OK, let’s try this again. For those of you that follow us on Facebook you may have seen yesterday’s post about me spending over an hour last night on a blog post and then losing all of it when my laptop battery died. It usually auto-saves quite a bit as I write so I didn’t even realize that it wasn’t saving anything. Oh well, here we go again…
It was a rainy weekend.
As I stepped outside the other day I found this feller wandering around the back door…
I’m guessing he was washed out of his home with all the rain we had.
Crawdads are interesting creatures. They remind me of a tiny lobster!
On one of my days off last weekend I spent some time painting moulding for the bathroom while CountryBoy had the water turned off so that he could tie in the upstairs water lines to the downstairs lines. We had to make a quick trip to town for the right size flex line to connect the water line to the toilet but once it was connected, guess what? We did not have to go downstairs that night (in the middle of the night) to use the bathroom nor will we ever have to again. Woohoo! We are a long way from being finished but man oh man, what an accomplishment.
In the midst of working on the bathroom we were able to do some farmsteading stuff such as prepping/canning Squash Relish and soaking/dehydrating our very own Black Walnuts.
Shredded yellow squash, diced green peppers and onions and canning/pickling salt left to drain overnight…
On Sunday evening we added the spice mixture and canned six pints…
It’s SO good! We like it better than cucumber relish.
I soaked the Black Walnuts overnight in a brine…
then drained them and put them in the dehydrator for a little over 24 hours until they dried completely. These walnuts came from our huge Black Walnut tree. CountryBoy painstakingly shelled them and we stuck them in the freezer. They turned out really well. I’ll be using them in my homemade granola. Looks like we’ll have to come up with an easier way to crack and shell these babies!
The rain stopped long enough for CountyBoy to hop on the mower and I ventured out to tackle the weeds that had taken over the walkway. I got a lot done but my hands gave out towards the end…
The weeds pull out easy after a good rain so it shouldn’t take long to finish the rest.
We also decided to put together a grill/smoker that was given to us…
There was only one problem – we only had three legs! After hemhawing around as to what to do we decided to see if the smoker would work on our existing grill since they were made from the same manufacturer. We had to switch the legs around, remove a side panel and attach the smoker. Our existing grill was smaller than the one we were given but it’s gonna work…
Now we just need to figure out how it works, ha!
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The last few days I’ve been able to do one of my favorite things – wander around the farm with my camera and take some photos…
Here’s a different view of the farm…
I may be partial but no matter where one stands at the farm and looks out you see a gorgeous view.
I’ve been sorting through my camera equipment and found the clip for my monopod so I got out my macro lens…
The intricacies of flowers are fascinating.
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Since we are basically at a standstill on the bathroom addition while we wait for the arrival of our bathtub CountryBoy tackled a project that’s on his To-Do list this year – Re-doing the well. He dismantled the cement blocks while I was at work yesterday…
The plan is to build it back up using stacked rocks, adding a cover over it and making it look original once again. Hopefully one day it will be a functioning well again. I miss having well water.
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The weather this week has been gorgeous. Here we are headed into the middle of June and our days have been perfect and the nights are on the cool side making it the perfect weather to sleep with the windows open.
The last two days I’ve gotten off work early. On Tuesday we knocked the paper out fairly quick so I had the better part of a beautiful afternoon off. And today, there weren’t a whole lot of sheets to iron at the B&B so after helping with breakfast I knocked the sheets out and headed home. CountryBoy and I had planned on going to Rural King and Lowes after work so it was nice to be able to head there early and get back before dark to unload the truck and the feed. I love these extra snippets of precious time away from work!
Dream Valley Farmstead 