Friday, September 16, 2011

Honey, jam, peaches and eggs!

Brian, one of our friends is a bee keeper as a hobby and we have some of his hives on our property. We love it because he comes by every couple of weeks to check the bees and teaches the kids all about them.


Our bees were doing so well that he brought over more hives. We currently have a tower of four hives. Last weekend we went over to Brian's house to watch and help him spin all the honey from our hives. It was sooo interesting. I should have taken photos of the process, but I only have a photo of the outcome. He got TONS of hone from our hives and it tastes amazing. We came home with a gallon for us and my kids have just been eating spoonfuls of it. 


A couple of weeks ago I got together with some other moms and all our kids and had a strawberry jam making marathon. I could not believe how much jam we ended up making. We went through 3 or 4 50# bags of sugar!


Luckily we had several little worker bees that loved helping out and stirring. I don't know how we would have done it without all the slave labor!


Here is a sampling of some of the finished product.


One of my main cravings with this pregnancy has been fresh fruit. I have been eating watermelon, cantaloupe and grapes like crazy. When our favorite local orchard said the peaches we ready I was so excited I could hardly sleep. The fact that we all LOVE these peaches, the girls were having so much fun picking them and I have been craving fruit were a very costly combination. When we took all our peaches to get weighed it was $97.... What? I asked how many pounds of peaches we picked and it was 198 pounds- oops!

We spend the next 4 days washing, peeling, cutting and freezing as many peaches as possible. We also ate a ton just off the counter.


After talking about all the sugar... I guess I should show a little protein. All of our 40 chickens are now laying. We have been getting between 18-36 eggs a day!!! They are so beautiful that the other day I snapped this photo after washing them. Look at all the variation, I love it. The girls have been selling them on our street and I have been giving them away to the older ladies in our church.


2 comments:

Greg said...

I thought going on a 23 mile overnight backpacking and hike outing to celebrate my 50th birthday was possibly a little over the top. It just pales in comparison to a craving during pregnancy for 198 pounds of peaches.

It was less than 24 hours from the start of the trip at the trail head to my return to the trail head. That is nothing like 4 days of canning peaches. I could not imagine the pain and agony of pealing another peach after about one day of it.

Liz said...

Awesome! I wish we lived in a place where we could have so much readily available fresh fruit! I'm glad you are taking advantage of it! :) The honey looks delicious!

 
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