Fall already?

I can't get over it. Where did summer go? We just finished up the coolest July on record and now it's fall? No fair!

It was a balmy 44 degrees F when I got up this morning. There's a fog as thick as pea soup outside.

I'm headed to work with an armload of clothes. I look like a bag lady. Working where I do, I have no idea how hot it will get or how chilly it will be when I get started, so I try to be prepared: extra jackets, shorts and tanktop in case it heats up in a hurry, etc.

Harvest is still going strong. Hubby picks pecks and bushels of goodies daily for me to process. He's been a huge help since I really don't have time to pick and process. Little Sis has been great as well; she's a pro bean breaker and loves to grind tomatoes in the food mill.

This week I'll be making hot sauce, wing sauce, tomatillo salsa, tomato salsa, habanero jelly, canning crushed tomatoes and freezing green beans and peppers. I think I have enough zucchini frozen but the plants are still producing. Not a bad deal...free chicken food.

I have at least two bushels of hot peppers in the kitchen just waiting to be frozen and at least three bushels of tomatoes on the porch to be processed, not counting whatever Hubby will bring in today. I'm not complaining. It will be nice this winter to have all of this garden fare.

For once, I'm sort of looking forward to winter. If all goes according to plan (insert evil laugh because you just can't hear those words without one), we'll be busting a$$ to get the firewood in, but hope to have it all done and, for once, not haul wood in the snow. We are planning to splurge and rent a log splitter once all the wood is cut and stacked. We've always done our firewood 'by hand' with an axe or maul, but having it all split is a tempting idea. There's nothing fun about coming home from work, shivering and dripping wet, only to find that no firewood is split, so it's back outside in the freezing rain to split some, ya know? Anyway, once that's done, we can enjoy winter, maybe work on the interior of the house a bit, and, if all goes well, I may get another quilt started.

Harvesting chickens

Remember our first hatch? We finally got around to harvesting the two big hens, leaving the two bantams to fill out our bantam flock.

If you have never raised your own meat, you don't know what you are missing. Sure, it's messy and a little gross. But you know how it was raised and processed. You know the animal was healthy. And you know it wasn't rolled around in sewage before it was popped onto the store shelf. (Ew!)

We did all of the processing ourselves. I'm kind of glad the first hatch was small, since we really didn't know what we were doing. But, after the first chicken, the second was easy. Well, other than me dodging the headless chicken. That was hysterical.

Anyway, after the processing, we put the chicken in the freezer. Then last weekend I made time to cook a decent meal. We had fried chicken (our own!), green beans, mashed potatoes, made from scratch biscuits, and blackberry cobbler. The beans, potatoes, blackberries and chicken were all raised here. It was all amazing. There's nothing like raising your own food.

Our next harvest will be 14 chickens, then another 25 after that. These aren't broilers, so they look kind of small when we butcher them, but there's a surprising amount of meat on these scrawny looking birds.

I am considering ordering 25 broilers, just to compare. But that, most likely, will have to wait till next spring.

This week's harvest

See the lonely ripe tomato hiding in the beans? Those green tomato looking things are tomatillos. There's a milk crate full of mild peppers...the hot ones refused to pose for photo.

I blanched and froze 30 quarts of zucchini today. Not even half done. Where can I apply for some extra hours in the day?