 half gallons of juice!

New Puppy

This is another new member of our farm family...Cocoa.   She has been the most work by far.  We are working on not chewing on EVERYTHING! She is a lot of work and we would have kicked her out a long time ago if she wasn't so cute.

Chickens

We are still adding to our little hobby farm, now with chickens.  We have decided to only start with egg chickens for now and may try our hand at baby chicks for meat chickens later in the spring. We were able to retrieve our older girl, Lilly from my dad's house.  He was fostering her until we could complete the coop.  We have turned the old well house into a very nice chicken coop. Chris put new siding on the house while Devin, Lexy, and I cleaned the inside and built a ladder roost for the 10 new chicks.  These chicks should start laying around mid to late September. We can't wait! They are so fun to watch.

while building the coop, we had to leave for an hour and when we came back, the goats were inside the coop!! They had managed to climb through the 12X12 doorway and made a wonderful mess of the food and water containers.  Needless to say, we have moved the goats to the middle pasture for their own and kept the chickens in the smallest fenced area.  They are still too small to let run the entire area, so we have fenced off a smaller section for a few weeks.  Hopefully by then they will grow to big to fit through the fence panels. I have posted some before and after pics of the coop and a few of our new birds...all of which have been named by Devin and Lexy.

The Goats

We have added 2 new members to our family, Amber and Ginger.  Amber is the black and white goat and born in February.  She is the more feisty of the two, but a lot of fun.  Ginger is the born and white one and love the attention.  She was born in January.  We hope to breed them in the Spring, which will put them into milk.  Then comes the homemade feta and goatmilk soap!! We can't wait.

Amber

Ginger

We are Here

We have started the big move-in. We have painted every room, repaired floors, added new gutters, put in new carpet, and CLEANED among many other things.  We are seeing some progress and have even  been able to sleep here the past couple nights.  The grass outside is 8 inches high, but we need to repair the mower and the pasture grass is nearly 3 feet tall! We will also be getting rid out the mount trashmore on Monday night thanks to my my mom. We will post pics once we get most things in place!

Last night was the last night in the old house, we're ready to move and tired of living in a vacant house as we have for the past week.  Everyone is excited to move into the new house and begin work on moving in and paint/cleaning!

Our last days

We only have 2 days in our old house.  Things are falling apart with the repairs of our new house, but we will manage. We will have to forgo the new window, new roof on the barn, and gutters for the house.  We hope to at least get new carpet and the rest will fall in place later.