Hot Weekend…

 

We had an extremely busy weekend and are feeling the effects of it today.  Friday I spent the morning in the garden weeding and picking tomatoes.  I had to run into town to deliver tomatoes to Mom’s store, do some Avon deliveries, and run a few errands.  I stopped by the second-hand store in town and found a few fun things:

Knitting needles, a fun mason jar with an old-fashioned lid, and some fabric.  Here’s a close-up of the fabric.  I just LOVE it!  Dh said it looks old-fashioned, and I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.  Oh well, I think it’s pretty!

I also stopped in at the herb shop in town:

You can’t read the labels in the photo, too much flash.  On the left is an all natural deoderant stone.  I used this over the weekend and was really please with it.  In the middle is lemongrass essential oil.  I’m using this as a bug repellant.  So far, so good!  On the right is peach extract for making peach tea.  Yum!

When I got home from town I did some work in the yard and in the house, laundry, watering, and dinner.  I also managed to get some onions dehydrated.

I forgot a picture of the finished product, sorry.

I also managed to bake a couple different kinds of bread, whole wheat and cheesy onion bread and got my sourdough starter going.

Saturday morning we wormed, vaccinated, tagged, and separated our baby lambs from their mamas.  Dad came down to help since we weren’t sure how to tag them.  It actually went really well, and we got done before it got too hot out.  Once we were done we ran into town to look at a tractor for sale and some Nubian goats.  When we got home we rand to the dairy for milk, did some chores around the house, and then made our first batch of rotel for the season.  Dh helped me cut peppers and tomatoes and made the whole process go so much faster than when I do it all myself.  (Thank you!)

Sunday dh and my brother, Craig, went to help Dad roof his building for his sheep.  While they were gone I weeded the entire garden.  It needed it really bad.  Then dh and Craig came back to side the front of our shop/garage.  It looks sooo much better, and they aren’t even finished yet.  I vacuumed the pool and did some watering while they were hard at it.  A family came to look at and buy one of our rams.  Yea!  They were a really nice family.  Their son is actually the one who bought a ram from us.  He hopes to breed it to his Suffolk ewes (for the sheep people out their) and begin to work his way from black-faced sheep into white-faced sheep.  We were excited about the whole experience, for him and for us. 

I made laundry soap from a new recipe.  I haven’t used it yet, but if it works okay I will pass along the recipe.  I used Zote instead of Fels Naptha.  It has a very strong perfume smell (I think I would recommend sticking to the Fels Naptha).

And dehydrated some basil.

I hope to dehdrate my pineapple sage, spearmint, lemon balm, and oregano next.  The rosemary and peppermint will be awhile yet, and our chives may not produce this year.  The sheep mowed them down on one of their expeditions out.  Smile

Sunday evening we mulched some of the vegetable beds around the house.  The heat index was in the 100s, and we were runninng out of steam.  We are “drying off” our mama ewes, meaning we have pulled their food and water to get them to stop producing milk.  This also means we get to milk out the mamas who fill up with milk to ensure they don’t get mastitis.  We milked 4-5 ewes, luckily using Dad’s handheld milker which makes the process go a lot faster.  We try to save as much milk as possible to use if we have bottle lambs the following year.

Dh did chores while I put dinner together.  Thank goodness for crockpots and our grill as it was entirely to warm to cook inside.

This morning our conversation took the usual turn to, “if you didn’t work” our lives would be a lot simpler.  We are getting there.  We just have to make sure we are prepared to take that leap, and we just aren’t quite there yet. 

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend.