Something Fishy around here....

Those of you that have been reading my blog very long know that we eat wild game, and steer away from other types of meat. This limits us to 2 primary sources of meat 1) deer (venison) and 2) fish. We also are lucky sometimes to get shrimp, wild rabbit, duck, squirrel, even bear!
We eat a lot of fish though. Our favorite is crappie. I have said crappie before to some folks in the north and they look at me like I'm crazy, so I think it must be more of a Southern thing. Crappie fishing is great around our parts and easy and fun to catch. They are delicious to eat also.

Our daughters have been going fishing with us ever since they were tiny, but for whatever reason my oldest one is just now taking an interest in cleaning or scaling fish.

She was so excited to help her dad scale our recent catch. She worked so hard and wanted to make sure that the fish SHE scaled was the fish SHE ate that night for supper....

It's such a blessing to pass on skills like this to our children. I dare say that there are not many 5 year old girls that can bait a hook, catch a fish, then scale it BY HERSELF. Very proud of her.

You know the saying: If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Baby is here.... busy as always

Well first thing first, we welcomed a new little blessing into the world September 29th. I'm glad to report that both he and I are doing very well. He was a whopper ( 9 lbs 12 ozs) and the girls are just crazy about him.

Around the home front, we still have a few things producing, but it has slowed down considerably. Which is fine due to the fact that having a newborn takes a lot of time:) My husband and girls have been great though about helping out.

Greens!
We have tons of greens. Mostly mustard and collards, and about every evening when it gets a bit cooler they will go pick a big batch. A little trick to gteting nice greens is to not pick them in the heat of the day, the leaves are wilted, but if you wait until a little later in the evening they perk back up, giving you crisper, fresher tasting greens.

Okra!
Still getting lots of okra. Our favorite way to eat it is kind of fried, not deep fried, but just in some shallow olive oil after they have been sliced up into thin coins and rolled in some corn meal flour mixture. We also like them boiled, and before baby got here we pickled about 20 pints.

Pears!
We are getting delicious Asian pears. We have 2 HUGE trees and are getting all the pears we could possibly want. We had a cousin call the other day wanting some and he picked a 5 gallon bucket in no time and you can't tell he was even here. We eat these normally just off the tree, last year my dad and I put some up into preserves, but even though they are tasty, we found we don't eat too many preserves, so we didn't put any more up this year. We still have probably 40 from last year that are still good.

It's deer season here also so that will keep my husband and the other men around here busy. My husband isn't really a hunter, but he is great at making sausage, summer sausage, etc and is a great help to others that do hunt. Plus we always end up with at least one deer in our freezer ready for the winter. I'm sure I'll have another post about deer hunting and deer meat in the future.

So that's it for now, just trying to get back in the routine of things and trying to get enough rest....

Thankful for our home, our family and our blessings!!

My First Giveaway!!!!!

I've always been a reader. I love to get lost in good books. But right now with babies and gardening and lots of outdoor activities I find it more and more difficult to find time to read a book. So my solution: MAGAZINES! I really enjoy strumming lazily through the pages of a good magazine while sitting on the front porch swing, sipping homeade lemonade and listening to the girls giggle while playing in the garden. Today's giveaway will give one lucky reader a subscription of their choice to one of my favorite magazines. I buy all of my magazines through Ebates.


Ebates is a site where you earn cash back for your purchases, and the store I normally buy from is Magazines.com   . They have specials where you will earn up to %51 percent cash back on magazine subscriptions. Sometimes they even send me $5 gift cards also to use towards my next purchase, which makes for some great prices.

Some of my favorite magazine subscriptions are:
Organic Gardening
Hobby Home Farm
Hobby Home
Vegetarian Times
Mother Earth News

There are several ways to enter this contest!

1. Be a subscriber to my blog and leave a comment telling me you are.
2. Sign up for ebates, it's free and let me know you signed up.
3. Post about my giveaway on your blog and leave a comment to link me to it.
4. Refer a friend to my blog, make sure they leave a comment letting me know who referred them and that they follow my blog themselves.

I'll draw a random winner Wednesday March 14th at noon CST and will send that person an email with the options for their subscriptions. All entries must be received by Noon CST Wednesday, March 14th. I'll also post the winner's first name and last initial on my blog with their Magazine choice. I'll have to have the winners address ( which you can send me privately) in order to send them a gift subscription.

Note: This giveaway is not endorsed by Ebates or Magazines.com , I just thought that it would be a fun thing for all my readers.

This post in linked up to the Homesteading Barn Hop, click below to enter:

Peaches...

So we finally got around to picking peaches. Our peach trees didn't do too well this year, they were small and hard, they never seemed to ripen. Thankfully we have an organic orchard about 10 miles from our house, so we loaded up the girls and went to the Peach Orchard. Boy was it hot!

We found some good ones. I think all in all we ended up with 30 pounds. Unfortunatly they didn't last too long... I made some into pies, some I gave to my parents, we ate most of them just fresh because boy were they delicious.

Just updates from our place

We've been busy. I've not been blogging :( I keep meaning too but something always comes up.

One thing that is going on right now is the fact that I am 35 weeks pregnant. I'm just really tired and the weather here has been soooo hot lately I just haven't done much. The heat also caused some problems in the garden. It was drought conditions for the better part of the summer growing season and some stuff just didn't grow. Tomatoes were one of them. I have enough to eat on sandwiches and make salads with, and I have made about 5 pints of salsa, but that's IT!! Last year by this time I had already put up over 150 jars of tomatoes in some form or fashion. This year they just didn't produce :( Neither did the peppers. Again, I had enough to eat, to put in fresh recipes, and I made a few jars of pepper sauce, but they just haven't produced this year either. Very sad.

I do have muscadines, boy do we have muscadines. But after doing an inventory of jelly from last year, and finding that I have over 75 jars of jelly, I may not force my pregnant self to toil away in the kitchen canning even more. I know I should, but I'm just not feeling it. There are plenty of people that would love to come pick them. The girls and I have been eating them for several days now, and I may pick some and just juice them... I haven't decided yet.

We also are getting okra still, and eggplant. The squash and cucumbers have had it for the season.

The pear trees are LOADED and if we can keep the deer out of them we'll have tons of pears here in a few months. I still have about 30 pear preserves left from last year, but really we all just love eating them fresh more than anything. They are are crunchy are delicious.

The chickens are good. 12 hens and a rooster. I am getting 8 eggs a day, and selling 2-3 dozen per week at my work for $2.50 a dozen. The rest of the eggs I use in cooking of course. My 5 year old LOVES hard boiled eggs and eats them almost daily. My husband and I love omelettes and my 4 year old just wants them scrambled.

It has been a good summer though. It's been hot, but I love spending time with my family and we are all healthy and happy. SO BLESSED.

Happy Homesteading everyone!

A start on the pickles

We love cucumbers around our house, the girls like to just eat them plain, sliced into little coins, my husband and I like them in salads, and also in a vinegar mixture with onions and tomatoes. But you can only eat so many fresh... so of course we have to have pickles!

I did two different kinds, one that are just whole, and the other that I call hamburger dill ( because most people use them on sandwiches and such). Somehow those didn't make it into the picture, but here they are all sliced up and ready to go.

So we ended up with some yummy canned goods. We love to take pickles with us when we go camping.

So there are 8 jars in the picture, then I did 3 more jars of the little dill slices, bringing me to 11 jars of pickles so far! I forsee more in the future though.

Things I just like...

My birthday is coming up and my husband has been asking me if I would like a gift. We typically don't do gifts for birthdays for each other, but it has gotten me thinking about some of my favorite things I have around the house that helps me on my "Homesteading Quest".

Ice Cream Maker:
- I would love an old fashioned hand cranked Amish one, but for now I do enjoy my little electric one. We enjoy homeade ice cream basically all year round, not just the summer.

My Ball Canner:
-I love my canners, I have an old pressure canner from my aunt that I use a lot, as well as just my good ole' water bath canner. I started out with a stash of jars of assorted sizes from my mom, and have picked up many more through out the years from yard sales. Many people will say "just take 'em", while many others I have found for a dime or a quarter.


Compost pail:
-This is totally not necessary, you don't need a compost pail, but I got one last year from Lehman's that I love. It is a very nice bamboo one with a plastic pail inside with a handle, that has a nice top with a charcoal filter. It looks very attractive on my counter and most people never would even know what it is.

Wheel barrow:
I'm not sure of the brand or anything but I love my wheelbarrow. We have one large one, then one kid sized one that the girls use. We use these all the time.

Magazine subscriptions:
- I really love my mags... I subscribe to several and I enjoy getting them in the mail and reading them, most of the time cover to cover. Some of my favorites are
- Mother Earth News
- GRIT
- Organic Gardening
- Vegetarian Times
- Hobby Farm
- Hobby Home Farm

There are many more things, but this is a good list. What about your one " must-have"??