Grayson Highlands Festival

I thought I would share with you all some of our pictures from our visit to the Grayson Highlands Festival today with the Horn’s. We saw lots of crafts and hand made items.

This was one of the biggest attractions. The making of molasses.

Here they are pouring the hot fresh made molasses into jars for selling. We, of course, bought one.

There was lots of food and lots of music.

But these little guys were the main attraction. They auction off these wild ponies every year. We stayed for a little of the auction but the rain finally forced us to leave.

It was a really fun day. I will show you some more of the pictures with the fall colors in my next post. I hope you all have a great weekend and God bless.

September 29, 2012 4

New Package

Hello everyone! I thought I would show you all my new idea for selling the homemade laundry soap. This is what the package looked like before

I think I like the new ones better. I am hoping they will catch customers attention more. We’ll see.

Well, that’s my day. It took a little longer to sew these little packets than I first expected, plus we had to make up the laundry soap. All our soap had sold at the Bread Basket. Tomorrow is a big day for shoppers here in Floyd-the annual craft festival. We wanted to make sure we had plenty of aprons and laundry soap on hand for selling.

I hope you all have a great day and God bless.

September 28, 2012 5

Wednesday

Hi everyone. I’m sorry about no pictures lately but I have been having trouble with my computer. Hopefully all is fixed now. Saturday, Dave, Jess and kids came up for a visit. Dave and Hubby went to Pastor Tom’s shoot. They had a great time. Then on Saturday afternoon, Chuck and his kids came over too. I was one happy mawmaw. All my grandbabies here at one time. I hope this becomes a habit. We all went to cut wood. I so wish I had taken my camera. It was so cute seeing them all carrying wood to load in the truck. Everyone went. We even had Katie and Sam in the stroller, which did not make Sam happy. He kept saying, “I wanna help PawPaw too.” We thought Sam might be a little too much “help.”

We had a great supper of pork, pintos, mashed potatoes, rolls, peaches and pears. After cutting, loading and unloading two truck loads of wood, everyone was hungry. As they were leaving, I gave them all an apple for the road. Alexius was getting in the car and got her finger shut in the car door. Chuck asked her how she managed to do that and she said, “I was trying to hold my apple and I wanted to give MawMaw another hug”. I felt so sorry for her.

I have been helping Hubby all this week with a bathroom remodel. We finished it today. Tomorrow, he will start installing the cabinets at the old farmhouse he has been working on. We plan on going with the Horn’s this Saturday to Grayson Highlands for their fall festival. We are looking forward to it. It sounds like lots of fun. Well, I think that’s about all that is happening around here. I hope you all have a great evening and God bless.

September 26, 2012 3

Oatmeal Pie

2 eggs beaten, 2/3 cup sugar, 2/3 cup uncooked oatmeal (I prefer old-fashioned oats but quick cooking will work as well) 1 tsp. vanilla, 2/3 cup melted margarine, 2/3 cup corn syrup, 1/4 tsp. salt.

Mix all ingredients together and pour into uncooked pie shell. Bake at 350 degrees for about l hr. Tastes very similar to pecan pie.

September 21, 2012 4

Our Trip

Hello everyone! I thought I would tell you all a little about our trip yesterday. I did not get any pictures-sorry. We didn’t actually go down into the town of Mt. Airy so we didn’t see any Andy Griffith stuff. We did have a great time though. We left here about 8:30 yesterday morning and got home about 6:00. A full day. We stopped at lots of produce stands. They were all stocked with beautiful fall mums, pumpkins and such. We ate lunch at Libby Hill. We enjoyed it a lot. We then walked around inside the Mayberry Mall for a while and had ice cream as a treat while in the mall. On the way home, we stopped at a few more produce/farmer market type places. Hubby bought 2 knives that he thinks will be good knives for working up deer and other meats. I bought 10 lbs of pintos, 5 lb. kidney beans, 4 lb. black beans, 3 lb. yellow eyed beans, some white sweet potatoes and a cushaw. I am hoping to can most of the beans to have on hand when I need them quickly.

We are working on our last sack of apples today. I am ready to start canning something else (beans, soups, and chili). Temperatures here are beautiful. Much cooler with lots of sunshine (after our downpour the other day). Dave, Jess and kids are coming up tomorrow. The pastor has a clay shoot at his house every year. Dave and Hubby are going to it while the rest of us go check out some yard sales and maybe a trip to Michaels. Jess has requested an oatmeal pie for tomorrow. I plan on making that this evening. It is a very good pie that tastes like pecan pie, just less expensive to make.

Well, I guess that is about all that’s happening here. I hope you all have a great day and God bless.

September 21, 2012 5

Rainy Tuesday

Hello everyone! We are really getting rain today. I think it is predicted to get about 5″ but I think we have already gotten that much. Well, we really need rain so I’m thankful besides I love the sound of rain on our tin roof. Makes me want to curl up with a good book and a cup of coffee or tea. However, that is not possible as we are still working on apples. I love the fact that we have all these apples but I am getting a little tired of working on them. So Thursday or Friday, Mrs. Faye and her hubby and us are going to Mt. Airy to purchase new crop pinto beans. We will be spending the day looking at little shops along the way and fun things like that. Then she and I are going to get together next week and can them or at least that’s the plan as of now. I went to her house yesterday to help her with her apples. We did apple juice, applesauce and canned apples. We had a lot of fun together.

Well, that’s about it. Sorry I haven’t posted much but there’s not much going on here. I don’t think I mentioned it but Mt. Airy is the home of the Andy Griffith show. Have any of you ever watched it? I’ll try to take some pictures to show you all. Enjoy your day and God bless.

September 18, 2012 3

Tuesday

Hi everyone! Today is a beautiful day here in Floyd. Actually it has been a beautiful week so far. Our nighttime temperatures have been in the mid 40’s and daytime highs are low 70’s. Perfect temps in my opinion.

Sunday we took the girls to Tweetsie Railroad for a day out. We had actually planned on going with Dave, Jess and kids but the kids had some type of virus going on. Daniel and Sam had it earlier in the week and we thought maybe Katie had escaped getting it. However, Saturday afternoon Katie came down with it so they did not get to go with us. Hubby actually decided to go with us at the last minute. He is not much for amusement parks but I think he didn’t want us going alone. We had a really fun day but kept missing Jess and crew. Sam so loves trains.

Today we are working with apples, SURPRISE! We also had 4 more l00 lb sacks of apples gave to us Friday evening. We will have plenty of apples this winter. I am juicing most of the ones gave to us Friday. We are making applesauce and applebutter too. Our steam juicer and our sauce maker sure do make this work go faster. I am very glad we have them.

Seems like we have been so busy here. I haven’t had time to make a post or read anyone else’s posts. I will try to catch up some today. Enjoy your day and God bless.

September 11, 2012 8

Apples

Monday, the girls and I went to the pastor’s home to pick apples.

He has about 10 trees (I think) and they all look like this one. We picked three 100 lb. feed sacks full. I am estimating each sack holds 1 and 1/2 bushel of apples. So that means we got close to 5 bushels of apples. At our local store, apples are selling for $20.00 a bushel. That means I have about $100.00 of apples sitting in my kitchen that were just gave to me. God is good!! They also gave us the last of their grapes-about 1 bushel. Yesterday, the girls and I juiced the grapes they gave us and did one batch of juice from our grapes. We also did a batch of apples in the juicer and tried a new recipe crockpot maple apple jam. It is very good. It reminds me of apple butter but has a distinctive maple taste.

We picked the last of our grapes today-about 1/2 bushel. We put them in the fridge for today. Maybe we will just eat on them for a while instead of juicing them. I hope to do more apples this evening but I’m not sure. We might have to wait until tomorrow to start on them. I am wanting to try a new recipe I saw for apple pie using honey instead of sugar. It looked really good.

Well, I guess that’s all that has been going on around here-just grapes and apples. I hope you all have a great day and God bless.

September 5, 2012 8

Raines Elementary

Hello everyone! I thought I would share this picture with you all. I found this on facebook the other day. This is where I went to school from 1st to 6th grade. In my 7th grade, they decided to tear down the school and build a new one. They then moved all us students to another building. I have many fond memories (and some not so fond) of this place. You see, I went to school during the time when teachers could still paddle. Not only that, but if I got in trouble at school, I knew I was in trouble at home. How did we ever get to where we are now. If a kid gets in trouble at school now, it is always the teachers fault never the kids. Oh well, sorry, I think I got on a rabbit trail there. Any way back to the picture. The small building you see in the right hand corner is the girls toilet. That’s right, toilet-not bathroom. You can not see it but there is one just like it on the left for the boys. No swings or any type of play equipment. Sometimes, someone would bring a board bat and a ball and we would play ball. Most times, we just played tag and hide and go seek, jump rope, hop scotch, things like that. In the upper left is the coal house and the pump house. Starting at the right of the building, the first room was the 3rd and 4th grade, next was 1st and 2nd, then 5th and 6th and the last room was for the 7th grade. I guess they thought if you made it to 7th grade, you deserved a room all to yourselves. As you probably guessed, we were a small school and everyone knew everyone, no matter what grade you were in. The older grades watched out for the younger grades. Everyone’s parents knew everyone’s parents. Of course, this meant you couldn’t get into too much meanness because someone was bound to tell on you. But I liked that, we knew where our boundaries were.

Well, that’s my walk down memory lane. I hope I didn’t bore you all too much. We are working with grapes today. So I better get off here and get started. Enjoy your day and God bless.

August 31, 2012 8

Wednesday

Hi everyone! Just a short post on how our day is (hopefully) going to progress. We are first working on tomatoes. We picked about 3/4 of a bushel yesterday evening. After the tomatoes are done, we plan on working with grapes. I have a plan of working up about 1/2 bushel everyday. We made 14 pts of grape jelly yesterday so today all the grapes will go to making juice. We had some fresh grape juice this morning with breakfast. Also some of the grape jelly. Both were delicious. They taste like eating fresh grapes. I used the Pamona Pectin to make the jelly. I really like it. With SureJell, to make a batch of jelly you need 5 cups of juice and 7 cups of sugar. With the Pamona, 4 cups of juice and only 2 cups of sugar. That is a really big difference.

I hope you all have a great day and God bless.

August 29, 2012 4