Tomatoes!

What a wonderful blessing that word is! :o)

 After several years of struggling to get ripe tomatoes before a frost.... well this year with the hoop house we're not only enjoying ripe tomatoes well after several frosts, but the tomatoes are HUGE! The basket above is from just one days harvest. Now the only problem I have is jars, I'm running seriously low and really don't wish to buy new jars. So I put the word out and hope today that we'll find some. :o)

 Seed collection for next year  and our Anaheim chili peppers almost completely dry and ready to be ground.

Here are the bean pods Mike and Cortney collected( and the dried Painted Mountain corn), we'll worry about shelling them on a cold winters day or evening at the table, next to the warm and toasty wood cook stove :o)  Thankfully there are projects such as these that can be postponed for a later time*wink*

We've had a tough year when it comes to animal, losses. Our cow, Addy, was down and couldn't get up in the pasture on Monday evening. She did stand on Tues. morning but it was obvious that she'd pulled out her hip. We're not entirely sure if this was an injury from a few days earlier( as we were treating her for what we felt was a pulled muscle or tendon), gone bad. Anyway we'd already decided months earlier she was going into the freezer as hamburger, we were just holding off because we didn't have the room( hindsight is 20/20 don't you know*sigh*). When we called the butcher( they'll come and custom butcher right on your farm), he said she had to be able to walk, which she could NOT, otherwise she's classified as a "downer cow" and they by law couldn't butcher her. With no place cool enough to hang her to age we were now are faced with the fact that we're loosing all the meat. :o(   We went ahead and put her down( she was in pain) and a friend of ours brought over their loader( Mike was fit to be tied, he couldn't get our tractor with loader to start) and loaded her on our truck for us. She was to be hauled and buried in a pit they have for cows( in fact they had one that had been bitten by a rattlesnake that they had to put down the day before), then the state trapper showed up and asked about using the two cows as bait for coyotes. Since we know firsthand that a friend of ours has been struggling with her sheep being killed by coyotes all year we talked it over and decided that at least Addy's death was not going to be a total loss.
When you own animals things happen, we don't always understand, nor do we enjoy these things happening but you can either let it ruin your life or pick yourself back up and move forward. Loosing an animals is never easy, especially when you work closely with them and they become a friend. We're just so glad we opted to buy the bottle calf Cortney was raising for a friend, otherwise Button would be all alone and cows are, after all a herd animal.
Well, got to get moving we have laundry to finish today and tomatoes to run through the mill and cook down for sauce. :o)  I loose my righthand woman at 12:30pm today too, she's helping with an after school program for children *wink*
Blessings for your day!