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

Grapes

The girls and I are starting on our grapes today. We picked 1/2 bushel this morning. We plan on making mostly jelly from these. Tomorrow we will start making juice. Yesterday I went to our friend Mrs. Faye. I helped her with her grapes. She wanted to make jelly and juice. Last year, they purchased a steam canner and a steam juicer like ours but they were not too confident with using them. So I went over to help them a little. It was a fun day. We had green beans, corn, cucumbers, cole slaw and cornbread for lunch. YUM!

Not much else going on here. Just mostly canning. We plan on picking more tomatoes this evening. We have been blessed with lots of beautiful tomatoes. Our temperatures have been cooler at night here. You can feel fall in the air. The dogwood trees are starting to turn colors. Apples will soon be ready. I love fall. As I am sitting here typing this post, the sweet smell of grapes fills my home. God is so good to us.

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

August 28, 2012 2

New Canner and Homemade Deodorant

This is my new canner. I stopped at a yard sale a few weeks ago and the lady had this canner for sale. One of the handles was missing so she sold it to me for $5.00. Yesterday, I stopped at Farmers Supply here in Floyd to see if they could order new handles. I had no idea if they could or not as the canner appears to be old. Well, they could and they only cost me $8.00. I then went to the extension office and had them calibrate the guage. It was off 1 and 1/2 pounds so I thought I probably should get a new guage too. This cost $l8.00. Amazing. These parts will be in by Friday. So for roughly $30.00 I got a new canner. This one is much taller than my other ones. It will hold 1/2 gallon jars which I plan to use for our juice that we can.

Then we went on over to Vicki’s and had a great visit. We ate lunch together and then Vicki and I made homemade deodorant.

We used tea tree oil in the solid deodorant and lavender in the powder. I really like it. It smells so fresh and clean. I am impressed. I definitely will be making it again.

Today the girls and I are making spaghetti sauce. This will be our last batch of spaghetti sauce. I think the rest of the tomatoes will just be used to make tomato juice. Our tomatoes are doing very well this year. I think this isthe best ours have done in a long time.

I better go stir the spaghetti sauce as I do not have Mrs. Sally’s good kettle any longer. I took it back to her Sunday. Enjoy your day and God bless.

August 21, 2012 3

Piebald Deer

Piebald deer, a genetic variation that occurs in less than 1 percent of the whitetail population, have white bodies with brown spots, short legs and an arching spine.

We saw one of these last night on our way home from church. It was very exciting. I have never seen one before. The one we saw had a little more brown on it in the front and it was a buck. It was down close to the road so we got a really good look at it. Amazing! I am not sure what the girls and I will be working on today. I want to check the tomatoes and see if any more are ready and see how close the grapes are to being ready. If no garden harvest is ready, I guess we’ll just do normal housework. I hope you all have a great day. God bless.

I got the picture at http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/nov/27/piebald-deer-a-rare-find-in-area-woods/

August 20, 2012 2

Divide and Conquer

Yesterday we divided up to get more done. This is not something we usually do. We normally all work together on projects, However, Hubby wanted to start boxing in the remainder of the back porch and we had lots of tomatoes to work up. So Julie helped me with the tomatoes and Grace helped Hubby with the porch.

The girls worked with me today on more tomatoes and Hubby worked alone. We had to run into little town first to get a few supplies that he needed .The walls are now up and there is a window where they are standing at. He still has to put a door on and the siding but it is almost finished. T.

I better get busy working on my Sunday School lesson. I hope you all have a great evening and God bless.

August 18, 2012 3