The last few days have been cold and rainy. We started our new wood burning fireplace for the first time and huddled around it to get warm. We are heating the house exclusively with our fireplace and also the wood boiler. 

Cam hasn’t quite finished hooking up the wood boiler so for now the fireplace works well enough. 

This post contains affiliate links. Here is the full disclosure.

Next week we will get our first frost! I don’t have much that needs to be harvested luckily. It’s only the peppers that are left that will freeze. So I’ll be doing some major harvesting and preserving.

Homesteading Projects

The driveway is done! And even after lots of hard rain it is staying put and not draining into the road anymore! Yay! 

Preserving

We’ve been drying apples all week. I also had Cam pick me up some more apples from a local farm stand. They had to bring in apples from a few hours away this year since all the local orchards had the late frost kill them off.  

I think we are up to 20 half gallons of dried apples. Each half gallon has roughly 10 apples per jar. Last year I did 16 jars and they were gone so fast. We all love them as snacks in winter.

Hopefully by next year our own apples will start producing! I have the crabapples and enterprise apples that are mature enough to have a crop. I will be praying we don’t get a killing frost on all the fruits next year. Not just for me, but also for all the local farmers.

In the Garden

It feels weird but I’ve hardly been in the garden all week. The weather has been awful! But at the same time, I am relishing the slow pace and enjoying having time to reflect on the year.

I still need to get a cover crop planted once it dries out a bit and would like to get some spinach planted before I really call it quits for the year.

I did get out there on Friday and harvested the majority of the cabbage. It was ready and it had cabbage worms on it. I was able to peel the outer layers away and get them all off though. We still had a really good harvest despite the feasting that the bugs did.

I made sauerkraut with them and it was late at night that I was hurrying to get it done so no pictures. I have a new favorite ingredient in my sauerkraut, fresh dill. I put it in there on a whim late time and it was so good!

New Blog Posts Coming Soon

Thanks to the rainy weather this week, I had time to write a new blog post about my secrets to preserve tons of food and also another about my mistakes I made through the year and how I’ll improve on them.

I haven’t published them yet because I need to add some pictures but hopefully I’ll get at least one posted this week. Look out for them!

I hope you guys had a great growing season. I really appreciate all of you reading. I still plan on posting the weekly digs over winter but obviously they are a little more brief since it’s a season of rest. Hallelujah!