sentiment of home

Finding Beauty in the Ordinary

Summer 2023 – Home and Harvest

September 9, 2023

It was a beautiful and extremely productive Summer. We planned throughout the winter what we wanted to plant, things we wanted to accomplish, and while not everything went according to plan (as usual in life) we learned many lessons and enjoyed (almost) every second. We try to remind ourselves in the crazy moments that these are the good old days. One day, we will look back at these memories and wonder how they slipped by so quickly (at least that’s what every person with grown children tell us) so we take their advice in stride and try to savor the crazy, beautiful, messy, lovely, moments. This Summer was filled to the brim with them. Since my memory tends to be terrible, I enjoy taking pictures of those moments.

Our tomato jungle. We had 2 1/2 beds like this… next year we’re just buying 4 plants. 16 May have been too many…

… But the harvest was beautiful.

We turned that big beautiful tomato into a big bowl of salsa. My mom shared a great recipe with me linked below ⬇️
https://www.melskitchencafe.com/best-homemade-salsa/

I had to take a moment to appreciate the clean, calm kitchen. After spending the day in it, freezing corn, making/canning a years worth of salsa, and making homemade pizza, it was nice to just give a long sigh and say “we survived!” She’s a hard-worked kitchen, but she cleans up nicely.

Thankful to a friend who told us about an Amish farmer who lets you pick his organic corn for free (we usually give a donation) since after filling his orders he was just going to mow over the remaining. So we picked on a Friday night and spent the next day dedicated to freezing it. We did this last year as well and were sad when we used up all the bags by December, so we tried to pick more this year. I believe we picked around 20 dozen.

Believe it or not, the kids actually sat outside with Jake and helped him shuck the entire two-wagons full.

Okay Julia may have just snacked, but Elsa and William worked hard.

Judging her dad’s corn-husk-doll-making skills.

This same farmer also grows orange watermelon.

Too much work for this little princess. She actually fell asleep at the desk. Nap time came a bit earlier that day.

I didn’t get a picture of all the bags of corn we made but it came out to be by 28 quart bags. Hopefully that lasts us a bit longer this time.

Now let’s turn our attention to peaches…

The peaches came in fast and hard. We ate them fresh, made peach butter, froze them, and canned a ton (which I’d rather not talk about because it’s still too painful). All I’m going to say is next year… we WILL do better!!!

I’ve learned some things about canning this year and next year can ONLY get better… right? It actually has to because it really couldn’t get worse. 😭

We got to piglet sit one day and it was SO fun. This is Liesl and we all got quite attached.

…Even Sally II.

We found 6 black swallowtails in the garden. They were especially partial to our carrot tops, so we brought them in, and watched them transform one by one into beautiful butterflies. It was so fun and amazing to see what a beautiful Creator our God is. As they hatched from the their cocoons the kids named each one and we released them. Hoping to do this each year.