Summer camp all year long

I have been waiting for this day...

See that playset?  The one that the kids don't ever play on anymore?...

It's coming down!

I have often entertained the idea of turning it into a coop, or a potting shed - but what I really wanted was a... camp style canoe rack!

I don't think I had to lift a finger.  Hubs is fantastic with this stuff, as long as I can get him to "see what I'm seeing".  This was a tad difficult since he didn't grow up where canoe racks and summer camps were a common sight.  I think I might have jogged his memory with a showing of Friday the 13th.   

 After the kids helped daddy dismantle the old playset and salvage any lumber that wasn't split or rotted, they were off to get their supplies.  

Finn said he could help.  Uh-huh.

Hubs clearly thought I was describing a skyscraper canoe rack, but I can work with this.

Ta da!  Ok, I admit it stayed like this for several weeks.

It is huge, but incredibly useful.  We still have a big tandem kayak that was last seen floating around Minnesota/Wisconsin in my parent's garage... or someone's garage we know up there (we hope), so we have plenty of room for that as well.  It even holds our rooftop cargo box and will eventually have an attic shelf we can store some gear in.  Of course we can't afford a real roof LOL, so bamboo will do for now!  The kids have named it the 'Yak Shack.

That poor old yellow canoe is in desperate need of some TLC, that's what years of hot southern sun will do to your stuff here.

Another view, this thing is huge.  Bonus is that I can fit a couple of chairs under there so I will have some shade to read a book, knit, or any of those other things that I will honestly never get to do!  I'm sure we will do a little decorating with old life vests and cracked paddles to give it a little character :)

Hubs celebrated by smoking some pork in the rain.

For the uninitiated, that's not raw meat.  The pink is from the "smoke ring".  It turned out beautifully and now I have a ton of pulled pork in the freezer ready for quick meals.  I took a jar of my canned hot pepper sauce, added some extra vinegar and other random things and it made for a great NC style mop to go with it.  We will be enjoying this long after the hubs is on the other side of the Suez Canal :)

I've been doing some cooking of my own lately in celebration of cooler fall temps...

Chili 'n Jalapeno Cornbread

Rain expected this afternoon, but I'm hoping to at least get some pumpkins in the front yard and the porch cleared off of all our fishing gear and bait buckets - seriously, our porch looks pretty redneck right now since we have been busy with activities and Cub Scout stuff and not putting things away properly.  There's bait buckets, tackle boxes, even a bunch of camo painted boxes for a Cub Scout Nerf War, totally "Honey Boo Boo" out there.  Hubs' relatives are coming this weekend so I think I better clear a path!  

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Thought I would share this one quickly... one day only- free eBook from Amazon:


I haven't read it yet, but the title alone is great, and it's free today!  

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I only thought the garden was done...

I lied, I thought the garden was done, kaput.  Then I remembered the other day that I asked hubby to leave the pepper bed alone since they were well behaved plants and weren't really infested with any sort of bugginess (is that a word?).  I've been up to other things inside the house and kind of forgot about checking up on them.  

All 16 pounds of them!

Nope, canning season wasn't over yet.

I also tried making hot sauce for the first time.  As usual, don't expect a recipe out of me, I don't use them.  I chucked a bunch of the mini-bell peppers that are a pain to freeze in the crock pot along with some jalapeños and a bunch of the yellow and green Trinidad Spice peppers you see in the photo above.  Added "a bit" of vinegar and a jar of last year's frozen tomatoes that were still in the freezer.  Cooked for several hours then blended with a stick blender, added salt and garlic, cooked a bit more and pressure canned a few pints along with a jar of fresh that we are using already.  Very yummy and now I'm thinking of making some of it into a bbq mop for our next pork smoking event, since the final sauce product flavor really hinted at it.  Not much of a recipe, but that's how I roll :)

Pickled jalapeños, Trinidad Spice Peppers, 6 qts frozen bell peppers (not pictured) and a bunch of hot sauce!

Although I'm not canning apples anymore, I still pick them up at the farm stand for fresh eating.  Finn is the apple connoisseur around here.  We all like them in some fashion, but for him it's a religious calling to sample every apple that passes by.

Above apples according to Finnegan:  "these are nice to look at, but taste gross"... there you have it.  These are Fuji I think, but I wouldn't judge any apple on this year's crop, apples have been dealt a difficult hand this year.

Speaking of bad crops, the pumpkin growers down here are calling it a total loss.  Crazy, the pumpkins look beautiful, but when you touch them or go to lift them, they collapse into a mess.  Too much rain.

So I've been avoiding the obvious, where the he(( have I been the past couple of weeks?!  I have no excuse for myself except motivation.  I have been busy with the kids's stuff, they have swim team, music lessons, Loch is in the Robotics Lego League, and of course we are Cub Scout leaders so that eats up a lot of time as well.  Of course none of this is a valid excuse for why I can't find 15-30 minutes to sit down and blog since you all do way more homestead-y chores and still manage to do it, I'm just a hot mess this year for some reason LOL.  Rest assured though, we are all alive and kicking and just waiting for the next wave of inspiration and industriousness to arrive.  Until then I'll continue cleaning up 2 square feet of the garden and losing interest or pulling all the stuff out of a cupboard to clean and then walking away from it with ADD  :)

There is a huge elephant who is not in the room yet, but can be heard wiping his feet off on the doormat outside... the deployment schedule has arrived.  Hubby leaves in just a couple of days and will only be home for 7 days over the next 2 months, after that we don't know how long he will be here before he leaves for 6-10 months.  We have heard this is the most condensed workup cycle that has been done, usually these training missions pre-deployment are a little more spaced out, but I guess we can thank the new crisis in the Middle East for that.  "New crisis" and "Middle East" should probably not ever go into the same sentence but I just did it LOL.  So anyway, now we aren't even sure if our holiday plans will be a go.  Oh well, I'm not afraid to say I can't stand Obama (military family, no big surprise there) but we will loyally "go with the program" and not complain too much, the deployment is needed and we've had him home for almost 2 years so we are fortunate.

Hubby took the boys camping last weekend!  I was home ALONE for a night!  I realized that I had never, ever been alone without any of them, how strange!  I'm not ashamed to say it was awesome.  :)

Hubs & the boys - Knotts Island, NC

What was really cool was that apparently he did indeed feed them and keep them from harm's way, they came back the next day intact.  I had to save my "I told you that would happen" for another day...

p.s.  I have been trying to keep up with everyone and none of my comments are posting on blogs unless I'm on my desktop computer!  I usually read my blogs on the laptop so I apologize, I'm going to see if I can find the issue tonight.

Work!

Today is the first day in months that we have seen a high temperature only in the 70's, and I can't even begin to describe what that does for my mood and motivation!  Even though these temps mean only one thing right now...WORK... the work is so enjoyable now.  As you all know by now I didn't do one thing this summer except harvest and canning, so that means the garden, er, weeds are about 12 feet tall.  Here's a quick post and then I need to get back at it!

Hubby's taking the back yard and the heavy initial "clearing" while I'm taking the front yard today to try and get some curb appeal back.

No joke... these ornamental grasses are 10 feet tall and were obscuring our pathway to even get out of our gravel perennial garden/seating area.  I had already forgotten I had a yard and garden beyond this "walled in" room!

This is the view looking out my back door.  This is a deck, so it's crazy how high the grasses grew this year, this area is probably at 10-12 feet tall.  See how easy it was to forget the garden mess this year?  Out of sight, out of mind :)

 

Paused to enjoy a flower in the barrel pond...

They are here!!!

I won't know how they work for awhile yet, I plan on using up the open boxes of metal lids first.

We had a great day at a big event here Saturday, but that will have to wait another day, I need to get back out and man my scythe!  I imagine it will take the better part of a month to get the homestead whipped back into shape and it won't happen by itself, it's already proved that :)  We are actually supposed to have a low in the upper 60's tonight which will feel fantastically arctic compared to the past few months, I'm hoping for an open window kind of evening!

It may be hot still....

But it's fall in the kitchen!  We went apple picking and managed to get enough to put some up for winter.  The orchards around here are in dismal shape, most are rotting on the branch or just look awful, it made for a time consuming hunt to find the good ones!  All we get here due to our climate are Red and Golden Delicious, but I'll take what I can get and live vicariously through those of you who live far enough north to get the coveted Honeycrisps!

We ended up with 2 pecks, or what weighed in at home as right at about 20 lbs.  I would love more, but the condition of the apples along with the heat, humidity and mosquitoes had me quitting early!  Maybe another weekend I'll get more.

I finally relented and bought an apple peeler/corer/slicer.  

I spent the evening making apple pie filling to preserve.  Maybe my family will actually get more than one apple pie out of me this fall if all I have to do now is open a jar and dump it in!

This was only part of it, I had to do two batches or my poor burner would never be able to heat up that big pot!

Now that I have the peeler/slicer, I'm able to get the thin slices I prefer for pies.  I like my pies to have almost no syrup in them so they will pack into a pie nice and tightly with these.  The last time I made a pie I didn't have a slicer and tried to get them thin with a paring knife, ugh... never again!

Apple Pie in a Jar - bring it on, winter!

We were invited to a Labor Day cookout at a friend's house, so I also made an Apple Crisp, my first one ever.

It didn't end up looking like my grandma's, but I guess it turned out okay anyways - 

here is the pan an hour later... hmmm, of course it could have been awful and they were just being nice, they are nice people after all :)

a quick trip to Open House for Loch to meet his new teacher and see his desk -

then yesterday they were off!  Can you hear me shouting for joy?  I'm not being mean, they wanted back in school as much as I wanted them there.  This unbearable heat has made for some cooped up and bored children, and a frustrated mommy.  I love fall, always seems like time for a fresh start.

Marley took no time at all in getting back into her school bus waiting schedule.

I sat around in shock for a bit in the morning, then I figured I better get a plan together quick before they came home, so all I got done was jarring up some Apple Butter than had been going in the crock pot.  With that, all the apples are now dealt with.

Enjoyed a truly local summer dinner.  Although only the bread and onions here are mine, I was able to source the corn, potatoes, butter and pastured pork sausage from a local farm.  I didn't even realize it until we sat down to eat, but it certainly makes me smile to think that everything on my plate came from my own town.

Happy Back to School all you other mamas out there, enjoy!

Things I actually did get accomplished!

Since it's been so miserably hot in the garden this year and I seem to have thrown the towel in months ago, I've had more time to branch out beyond my usual harvest by taking advantage of the local farm stands.  Not the Farmer's "Market", those are usually disappointing to me, but the actual stands on the road in front of a farm.  Usually I go load up on strawberries and blueberries, and then by the time the farms have other offerings I am knee deep in my own garden and don't manage to get by the farm stands to pick up anything more than a few ears of corn for dinner.  This year was sooooooo different!  My tomatoes were all done and canned by mid-July, so I've started becoming a little more creative beyond my usual jars of salsa, tomatoes and jam on the shelves.

One day I took the kids and headed out to pick up some early corn, the last of the blueberry pickings, figs and peaches.

The "early" corn ended up being fantastic, so I went back the next morning and bought a bunch more and put the kids to work.  I ended up with some great jars of canned corn this year, another first (usually I freeze it).

THIS is why I don't bother with corn in my home garden...look at that pollination!

My first time for canning peaches... I know, I know... who doesn't can peaches?  I remember my grandma getting lots of peaches every year, but I never did care much for them and never tried myself.  I have found that I like the taste, but don't like the smell, anyone else have this problem?  Ok, maybe it's just me :)

I decided to get creative with some color by canning blueberries with peaches also -

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.  I am now addicted to stopping by the farm stands and canning just about anything they have going in abundance this year.  It's pretty time consuming, but it's fun and I'm learning so much about the market price of all the things I take for granted since I grow them myself.  Like WOW, the other day I saw tomatoes for 2.99/lb at the stand... considering how many hundreds of lbs I grow of those every year I have a lot of money on my shelves.  Too bad I can't pay the mortgage in tomatoes!  Apocalypse Currency, I say!

All this canning led me to want to clean my kitchen finally.  I'm not talking about the standard cleaning, I mean the stuff that is taller than I am, anyone else have this grime blindness?  Oh yes, the tops of the cabinets, yuck!  Even the top of the range hood :)  I will occasionally wipe down the underside and sides, but I can't see the top so who else will?  Apparently anyone over 5'2, that's who :)  I armed myself with my spray bottle and got to work, tops of fridge, cabinets, and oh, look! - tomato sauce all over the wall tile, wonder what canning year that was?   

Of course I'm about to splatter can apple pie filling this week, but the clean lasted at least a day or two.

The best part of cleaning and reorganizing is being able to look at what you have accomplished!

Other things I have been up to:

a beach in a bowl, just because I felt like it :)

I'm lucky that I have one farm stand 2 miles from the house, and many more only 10 minutes away, more goodies at the farm stand this week:  potatoes, honey, eggs, fresh butter:

all these trips to the farm stand made me want to knit one of those market bags, so I started knitting a little early this year -

I'll be honest, these bags are more form than function LOL, I prefer the empty box I keep in the car, but they are pretty cute :)

I was able to get an evening in kayaking with my "church ladies" :), so much fun - 

I wish we all had the time to do this more often!

Tomorrow is the first day of school, I can't wait!  If the weather breaks soon (we still have heat indexes at 100º) I can be out there doing the big fall cleanup during the day without worrying about the boys burning down the house, and hopefully by October be doing some quilting!

For now, there is school sandwich bread to be made and frozen.  I wonder how long I can keep this up before I give in and buy bread again...(I only lasted about 2 months last year of dedicated sandwich bread making!)

I thought this was pretty cute the other day, the last I had heard that morning was that they hated each other -

I'm all for this "new kind of hatred" :)

I know I'm the last person to be issuing demands and challenges since I've been such a bad blogger lately, but since I put up the kitchen photo and it is that time of year, how 'bout you share a photo of where you do your canning and a photo of what you have stashed away so far?  I'll call this the "Medicine Cabinet" challenge, because you have to admit that for us like minded folks looking at photos of other's canning spaces and under-bed storage pantries is like other peoples' fascination with medicine cabinets!

Want Tattler Lids? Deal Alert!

Then the time is now!  Just a quick announcement I received from a Facebook friend that Tattler is offering a Labor Day special right now 10-30% off and free shipping.  The best deal looks to be the variety pack at $52.95 total includes 3 dozen regular mouth & 3 dozen wide mouth including bands with free shipping.  The going rate on Amazon is $10.50 a dozen so this deal brings it to a more reasonable $8.83 per dozen.  If you notice you save a few bucks getting this variety pack over the individual boxes.  I'm finally taking the plunge - Happy Tattling y'all!

Link to Tattler Deal

 Can on, my friends!

(not my photo, linked from Kelly canning, but it's awesome!)