Pickles!

..and corn, and green beans, and broccoli, and summer squash, and peas, and tomatoes, and zucchini! yep, it's officially harvest, and that means we've got fresh vegetables coming out our ears, (thank goodness the potato field won't need harvesting for another week) today we made pickles, and lots of them! Our family eats pickles like you wouldn't believe, but only homemade ones. The ones you can buy don't taste the same at all! So our day went something like this, We got up with the sun and went out and harvested all of the beans, peas, squash and broccoli while it was still cool, then we came inside and started putting up the beans, peas and broccoli. After that we went back out and picked all of the pickling cukes and corn, and started making pickles. We had an assembly line going, and my job was to slice the pickles into coins and mix up the juice, I probably sliced for 45 minutes, and we used an entire gallon of vinegar before it was all said and done! We stopped for lunch around noon, and I'll bet you can guess what we had ;) Vegetables! haha, we had fresh boiled corn, peas, tomatoes, some leftover pulled pork from last night, and fresh milk. I think we'll finally be finished with the pickles as soon as the timer goes off and we take them out of the canner. Then we have to do the squash, after that, we'll be good for about another week, then the next round of the vegetables will be ripe.

Tonight we're having a birthday dinner for Luke, his birthday isn't until Wednesday, but with Gracie's Surgery and all, we decided it would be better to have it tonight. We're having an exclusively "homavore" meal. We coined this term to mean food that we grew or produced on our land, which actually applies to more and more these days. Anyways, We're having: Baked Lemon Chicken, Fresh Corn, Green Beans, Salad, and homemade grape juice, Yum! Then dessert will of course be birthday cake, and fresh berries. We raised and butchered the chickens, grew the veggies, grew the grapes, harvested them, and made them into grape juice, which we canned last summer, and grew the berries. For the birthday cake, we ground the wheat into flour and made it from scratch (and if you want to be technical, we didn't grow the wheat, we actually bought it from some friends of ours that did) Sounds pretty "homovore" to me :P

We couldn't go to church today, at the risk of getting Gracie sick, so we did a family bible study while we were putting up the beans and peas. Oh, life on a farm.. :)

Hannah~