Happy Thanksgiving!

 

It's going to be a quiet turkey day here at Wandering Star Ranch, just TheManWhoHoldsMyHeart and myself. With grown children, distance (mostly distance), cost of travel, extended family and time off get in the way of everyone being able to come together for holidays. I should have known this day would come but it always seemed so far off, with all the daily hub bub of living. Since I am now on the other side of fifty and coming up on the golden years I realize the golden years have already passed us by...... They were the years when we were raising our children, dealing with day to day angst, but enjoying family dinners, teaching moments, reading books, discovering nature, dancing to oldies radio in the living room on Saturdays nights, making a mess in the kitchen mixing and baking cookies, crafting ornaments for Christmas, raking leaves and then jumping in the pile, cooling off (we adults always paid the next day for throwing our bodies on the ground) on the slip and slide out in the backyard, playing 500, and lots of board games, we got a new game every year for Christmas! Those times are GOLDEN! So on this day of giving thanks I'm so very thankful for all the family memories of the past and for the new "making memory moments" to come, especially with our granddaughter.

 

Family Fun at Wandering Star Ranch July 2013

 

I hear TheManWhoHoldsMyHeart waking up, so I think it's time to turn on the coffee maker and enjoy a cuppa with the person who help create all those wonderful memories. While I still think the golden years have passed, these are a ummm maybe the silver years to match my changing hair color, I'm really beginning to like my gray!!

I'm back and it's Autumn!

I think our pumpkin display looks "sincere"! So I'm expecting the great pumpkin to come on Halloween! Linus too! And Sally!! I love that Charlie Brown holiday special!  The three pumpkin vines did well this season, we got approx. 70 pumpkins.

I've been very busy with canning and it all started with that June post and just snowballed.

1. Strawberry Jam

2. Mulberry Jam and syrup

3. Strawberry rhubarb jam

4. Yellow tomato salsa and red tomato salsa

5. Canned tomatoes and juice

6. Concord grape jam

7. Pickled okra

8. Apple pie filling, applesauce, apple butter, spiced apple jelly

9. Green tomato jam

and lastly some pear honey as soon as the pears ripen!

  I'm ready to put the canner back in the basement and enjoy the fruits of my many labors!!



It's Strawberry Harvest Time!

Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam (on the left ) & Strawberry Jam
 

 

True to form our June bearing strawberry plants are bearing in grand style, due to very timely rains this spring and some winter moisture. We started picking on Sunday evening and have picked for three evenings straight, my knees and thighs can vouch for that! I've froze most of the harvest along with making these jams. We will probably have several more days, (I'm guessing 4) of productive picking until the harvest is exhausted. We didn't pick yesterday evening, because we received 2.25 inches of rain early (about 3AM) Wednesday morning, a timely break for my hips and knees. We will probably pick again on Friday and over the weekend. I want to make one more batch, or may two of plain strawberry jam. It seems the later in the harvest the smaller the berries so they make better jam. Strawberry jam along with grape are our favorites and the grape harvest shows promise to also be a good one this year. TheManWhoHoldsMyHeart is hoping for a banner mulberry harvest, he loves mulberry jam and mulberry syrup. I'm so-so on mulberries as the seeds are always stuck in my teeth.

This year's garden (knock on wood) is shaping up to be one of our best, all due to getting rain at proper intervals!!! We've had plenty of asparagus, lovely rhubarb, great salad greens of spinach & lettuce,  and spring onions. So can tasty tomatoes be far behind???? We shall see! Oh and my perennial herb plants, especially the lavender (it's blooming), look great! We've been eating the garlic chives and parsley for about a month now! The annuals of basil and rosemary, planted in the last week,  are flourishing and will yield pickings in a few more weeks.

This has been a cooler at times to near normal temps for spring so I know that has helped immensely. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the real heat holds off for another few weeks and the rains keep coming.

 

 



What I did this morning!!

 

 

I finished my obsession with Sookie Stackhouse this morning! While Sookie didn't end up with the Vampire/Shapeshifter/Were (I'm not telling which one) I wanted I guess I'm good with the conclusion. My addiction to the "Dead" novels began in the summer of 2009 and I've been a fan ever since. I've also watched the True Blood series from HBO, but my viewing has been on DVD from the library or Netflix.  The TV series takes a different road and veers away from the novel storyline early in the book series, but I've still enjoyed their direction.

When I needed a fix between waiting for the next Charlaine Harris novel I found another vampire series "Undead/Queen Betsy" by MaryJanice Davidson! Satisfied my need for....blood! LOL

I've read all the series through book #11 and book #12 comes out in August!

Need a new photo...Aww much better :*)

It's about time I get rid of that snow picture!!! BLAH

 

It's been more spring like and along with that more weather watches and welcome rain! We have been lucky so far to have had only small pea size hail, and some winds accompany the rain. Over the weekend we attended two graduation open house parties about 50 miles west of our prairie home. On Saturday afternoon skies began to cloud and when the heat and dreadful humidity of the day met up with the cooler air of the front we had all kinds of thunderstorm and tornado watches go up. I was driving between affairs once when my phone went off for an actual tornado warning in the county, scared the bajebers out of me! My phone had never before made that alarm sound! The warning applied to the northern part of the county so for our location it was already north of us and on it's way out of the county!  Great cloud watching as my sister, mom and I stood out in the driveway looking up and keeping an eye out for ominous formations. What we got was temperature changes as winds would blow cool one moment and then warm the next, then stop blowing completely! Scary!!
When we got home later in the evening it appeared we had had some winds come through as a chair was blown over down by the shed along with 1.15 in the rain gauge!
 Woohoo we needed that precipitation on the strawberries, they're full of blooms, with promise of a bountiful harvest come June! The asparagus has been plentiful and we have been eating and sharing the harvest with others. The rhubarb harvest has been good, I made a pie and some rhubarb sauce, but not the usual overwhelming amount that allows me to put up cartons in the freezer. It went to seed so early that we picked the seed heads off in hopes of prolonging the grow time to get more for jelly and the freezer, we shall see if that works. We've had two pickings of spinach and lettuce for salads, YUM good stuff! So much better than iceberg lettuce salad!

This is Spring! NOT!

AAgghhh! Can you believe it!

For four consecutive weeks now we have been experiencing the last gasp of winter! It warms then a freak cold front comes through, and we experience a hard freeze.

 Warms~freeze    Warms~freeze  Warms~freeze  

Snow today 2 inches accumulation then another hard freeze, down to 22 tonight, this is number four! Our poor flowering trees, peonies, and garden!

So today I am baking, Pumpkin Streusel Muffins and Gingerbread Biscotti. My sewing machine is at the shop getting a tune-up, much needed as I have neglected this annual clean up. The place I usually take it too closed over a year ago and I had tried another about 70 miles away last fall but they were not able to get my machine in for months and I needed it for Christmas sewing. So I decided to part with it (temporarily) last Friday. It's hard--- I just love knowing it's waiting for me in the sewing room. Now a large dusty empty hole in the sewing table looks so forlorn {big pouty lip here}! I could get out the serger I inherited from my grandmother and see if I can teach myself how to use it. That's a strong possibility as I really want the use of this machine, I'm just a bit cowardly!

 So... more coffee a warm pumpkin muffin and then...and then........

Meet my granddaughter!

Katelyn Marie
Born 4/3/2013 7:36AM
8lbs.   21 inches