Thankful Thursday

Thanks to MissBuckle for starting my day with a great post that I thought about all day long.

I'm thankful.....


~  that the sky looked like this early this morning when I came down to pour coffee.  How can a day go wrong when this is the first thing you see!

~  that I got to work and this little bird was hard at work nest building, and I could watch him all day long.

~  that the first thing Sidney asked me after school was if we were having dinner on the porch again tonight.

~ That the days are getting wonderfully longer, and I can almost taste the days of summer.

What are you thankful for today?

The Cream on Top

 Warm Air

Fragrant Flowers

Family Dinners on the Porch

Lead to Ripening Conversations

 That, is the Cream

On Top 

June

May In Review

It is hard to believe that it is June first already!  Spring finally made an appearance in May, we have flowers, grass and the trees have finally leafed out!  Here is what my lens found interesting in May.

Leaving Las Vegas

As we sat eating a wonderful dinner on our peaceful wrap around porch on this warm evening, just jostled by a light wind that gave a breath to the heat,  I began to think about milestones.  Those most important markers that make you reflect.

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 Ten years ago today, we packed up our life and ventured across country with our then six-week old baby girl.

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We signed the papers that sealed the deal for our business and hit the road, Sidney was an amazing traveler for our marathon drive.

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Since then we have carved out a special life, and in the absence of local family, have been so fortunate to have found the most amazing group of people to share it with.

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So here is raising a toast to making a leap, and taking roads less traveled.

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Sláinte

A Full Sunday

We had a warm, yet foggy start to our day.  Charles helped us get some garden work done while Sidney worked with her show Silkie.   We then made an ambitious plan for what we would do until mid afternoon when the storms descended upon us.  B went to the farm supply store to get a few things we needed to put our ideas into action.  I went about chicken duties and some weeding all while listening to the thunder slowly roll toward me, first as a very distant low growl, then as a much more present threat as the sky darkened to evening (at noon). 

So now, inside the house watching the steady rain that seems to have dominated our week,  we are doing our first processing of the season.  Our mutant rhubarb plant supplied the perfect muse to spend our afternoon.  I would be surprised if farm box families didn't see a little jar of Rhubarb Ginger Jam.

We had such great surprise this afternoon as we were ladling the jam into hot jars.  A friend of ours came bearing 2 week old chicks to share.  We split the hens between us and now have six new babies!  Since we only netted two hens out of our egg hatching experiment, this was great news.  We now have two additional Rhode Island Reds, two Wyondottes, a Burr Orphington, and a Barred Rock.  So exciting!

If you would like to see hear a little bit about this weeks planting I talked about it here and if you would like some food for thought on honeybees and the colony collapse syndrome, I talked about it here.  Now I'm off to have some of B's wonderful Asparagus soup!
 

Rhubarb Ginger Jam

20 C Rhubarb cut into 1 inch pieces
6 C Sugar
3 pkgs. 8 oz Strawberry Jello
1 12.6 oz Jar Candied Ginger, chopped into fine dice

Place sugar and rhubarb in a stockpot over medium heat and cook until softened.  Using an immersion blender, process rhubarb until desired consistency.  Stir in jello packages and diced ginger and cook until dissolved and smooth (the jello adds the color to the otherwise dull cooked rhubarb).  Process into jars and/or refrigerate.

This yielded 23~ 4 oz.  jars & 6~ 8oz.  jars

***I sifted through tons of recipes and this was one we made up of several.  The original proportion was 10 C of Rhubarb to 6 C of sugar which was WAY too sweet & before the jello.  So we cooked up additional rhubarb without sweetening and it came out the perfect balance of sweet and tart.  Unless you too have a mutant rhubarb (this recipe barely made a dent in this plant~yes a single plant), please reduce the ingredients proportionally.