Our Week Of Thankfulness
It’s been a busy week, but what else is new? It’s like we don’t know how to not be busy. We love it, we love having a schedule, an every day routine. Something that we have to stick to whether it’s a weekday or weekend. We get up at 7 AM or earlier in the summer. Honestly, if the sun is up we’re up. So fall and winter is nice to have some extra sleep time. We get up, put on coffee then head outside to tend to homestead chores. Addy is in charge of opening up the coop, feeding the poultry and water fowl, then rinsing out the duck pool and refilling it. I’ll go and mix up the goat feed, it’s goat ration with black oil sunflower seeds and a few alfalfa pellets as a treat. I’ll feed them prop open their shed door, clean and refill waters, and replenish their hay feeders. I’ll help Addy if he needs it and that’s pretty much it!! Honestly it only takes about 30 minutes if all goes smoothly. We come in enjoy a cup of coffee on the couch with our fur babies, and eventually have breakfast.
On top of our daily chores, we had some running around to do. On Thursday we went to a Noble Grape U brew store and bottled up our raspberry mango cider. Smells so good. Very excited. It’s all boxed up in our spare room untouched as it needs to sit for another 2 weeks to carbonate! It’s marked on our calendar, I’m looking forward to trying it. At under $5 a 750ml bottle, if it’s good, we’ll be sure to put another batch on every now and then.
We are also starting to get ready for winter here on the Homestead. We closed down our garden by picking the last squash, tomatoes, celery peppers and herbs. Once a garden bed is clear we pile soiled goat bedding on it to mulch and fertilize. Win win!
Usually on the weekends it’s muck out the ducks and goats. In the winter we’re switching to a deep litter method, but for now, to use the mulch we clean out weekly. Also, the pitch fork is an amazing tool, who knew?! Lol Makes quick work of moving straw and hay. Talk about a workout.
Bright and early Saturday morning at 10am, well OK after our chores bright and early, we loaded up the truck with ratchet straps and a tarp, and drove about an hour away to pick up some extra hay. I didn’t know horses were so picky about the hay they ate. I found a FB market place add selling square bales of hay for a dollar each as their horses wouldn’t eat it anymore. That’s an amazing deal and goats aren’t fussy, so we hurried over there and picked up 25 bales. We were racing a storm… can we get it before the deluge comes? Everything went well, I have never seen our truck box so full, it was a crazy nerve racking drive home. Phew! We beat the post tropical storm Hurricane Pilippe and now we have food security over the winter, well for the goats anyway.
Lots of our time is still spent unpacking, sorting and figuring out what furniture we need to replace. We had to get rid of a lot of our shelves and things that really wouldn’t fit in our shipping container to move across Canada to New Brunswick. Now we’re realizing what an expense it’s going to be to replace everything we sold for super cheap. So we’re doing a little bit at a time. Addy is getting really good at building shelves and being our handy man. We have to remember this won’t be part of our weekly routine for long. I know that we’ll both be glad to finally be settled in all the way.
Thanksgiving was this weekend! We make Thanksgiving dinner for Sunday night. This year I made a pumpkin pie from scratch, it tasted better than it looked. I did my best! We chose to not have turkey this year. Instead we roasted a chicken we butchered last weekend. He was our biggest chicken at 3.08 pounds and was delicious. Also made a small ham too with all the fixings including stuffing, sweet potatoes, regular mashed potatoes, brussels sprouts with bacon, carrots, and broccoli with cheese sauce, and last, but not least delicious gravy. Instead of dinner rolls, I made a big batch of focaccia bread using the herbs we picked from the garden, very satisfying.
We are so grateful for everything we’ve done this year to get where we are. I never imagined I’d be planning to have goats milk next spring, raise a batch of Bresse chickens for meat in a chicken tractor, and possibly adding pigs to our animals. We’re so grateful for each other, and that we’re crazy good together on this adventure.
The next day all I wanted to do is relax, put my feet up and be a couch potato… after chores of course! While drinking our coffee we had YouTube on to watch a few of our favourite homesteaders videos and Addy was inspired. He talked me into going out and picking apples right on our property! We ended up with a whole basket of them! Amazing. They were tiny but we had lots, so the next 3 hours we peeled cored and chopped apples to make apple sauce, apple sauce loaf and apple fruit leather. We are turning the scraps into apple cider vinegar. So easy! It seems we can’t help being busy like I said at the beginning of this blog. The sauce and everything we made with it was delicious! We can’t believe our luck to be on a properly with mature apples trees. Again, we are so grateful.