Fall Harvest

The canning is officially done!  We've been busy canning peaches, applesauce, pears, and grape juice and we harvested our honey on Friday.  Hooray!  We were beat after all that work.  We used up all the jars in our house and canned over 150 quarts of food this year.  It was a record year for sure.

The honey harvest wasn't as successful as we had hoped, but considering the drought our bees did ok.  We have three hives and one hive struggled so we didn't harvest any from it, but the other two gave us 7 gallons (around 85 pounds).  We sure love honey.  Mason keeps asking when we get to harvest the honey again!

 We picked all the pumpkins and gourds out of our garden.  We hardly put any effort into planting or growing gourds and pumpkins and we always end up with a ton!  

 Dallin discovered the tomatillos.

 The kids were such good workers!

 Today Mason and Dallin were playing in the garage with there "cars" and having such a good time.

 These two are getting to be best buddies with Camille and Garet at school all day.

This is a little video of the kids picking pumpkins.

Now I feel like we can settle down and get ready for a new baby.  I've got 4 weeks to go!

The "Four Beaner"

Every year it's a contest to see who can find the "four beaner" from our Japanese Bean patch - aka - Soy beans or Edamame in our garden.
Well this year we found 5 of them.  Jared told the kids as they were slaving away picking beans that they could have a dollar if they found one.  Well, I don't think he was planning on finding 5 of them:)  The bribery seemed to help a little, but there was still a lot of whining.  Kids have it so rough!

 We blanch and freeze the beans and eat them all winter long.  They are so yummy!

We love to eat beans, but we don't love to pick them.

 The last of the corn.  Check out that corn face.

 For Labor Day our town celebrates "Hooper Tomato Days", so we went to the rodeo with our neighbors.

Camille and Riley (two peas in a pod)

 Garet and Preston (Best Buddies)

 Annie and Mason (Grandma and Grandpa - that's what they play almost everyday)

 Cowgirls!

 Dallin found the peach stash in the basement and decided to try his hammer out on a few!  Uh-Oh, what a mess!  Our friends, the Down's, from Clinton gave us a ton of peaches from their trees (like 3-4 bushel).  I canned 56 quarts.  We dried 2 dehydrators full, froze a few gallon bags, made jam, made baby food, gave some to our neighbor, and ate peaches like crazy.  I think we are peached out around here.  They are Jared's favorite fruit!  I think he eats a peach at least 4 times a day.