I had some mega sized weeds attempting to take over the garden. They had gotten so big that my garden clippers couldn’t even begin to touch them. I decided to break out the ole sawzall and see if it would work to cut them down. It did… and not only did it work great, but it was also fun to finally get rid of those weeds. Well, I guess it was fun until I found the garden was crawling with caterpillars.
The kids got a mum planted and we got our dried herbs packed into jars.
Oh those guineas…. they’re in so much trouble! Between picking on Neville and trampling my beans down, they’re on my bad list for sure.
We’re drying herbs from the garden for the first time. It’s so easy and with the cost of buying them, I don’t know why we didn’t try it sooner.
It’s a busy time right now. We’ve had lots of stuff going on and we’ve been away from home a lot so I’m having to try to get caught up on a lot of stuff. Then on top of that, I have jury duty this week and have to prepare for the possibility of being gone for 5 days. The sunflowers are ready to harvest plus more tomatoes are also ready. No time to make sauce or roast sunflower seeds now so I’m freezing the tomatoes to make sauce out of another time and we’re picking the sunflowers so Miley can take the seeds off and have them ready to roast when we have the time.
So much to do, so little time… it’s just another day on the homestead.
We had a fun surprise in the barn when we went out to do chores. The nest of guinea eggs that our hen has been faithfully sitting on for the last several weeks finally started hatching. We ended up with 5 baby keets. Since they hatched, we had to move the the meat chicks into the coop so that we could use the tote for the keets. We didn’t plan for it to take all that long but it kept us busy for most of the afternoon.
Had a fun labor day weekend but it was so windy out that we weren’t able to do much outside. We got our fall meat birds and now the guinea keets are hatching, so we’re having to figure out where to put them all.
We got our milk room enclosure done and it’s so nice. Just when we get that problem fixed, we have another. Moles have started taking over the garden so now we’re trying to figure out a good way to get rid of them.
We have a bunch of zucchini so we’re shredding it up to freeze and making chocolate zucchini cake. If you’d like the recipe, you can find it here.
Hubby had the day off so we decided to start working on getting the milk room enclosed to keep the chickens out. While out there, the kids got creative with some old spider webs and went to scare Grandma with them.
Just another day on the homestead getting chores done, tomatoes canned and a story of a bad dream I had. It was a super busy but fun day… never a dull moment…
Lots of tomatoes were ripe so we decided it was time to get some salsa made. We had big plans to make several batches but got a late start and ended up just getting one batch canned plus a fresh batch made just to eat. If you’re interested in the recipe, you can find it here.
In the evening we decided to play a game of Agricola, which is a farming board game and happens to be one of our favorite games… imagine that. 😉 It has levels of play from easy to advanced and is a great game for the entire family if you enjoy strategy games.
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Zucchini… it’s been the word of the kitchen the last several months. Our zucchini plants have done amazing this year. It’s the first year since we’ve moved here that our zucchini plants have stayed alive all summer and haven’t been killed off by squash bugs. We’ve enjoyed having a nice supply of it to eat through out the summer.
But lately, let me tell ya, its been a little hard to come up with creative ways to use it all up. I’ve snuck it in everything I can. Even then, we still had more of it than I could keep up with so I’ve been cutting it up and feeding it to the chickens. I thought I was doing good sneaking it in recipes until the kids informed me the other day that they were getting a little tired of having zucchini in everything. Even the chickens seem to be turning their beaks up at it lately.
I decided i better kick it up a few notches and make something that everyone would love even if there was zucchini in it. I dug out an old recipe book and found an all time favorite of ours…
Chocolate Zucchini Cake
I mixed up a double recipe and made 24 cupcakes plus a small cake. I put the cupcakes in the freezer so we have a quick and easy way to get that chocolate fix when we need it. The cake… well, it didn’t last too long. It was so good. And the best part is… I managed to get more of that zucchini used up with no complaints.
Humble Little Homestead 