10 days and I'm behind!!!

Well, I just sat down to do a blog post about Monday's blood drive and realized I've got a few other things to catch up on here. So here's some random tidbits:

Soccer season is now fully underway and here are the girls in action! Jason has mostly had a break from coaching Alida's team this season, though he is on board as the lead coach for this week. They are both enjoying it and Wednesdays are now really full as they are both also taking a homeschool art class downtown on Wednesday afternoons. So when it gets to 10 p.m. on a Wednesday evening (or after as it is now), this family is ready to call it a day! Terah has already sacked out...

But it's not quite time to turn in yet for some of us. We just lugged all our trays of sweet potatoes down to the back kitchen for Jason to weigh, sort and tuck away in the root cellar! The curing in the 3-season room is complete and it was time to put that room back to order (turn it back over to Mom and Dad in other words!). We don't get to tuck many nuts away just get, thanks in part to these little guys, but we do plan to enjoy a good number of sweet potatoes. The figures are just in - we have 179 lbs of mahon yams and 179 of beauregard sweet potatoes. Yep, it's kind of fun when it works out that way. Alida just came and said, "that's not very much" and then I told her that was 358 pounds of sweet potatoes, to which she replied, "whoa!"

It's cover cropping and seeding time around here - we like to have that done by the middle of October but it looks like we'll be glad if we get them all in by the end of the month. It was a big relief this past week to get both the garlic planted and also our fall spinach!

This week we enjoyed having some additional hands around and were able to get some bed reshaping done (to hopefully help us handle excess rainfall in future years better than we did this year) and a rye/vetch/winter pea cover crop in the root patch.

I do enjoy days when lots is going on around our place - even if sometimes it can feel like too much of a good thing. One of my favorite moments on Tuesday was coming out with Terah on my back to get laundry in before the dew made it wet again. I was working on dinner inside for the 10 of us, but outside I found this scene - a lively bball game happening on 1/2 of the concrete pad and some threshing happening on the other half! I think we are making good use of that space!

The pigs have been tanked up on sweet potato vines and other weeds, but after a harder frost this week the weed supply is diminishing rapidly! So we were happy for an apple cider pressing day at the neighbors to provide us with lots of buckets of apple scraps. The pigs LOVE their apple/yogurt slop. And thankfully they have all stayed within the bounds of their electric fencing recently. One night when Jason was away I did the evening rounds and was feeling good about getting some things done for Jason in his absence. I was taking the pig bucket back to the shed when I looked up and saw one of our red pigs walking towards me. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on as it was rather disorienting to see a pig trotting towards me out in the open. It's nice they are tame!! AND I got her back in. I was impressed with myself and then the pig was out again minutes after Jason got home!

We've still got a fair amount of threshing and winnowing to do, but the amaranth is all harvested and we just gleaned sorghum from our neighbor's patch before it is mown down! Other than a few raspberries, nettles, tea and a few herbs, this year's harvests are done. We'll be eager to turn our attention soon to "leaf harvesting."

So hopefully that means we are moving towards a bit of a slower time. I know at least the parents in this household are just a tad TIRED! It doesn't help that we have had a cold virus of some kind moving through our home for well over a month now! It's not been the kind of sickness that changes our day to day plans, but sure has made our nights not as restful. But there is still plenty of happiness and sweetness around, especially where these two are concerned!

The highlight of this past weekend was Alida and Kali taking part in a Heidi play that their friend wrote and directed! It was so fun seeing the kids enjoy themselves both at the practice and performance. Lots of giggles!

No mishaps at all, other than Kali and her co-servant almost dropping Clara. :)

They were happy and it seemed maybe a tad proud, as they should be. It was great entertainment! They were already talking about the next play they might want to put on together!

Terah enjoyed the fact that while the big kids were practicing and also on performance day she got the large trampoline all to herself! That was until the "cast party" when the herd of performers came tearing over. She wanted out of there fast!!

p.s. We have a YouTube video of the performance if anyone is interested in seeing it, let me know!