All My Birdies have Flown the Coop

The largest sunflower head we had this year.

We moved Alex into his dorm yesterday with the help of his FiJi friends.... that is the Fraternity that he has pledged for....seems like a nice group of guys.  I had a few moments of panic and sadness throughout the day but he is only 15 mins. away and 2 hours after leaving him at the dorm, he and his friends pulled into our driveway to pick something up from Alex's room.  We will seem him often I am sure. 

Memphis house has had a couple more potential buyers tour it - one is still considering and not sure about the other one...they came yesterday and we have not received feed back from them yet. 

This past weekend we picked up more mulch and did some weed control on the blueberries and grapes.  We put down newspaper, then fabric weed block and then mulch....hopefully that will keep the grass from growing where we don't want it to grow.

The blackberries are ready to have another row added so as soon as we find the thing that we use to hammer down the fence posts, we will get started on that....it is hiding somewhere on the farm.  The 3 little blackberry plants we started with have really expanded nicely.

I finished mowing the back fields and even though you are only sitting on a tractor riding around, it still wears you out after a couple hours.  The tractor's power steering is not working and the bouncing around is a little hard on the back sometimes.   Every time we drive by the tractor store in Bolivar, Cris and I just sigh..... someday we will have a new tractor.

CANNING:  The pears were canned last week as well as peaches we bought at Jones Orchards.  We made a peach pepper jam that really tastes good.  Will go great over cream cheese.  We also canned about 10 jars of spaghetti sauce.  We use about one jar of spaghetti sauce a week so we figured it took 20 pounds of tomatoes to make 10 jars.... so we need about 80 more pounds of tomatoes to make a year's worth of spaghetti sauce.

SUNFLOWERS I harvested the sunflower heads last weekend.  We had ALOT of sunflowers from just a few heads we harvested last year.  They are drying out on the breezeway of our trailer on the farm.  Some of the seeds will be saves to plant next year and some will be used as 'organic' birdseed and chicken feed.  Chickens love birdseed.  No chickens on the farm yet but should have some in the Spring. 

Storage space is lacking in the trailer so we are making plans to install a pantry in the kitchen and some bookshelves in the dining area. 

FARM TO DO LIST:

• Clean up the hoop house to get ready for Fall planting
• Gutters for the trailer
• front/back deck built on trailer
• storage solutions for inside the trailer
• build garden shed near vegie fields
• addition to barn - 2 more stalls for farm equipment

This should keep us busy for a while....