It’s ok to pull in..
It’s ok to get quiet..
It’s ok to seek calmness..
It’s ok to withdraw…
It’s ok to take time answering..
It’s ok to unplug when you want to do so..
It’s ok to turtle..
to have a shell
to have a place to retreat to
to go slow
to peer
to pause
It was always a huge gamble and risk in regards to little timbit.. The odds were never in favor of us getting our donut.. This was the last photo I have while expecting.. and I like it very much.. It will be a bitter-sweet photo for many years to come for me..
Thank you to everyone who has prayed and sent best wishes.. I am grateful beyond words for all your support..
I love this, for full recipes please read this page on making mock pinnapple..
Otherwise, enjoy the photo of the process! so so good, the extra juice was made into a amazing jelly!
Peeling, chopping, cooking and then getting to have the last bit as a amazing treat! Love, Love this recipe that use’s up those nice big Zucchini and turns it into amazing canned winter fruit of the highest quality!
While I still adore this tradional way of making this fruit, I have since come across two fun ways to use it..
One : add a package of your favorite flavoured jello.. and turn the fruit into a different flavour.. raspberry or cherry or blueberry.. you get the idea!
Two: take the flavoured colored fruit out and dry it down into zucchini gummy’s.. so good.. adults and kids alike love it!
I really enjoyed this painting.. I started with the plan to do some background washes to prepare for future paintings but this one decided it needed to come out..
I will admit that I already have it framed (I used one I already had) and up on the wall.. This was very! hard to get a good photo of, but its the best I can do.. the real painting has more green tones to the blueish area’s in the photo..
I did get to show it off this weekend to a few friends and everyone that has seen it in person has just loved it.. I hope you will enjoy seeing it on your Monday viewing!
So I did a few more paintings where I was working this and that as I was remembering how to do things..
I have given myself the challenge of learning how to paint a dog and cat in a mix of both real and funky.. this is a huge challenge for me.. as I want to keep working on it till I can paint my own dogs and cats from the farm..
Till I get better at it.. I will share my colorful bird for the moment.. Like most people that paint.. I like some parts better then others and I would like to do this one again now that I remembered how to do some things while painting this one..
I really like the eye on this bird!
As most folks know I have been making Cold Process soaps for many years now.. This soap loaf is so lovely on many fronts. It is made with my favorite blend of oils.. its an nice harder bar of soap..
I was teaching how to make soap that day and so I let the student pick the colors of the soap to blend and put together.. we ended up with a very funky three tone camo soap!
This is a plant based infused soap as well.. the main oil was warm temp infused with Golden rod flowers and leaves to give a added bonus to this soap in terms of giving a skin boosting salve to it..
I am looking forward to making a number of different batches of soap this week.. More on that soon..
On to all the things happening on this busy sunday..
Hope all my readers and friends on the east coast are doing well and made it though the storm with little to no damage.. If you are willing.. please consider dropping me a quick. all good once you get power back!
“Researchers from the University of Guelph and the University of Ottawa looked at the concentrations of three commonly-used neonicotinoid insecticides in the soil at 18 different cucurbit farms in Ontario, Canada. They evaluated the probability that ground-nesting bees – hoary squash bees (Peponapis pruinosa) in this case – would be exposed to a lethal dose of those insecticides while constructing their nests.
“The results were sobering,” said Susan Chan, Ph.D. student and lead author, by email. Under many of the scenarios they evaluated, the team found that a hoary squash bee will be exposed to a killing dose of neonicotinoids 80 percent of the time.
“This is really important because we know that bee populations are declining globally but we have never assessed the contribution that pesticides in soil may be making to that decline,” said Chan.
I am not surprised at this finding.. as we poison our soil.. anything! digging and living and creating life in that soil will be effected!
““Our study shows that ground nesting bees are literally risking their lives by excavating their nests in agricultural soil because of the high concentrations of neonicotinoids there,” said Chan. “It is important to remember that not all ground-nesting bees nest in agricultural soil, but many do and those ones are likely at risk.”
The toxicity of a substance and the risk it could pose to different forms of life is measured and discussed in terms of median lethal dose (LD50): the average amount of said substance that is required to kill 50 percent of a population in a given amount of time, under specific circumstances. The lower the LD50, the more poisonous it is. Knowing this helps determine how different substances should be handled and used in real-world situations. And this raises an important question regarding pesticides and bees: if the current LD50s for neonicotinoids were determined based on honey bee populations, how accurate and helpful can they be when it comes to assessing the danger these same chemicals pose to other types of bees when they’re used on a farm, in a park or around our homes?
Chan thinks the current LD50 for neonicotinoids could indeed be a fair measure: honey bees and hoary squash bees are similar in size, and toxicity through contact varies much less among species than toxicity through consumption. However, because not all ground-nesting bees are as big as a squash bee, and because some pesticides are simply more poisonous to one species than another, Chan recommends dividing the LD50 by ten as a best practice to accommodate the range of bees that exist.”
I was thrilled to pick up my quarter beef of local (up the road about ten min) of grass fed beef. I have a lot of chicken, turkey, duck, goat, pork and will have a good amount of lamb.. so I just needed to flesh out the freezer with some beef.
I was thrilled to find a close to me local place that raises their animals so well, I have seen the momma cows, the calves, the pastures.. and it helps support a local farmer that raised Non-gmo Grains!
Got to love folks that are walking the walk.. and not just talking.. As you know, I am trying hard to lean down the farm in animal numbers and winter work.. adding in a bottle calf was not a good choice this summer/fall.. but I was watching my beef supply get lower and lower.
This left me trying to figure things out.. this was the perfect solution!
I have also ordered my bulk grains from them by the ton when they are ready and they will be delivered to the farm and I will put them up for the full winter’s use.. some for sprouting, some for fall winter sowing in the sheep pastures for a spring push for winter wheat for in fill..
This was the first meal I made.. minute steaks with fresh onions, mushrooms, zucchini and peppers.. so good.. that wonderful lean meat with great flavour.. Grass fed meat is so lean.. you do not take out fat.. you add fat in..
There is a learning curve on cooking with such lean meats..
If you are local to Ottawa area and you are looking for amazing grass-fed beef at a really good price point per pound for a quarter/half or whole. Send me a note and I will provide their contact information for you right away..
Two years ago, the grapes pulled down their posts and wire.. its a jumbled mess out there.. it needs to be trimmed, cleaned up and totally rebuilt..
Just one more project that is on the list.. and there it will remain.. the odds are not good that this will be done in 2019.. (hubby say’s its a late fall project to get the holes dug and the new MASSIVE posts put into the ground.. Kay)
but the grapes have found a way around this lol.. they climbed the tree’s around them.. and while we got a faction of what was normal last year..
This year they went to town and we have Grapes clusters all over the place out there.. I will have to prune the heck out of it this late spring and get it under control..
For now.. we reap the bounty that very stubborn and determined grape vines yielded..
Given our Drought, I am expecting some real depth of flavours to our grapes this year.. I will can up most of it into juice but at least one batch will go into a grape-apple blend..
I am not sure why I waited so long for this peice of equipment.. I guess becaues its spendy and I wonderered if it was worth the money..
Every single penny! I love it! the difference in the quality of the juice is amazing.. I either feed the leftover bits to the livestock or I will mush it.. dry it and then grind it for flavour in other ways to use it!
Are you having a good grape year? Are you finding your flavours are intense if you had the summer drought? or if you have had way to much water.. have your found your flavours washed out as well?
I planted 6 Roma’s and 6 Beef Stakes and 6 Cherry tomato plants this year, compared to my normal years.. this is a little amount.. but WOW.. despite the drought.. Hottawa Peppers for the WIN! Crazy Amount of tomato’s coming in.. they started about 3 weeks ago.. they are going strong and they still have lots of green to go..
With sizes like these, it takes no time at all to fill my BIG that’s a bowls which hold 42 cups each.. bowl after bowl.. hubby checked weights and figured out we are bringing in 45 to 48 pounds every two days.. that is pretty much a bushel if you were buying them.
Now at the first week of aug, I pruned them up from the bottom by a third and took off all the flowers, forcing the plants to focus on the many, many fruits they already had started..
The 3rd week of aug, I pruned again, even harder and opened up the plants for air and even took off small ones that where in bad locations.. The pruning and the taking of the flowers is certainly paying off! .. a winters supply of different kinds of pasts sauces recipe have been made time after time and are filling the pantry shelves!
Just another Day on the Farm 