Working Hard

Since we have moved into the new house, Randy and I have been working hard. A lot of the work we have done is yard work. Of course, I haven't really documented a lot of the trimming that has gone on, but I can say that we have filled up our extra three garbage cans with yard trimmings almost every week since we moved!

Here Randy is cutting down a tree that has grown way too close to the house. 

 Gone!

 This is the damage the tree left on the gutter

 not only have we been busy with trimming and weeding, but we have also had so much fruit that I have spent a lot of time canning, drying fruit and trying to use it as best we can. 

I've made jam (not from our garden)

 I also made bread. Here is Tyler enjoying some of it.

 This is a fruit picker we bought. It was so helpful in picking plums, apples, and pears!

 I dried plums in my mom's dehydrator. She was nice to let me borrow it for a while. The plums were soooo good.

 The girls chilling out while I cut plums

 I also bottled grape juice with grapes from our grapevines. This is my first time bottling juice but it wasn't so bad. I bottled 24 jars of grape juice.

 We ate a lot of the pears fresh and they were delicious!  But the pears we couldn't eat fast enough, I used to make and can pear sauce. I think I only bottled about 5 quart jars of pear sauce.

 We had the kids help pick apples for multiple family home evenings. We actually didn't even pick all of them. there were just too many apples! They tasted really good, but I had bushels and bushels of apples! My mom was a sweetheart (again) and she canned applesauce with me for three full days (almost 4-6 hours each day). We bottled probably about 40 jars. I left a whole box of apples at her house and she even canned more after that without me. needless to say, I'm so tired of apples now.

 These are pictures of apples we picked in just one night for FHE.

 The girls having fun spinning in the computer chair while I worked on sorting apples.

We pruned the trees a lot after the fruit was picked. I'm not sure how much fruit we will get next year because of it. I'm hoping our yummy bottled fruit and dried fruit will last us a little while. hopefully The trees recover well and we can have superior fruit in the coming years. It is such a blessing to have fruit trees. I feel much more prepared and self reliant. It is wonderful! It's hard work, but wonderful all the same.