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.