Future Chicken House

Harold has been sawing up black ash saw logs, practicing for when he will saw up boards for our living room floor.  In the meanwhile, he has sawed up quite a bit of lumber to build a chicken house.  This chicken house will be half for the chickens and half for storage for us.   Harold and the neighbors have been keeping an eye out for really good trees, black ash, that will make good saw logs.  He contacted a mill the other day that will take our boards and groove them out, saw them to specified lengths, and kiln dry them for hardwood flooring for the living room.   That will be a next year's project.  Meanwhile Harold is enjoying sawing up some quality lumber from trees on our own 100 acres.  His home-built sawmill works like a charm!

Harold prepares to plane off the outside bark on some lumber pieces.

Evening up boards on the band saw.

Harold prepares to even up several boards at once.

He ends up with a pile of bark pieces, which will be good for fire starting.

Harold inspects some of the wood he just evened up.  You can see a big pile of newly sawed lumber he did yesterday.  How nice that he can create his own quality lumber from our own trees!

Just look at this beautiful cabinet grade lumber!

A closer view of some very beautiful black ash lumber.

Harold sawed some larger pieces, too.  These are 2 x 8 x 15 ft. long

These thicker boards are just as lovely as the 1 x 6's pictured previously.

Black ash has a lovely grain.  Now imagine a whole living room floor with this wood, all finished and seal coated!  I can hardly wait!

A Peachy Keen Kitchen

The last several days I have been canning peaches.  I bought some peaches from a company I usually get for canning, Mrs. Smittcamp's.   I wanted to can up more, but went to another store and they didn't have the brand I usually get, but they had some from a company called Mountain View peaches.  These were huge, beautiful peaches!  Both companies sell Faye Elberta peaches, which are excellent for canning.   The prices were the same for both companies. 

     I love to can up peaches!  It's a simple and relaxing thing to do.   And the peaches taste SO good in the winter when the snow is deep and it's 30 below zero.   We usually just eat them plain as a dessert with our meals, but I often use the canned peaches as a topping for sponge cake or a coffee cake.  When cranberries are in season in the fall, I like to bake butternut squash slices with peaches and cranberries and some pecans or sliced almonds on top.  Yum!  My husband likes to take a pint jar of peaches with him during the sugar beet harvest.   When he is waiting in line at the beet piler, he says the peaches are so refreshing and sweet after a day in the dusty old Mack truck out in the fields.

     I usually can up about 30-40 quarts and about 6 to 10 pints.  This gives us plenty to stock the pantry with for those cold winter days. 

Here I am slicing up peaches into lemon water.

I ripen the peaches under linens.  They come fairly green in the box, and need a few days to ripen.  Keeping the peaches stem side down under linens ripens them nicely in 2 or 3 days.

After 2 days the peaches look perfect, and are not mushy or woody.

 

And here is some of the finished product:

Aren't these pretty?   They look much nicer than what you find in cans in the store.

It's true that canning is a lot of work, and I go through a lot of towels, water, lids, jars, time and ingredients.  But it is so worth it!   I know where my food comes from!  People tell me they can buy peaches "cheaper in the store".  Yes, a person probably could.  But many times the cans come from China or Thailand or the Philippines.  Who knows how they were processed?  I trust my kitchen more than some foreign factory!

     I have already canned up all the pickles I want for the season, and next is green beans.  By the end of October the pantry is full and well stocked with plenty of things to cook with for the winter.  I am also drying herbs right now:  basil, dill, parsley and oregano.

By the way, you may have noticed that the format on my blog is different.   I had no choice on this!  The blogger people decided to change everything and took away my previous layouts and formats.   They claim this is "improved".   I have found it harder to work with, and I am not happy with the choices I have.   Sometimes I wish people would just leave things alone.   I don't like change.  Sigh.....  So until I get better acquainted with how this new blog format works, there may be some errors.

Just look at the size of these peaches! I can hardly hold 4 of them in my hand.