Roots for dinner

We got up this morning and I asked the kids to go out in the garden and dig up some things for dinner. In my opinion, anyone who can say that is truely blessed!! It's so great to be able to plan a meal around what's growing in the garden.

So for this fine evening we made a stew out of the vegies and roots (carrots, potatoes) in the garden. I probably won't eat much, as it's very cooked, but I'll have a bit of a taste to make sure it's good, then enjoy my salad (also from the garden).

Yesterday I was thinking about how during the summer about 90% of our daily dinner is all from the garden. So why haven't I seen the food budget go down? Good question. I suppose it's due to the fruit we still love to consume, switching to more gluten free foods (a little bit pricier), and also buying fruit to can, which will last all year.

The chickens are popping our more eggs, yeah!

And we need serious prayer for Hailey and Will's dad to see the importance of homeschooling the kids. He's doesn't understand it a bit, and it's my hearts desire to be homeschooling the kids. I've changed my whole work schedule around to be able to teach the kids at home. And a lot of it has to do with making up for the negative impact there is when the kids are at their dad's house.
Ok, off for now. :)

A year......and counting

Well, it's been a year since the onset of the fibromyalgia. What am I counting?.........the days till I don't have to deal with it anymore! There WILL be a day when I don't have pain or fatigue (chronic fatigue, not normal fatigue, life is life).

The doctors say a cure won't happen, but I think I've done a pretty good job so far without any pain killers, anti-depresants or sleep aids. The other day there was a comercial for a medicine to help people with fibromyalgia, and the list of horrible side effects was enough to scare anyone away. I don't know why some people take the chance.

The last two weeks I've been able to use up my remaining vacation time so I've been relaxing more, and image that, I've been feeling better. Stress really is hard on the body.

On a good note, our chickens (at least one of them) has started laying eggs. Yeah!! And Yummy!!

Free water !

I'm finally sharing our "new" rain barrels with you. A month or so ago we bought three rain barrels from the city of Shelton. We put one off the garage, and two on the house on opposite sides (one in the goat pen/garden area and one near the flower beds). One rain storm filled them all up.
It's been so nice, especially with the lack of rain this summer, to be able to get water from the barrels to water the plants, instead of paying for city water.

Ok, I did a little too much today, so I'm running slow now.

Computer was being worked on.......

The computer was out of service for awhile to get all the things needed installed on it for my new job starting in september. I'll post more when I have time........



The short blerb on what we've been up to............new chickens, lots of berry picking, lots of canning, kayaking, parasailing, camping, hiking, and the list goes on.



My health has been pretty good the last few weeks, and when my health is doing well, I'm doing well!!

Ok, I have green beans cooking up to can, so off I go!!

Yummy RAW cake

The recipe is from Rawmom.com. "Raspberry Ganache Fudge Cake".

Yummy!! We picked blackberries yesterday, so it was a blackberry cake.

I also made a blackberry crumb cake for everyone else.

I tried some, but I think the RAW cake tasted better.

Here are the kids from friday picking blueberries.

It was hot, so we only picked about five pounds.

Pickles, pickles, pickles.......

We picked the first round of pickling cucumbers yesterday, they were a little plumper then we would like, but they still worked. Today we canned them up,making garlic dill pickles.

The set up

The posing pickles with some dill heads.

The process. The kids were in charge of the salt, sugar and garlic cloves. We had a good assembly line going.

Fun times! It's great the kids can help out now and enjoy it.

Me, in the process.


Taking their hot water bath.

The jars sitting and resting.

52 cucumbers made 16 quarts of pickles.

That was only the first round of picking, the vines are pretty heavy with new little cukes.

I figure in about a week or week and a half we'll be ready to can the next round.

Oh, and our total for the green beans so far is 10 quarts.

I think tomorrow I'll can up the remaining few cucumbers that didn't fit, and also some pickled mixed vegies.