Honey B Farm As of Today......

It's been a while since I posted anything on here.  Sixteen days to be exact.   We've been so busy!  This time of year is especially crowded with things to work on.  So far I have canned up the following:  peaches, pears, chokecherry jelly, raspberry cherry jelly, chokecherry syrup, dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, red pepper relish, cuke relish, spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, potatoes, applesauce, plain tomatoes, seasoned tomatoes (with peppers, onions and celery), and green beans.  I've also put cabbage, corn, carrots, peas and turnips in the freezer, and dried 14 quart bags of apples, and jars of basil, oregano and parsley.   We also harvested all the dry beans and they are drying in trays in the bay window and sunshine.  I still need to make more spaghetti sauce, and can up some tomato juice, and dry more herbs.   Today I am slicing up winter cabbage to put in the crock for sauerkraut:

Eight heads of Danish Ballhead cabbage ready to go into the crock for kraut.   You need a firm, white winter cabbage for successful sauerkraut making.   The kraut cutter is a vintage one I got at an antique store.

The fall colors are really pretty up here now, but they won't last long.  We are already past peak colors, and it's all downhill from here.

A gorgeous maple.

What the yard looks like this morning.

On the windy side of the place, the trees are already past peak.

I took a walk around the yard and took some photos just to show how things are as of today.  Let me bore you with a few show and tell pictures!

We have already had some frosty mornings, so it's time to get the pumpkins in.  I grow Winter Luxury pumpkins, which are excellent for pies.   They are small pumpkins, about 4 or 5 lbs each, with wonderful sweet flesh for the best pies ever!

Uh-oh.....time to get the butternut squash in because the deer are eating them!   This one is already half eaten by those pesty critters!

All my beautiful petunias are dead - time to snip off the seed pods and save the seed for next year. 

The beeyard is quiet now.  Only a little Canadian thistle, and sweet and red clover for them to feed on now.   We harvested close to 500 lbs of excellent light colored honey this year!

I still have a ton of tomatoes in the garden - plenty will probably just go to waste.  Want to come and pick some?

Remember the photo of my new lettuce in the last post?  It's all grown and ready now and we will be eating salads all week long!   A crop of new spinach is next to it. 

Looks like fall on the back porch.  Plenty of great winter squash to eat. 

All these tomatoes will be made into spaghetti sauce tomorrow!

This summer we did manage to paint the porch siding and get the porch ceiling on, and some trim.  We still need to get soffit material on.

All of our workhorse machinery!  My lawn mower (which is pretty good size) next to our brush hog mower, next to the big tractor loader.   We're prepared for just about every job!

And now for some "cute"...............

Un-named white kitten on a mission for some food, since all the food trays are empty!

FlufferDuff with her new little grey kitten and another older kitten.   Poor Fluffer broke her nose and upper jaw tangling with a coyote this summer.   But she is OK now, just a little off center in the face!

Another kitten and one of our Mama cats (not her kitten, though)

What's this???  "Climber" the kitten took a selfie???  Now, how did he do that?

And that's pretty much the way it is out here in the quiet countryside.  We're all busy getting ready for winter.  Harold is cutting wood, I'm still working with produce and food, and we are watching the leaves go fast off the trees.    Pretty soon the bees will go to California for the winter and we'll be cleaning up the yard and garden and getting things tilled up.  I'm anxious to see how long I can continue to grow things in the greenhouse - maybe another month or a few more weeks?