August 28, 2022 ~ Today is our daughter-in-law’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Amy!

August was still hot, but it is starting to get better. The month started off quite dismal! We finally had a chance to get into our beehives only to find out that something happened to three of our hives and they were EMPTY! Two of them did not have enough honey to harvest, we were able to pull a few frames from 2 other hives. We only had 1 healthy hive. We expected to get at least 40 gallons of honey, but we only were able to harvest 4 gallons. We melted the wax cappings, but barely had enough wax to make a votive candle! It was very disappointing.

In other parts of the farm, our laying chickens have decided to stop laying eggs. We are only getting 6 eggs from 20+ chickens – we think it was just too hot.  Our garden was looking dismal, too. The heat prevented the tomato and pepper flowers from setting fruit and grasshoppers got the best of our sweet potato and green bean plants. To top it all off, a rodent is getting to our apples – eating a bite or two from each one!  Farming is hard!

Our turkeys, however, are going great and they are getting big. They are really starting to show personalities and will talk back when we talk to them. We will process them and the meat chickens early next month. A few of the turkeys are already sold. We are going to keep most of the chickens for our own freezer since we lost so many last month.  We will have a chicken processing class to teach how to take the poultry from the yard to the freezer. Let us know if you are interested in learning how to do that.

John has spent most of his free time working in the garage on the Bass Pro rawhide domes. They are coming along and looking great. We might be a little ahead of schedule!

The last two days, there was a homesteading expo in a town about 30 minutes from us. Katie took the day off work to attend with some friends from our community. Yesterday we both went. There were many different vendors and different presentations for us to learn more about homesteading. These kinds of events give us encouragement to keep going, even during the hard times.  After the expo yesterday, we went to an Irish pub in town to hear our favorite local band, Hawthorne, play. It was a day.

The dismal start to August gave way to a surprising harvest. While it is not as much as we had hoped, we were able to harvest 12 ears of corn (we only planted a small plot to see if they would grow in our soil), green beans, peppers, tomatoes, basil and celery. Our garden thinks it’s JUNE!  Our kitchen was hopping today as we canned 12 jars of tomato sauce, 10 jars of peach habanero sauce, made sweet basil infused salt and celery salt. And, because gardening is an act of hope, we started seeds to see if we could get a winter crop of vegetables.