This sure flew by

I am totally in denial, which is hard to do because I'm typing this wearing a wool sweater, snuggled under a fleece blanket. I am going to have to face the facts, namely that it is fall.

When I went through August's summer photos to put them on the blog, I realized how little I shared with you from our most glorious, productive month because we were insanely busy. 

So that's why I want to share the pictures with you now. I look at the images of us swimming in creeks, rivers, and the ocean, while currently shivering under my fleece blanket, and I marvel at how much time we spent by the water in this droughty, hot month.

But don't be fooled.  We didn't just play by the water all summer long.

Oh no! One of the reasons I'm feeling fried is because we packed so much food preserving in.  I have to do a separate post about it, but for now, here are some highlights.

~ Harvesting potatoes with my crew

~ Gathering apples and pressing them into apple cider

~ Collecting eggs from our chickens

~ Picking figs and making them into fig jam

~ Harvesting tons of vegetables from the garden and cooking, pickling and canning them

We also slaughtered our 20 meat chickens.  Our kids have to help with this task every year.

I can't tell you how much social media interaction I got on the photo of Kai dipping a dead chicken in the hot water.

Most people were pretty positive about it, but there were some folks that freaked out and told me I was cruel for making my kids help with killing chickens.

To this I say: we don't run a petting zoo around here.  We raise some animals for meat, and my kids know that they will end up as such. ("They" being the chickens. Not the kids).

Since my children eat, they have to help.  They don't mind at all.  In fact, Luke takes pride in telling people at our homesteading and wilderness retreats in great detail how to pull out guts from a dead, still warm chicken.

We are homesteaders.  We get dirty.  We get bloody.  We grow and raise our food, and our kids know that chickens don't come from the supermarket neatly wrapped in plastic.  There's blood and guts involved, yo!

I will leave you with some fun images in case you are traumatized by dead chicken pictures.

The one below is Luke and me on a mountain bike ride.  He's dragging me up and down some vicious hills and teaches me mountain bike slang, like "Shred the gnar, dude."


I'm trying to shred, people, I really am.

This one was a particularly lovely sunset.  Or it might have been a sunrise.

And lastly, some of our plums.  There's more to come.

If you missed our video highlighting August, you can watch it HERE <----

And if you want to watch the tutorial I made on how to make pickled beets with honey and allspice, watch it HERE <---

How was your summer?

A dead bear in the creek, a heat wave, and summer in the garden

What do you do when a heat wave hits and temperatures soar above 90 degrees for over a week?

If you're like us, you find yourself a wild creek or a pond and live in it.

Considering that our creeks and rivers here in the Pacific Northwest are fed by glacially cold water, some of us jump in for a few seconds, and then jump out, screaming.  That would be me.

My kids, however, act like salmon.  They swim in this freezing water and stay in there for a long time, while I sit on a sun-scorched rock watching them in amazement.  How can their systems handle it?

Fortunately, we also have a pond close by, which is warmer.

Talking of wild creeks: We found a dead bear in a creek the other day.  Yes, a real bear, black, male, adult, big.

In all our years living here, we have seen many alive bears, but never a dead one, let alone one in the creek.

We don't know what happened.  The Fish and Wildlife people believe it got hit by a car and died of internal bleeding, since there are no signs of gun shots.

It's sad to see this beautiful animal dead, swaying in the water and starting to stink.  Hopefully, it will feed many other animals while it disintegrates...

The wildlife here has been insane: coyotes howling next to our goat barn, lots of bear, deer... I wonder if they are as hot as we are and are getting careless...

Heat or not, our homesteading life marches on.  Veggies are abundant, canning season is in full swing, and goat milk is flowing.

The kids and I made dilly beans the other day.  My recipe can be found on my Patreon blog here <---

Soon, it's time to make bread and butter pickles from my cucumbers.  They're loving this heat!

My goat is giving me 3 quarts of milk a day, which I make into yogurt and cheese.  I've been really into making Gouda lately, and several wheels are aging in the crawl space underneath our house.  As I type this, a wheel of Cheddar I made this morning is pressing in our cheese press.

You do know that you can learn how to make cheese in my self-paced online cheese making course here <---, right?  Most of my students use pasteurized, store bought cow's milk, and it works fantastically for cheese!

One of my students just wrote me this email:

"I was scared, worried, nervous. I wasn't thrilled with my Colby (which I did from another site). Wasn't very good. So I was nervous about trying my Gouda. WOW! After seven months, this is the best Gouda I've ever tasted and I've tasted many because I love Gouda. Corina, you were so right and following your steps led to an awesome product. I can't wait to get making some more since these two wheels aren't going to last very long. Thank you, Corina, You Rock! And she is ALWAYS available for help and comments. Now after I make a second batch of Gouda, I really want to try one of your other cheese recommendations."

Isn't that nice? Thanks, Edward!  I get great reviews all the time, but I thought I would share this with you all!

I better wrap up this post for now.  My middle son Luke wants to go mountain biking with me, which is crazy, because it's kind of hot out.

But as soon as the Cheddar is ready to turn over in the cheese press, I will let Luke haul my premenopausal butt up that mountain.  I'm gonna sweat and swear and burn, but gosh-darn-it, I'm gonna give it my best.  My teenager wants to spend time with me?  I'm game.

Luke has been building mountain bike trails on our five acre property.  It involves a lot of digging and hauling rocks and tree stumps in extreme heat, but he's doing it.  Crazy kid.

I'll leave you with images of summer:

~ My daughter and I biking (not crazy, break-your-neck stuff like Luke): she did 14 miles without hardly complaining!  I'm proud of her...

~ New flags to decorate our house...

~ Tomatoes from the greenhouse...

~ On a walk...

How's your summer going???

PS: We still have three spots available for our homesteading and wilderness skills retreat for adults! Click here to find out more <---

Summer bounty in full swing

This happens every year in July: the food bounty comes on so hard and fast, we get overwhelmed.  It's an incredible berry and fruit year, and we need more hours in the day to pick them all: 

There's red and blue huckleberries in our forests, and salmon berries, thimble berries and Oso berries beckoning us on our walks.  I wrote an essay in the Llewellyn's 2018 Herbal Almanac about wild berries and why they are so good for you to eat (order it here <---).

Then there are cherries in our orchard that we have to pick before the birds get them, and fortunately our kids are very motivated to beat the winged creatures to these sweet treasures.

Some mornings, little Eva is out there climbing on the ladder to grab cherries from the tree before I even had my coffee.

We also grow a bunch of Goumi berries in our yard, because they are famous for their high nutritional, anti-oxident content, especially a high lycopene content (cancer prevention and heart health).  You can order a plant here <---.

They taste okay to me, a little tart, with a big seed inside, but the kids ADORE them.  Spitting seeds at each other while picking berries is a plus, of course.

And finally, to add to the picking-the-abundance-overwhelm, raspberry and strawberry you-pick at Cascadian Farm opened.  This famous farm is only 15 minutes away from our homestead, which is dangerous because they have excellent berries, ice cream and coffee.

You can imagine that our garden is going nuts.  The potatoes bloomed already, and I bet if I stuck my hand in the soil right now, I could steal some new potatoes already.

We've had a bunch of rain in June, so it's a jungle out there.  All the plants are happy, including the honeysuckle that has taken over one side of our house and keeps climbing higher every year.

My potted herbs on the porch and free-ranging herbs in the garden are thriving as well, and I already dried a decent amount of majoram, oregano, sage, basil, thyme and peppermint.

The past few weeks have brought a flurry of celebrations: my birthday first, then our wedding anniversary, and a couple of days later Steve's birthday.  Oh, and Father's Day, which we spent camping in the Methow Valley!

Our son Luke, who has taken over cake-baking-duties in our household, has been feverishly cranking out goodies.  He's better at cakes than I am, which is saying a lot because I'm a pretty good baker.

It's a good thing we have many bottles of homemade blackberry wine with all these celebrations!

Our cabin is coming along nicely.  Steve and the boys are working on it, while Steve is teaching them how to build from the ground up.  And our friend came over for a few hours as well, so progress is happening!

Eva and I help, too, when time comes to raise a wall.  You can watch the action happen in our "Homesteading in Paradise June Highlights" movie here <---.

Luke, mountain biker extraordinaire, takes advantage of the height of the floor platform, hurling himself into the abyss on his bike, while I watch with my heart in my throat.

Other news of the month: Our oldest kid is driving.  Kai is going to driver's ed and is getting lots of practice driving, since driver's ed is one hour away (one way).  So he's driving two hours every time we drive to town, with me on the passenger seat knitting, contemplating how fast these kids are growing up, and compulsively watching out for any lurking dangers on the road...

Is this crazy, or what???

I have to spend lots of time on our homestead in the wilderness to decompress from the stress of my son driving, I tell ya.

Today, I'll leave you with images of my daughter making natural cleaners with lemon-infused vinegar, Borax and baking soda...

Steve enjoying his morning coffee...

And our dog Raka, whose jaw was paralyzed for over a week, but who's fine again...

And you?  How are you doing?  Are you getting hit by harvesting-the-bounty overwhelm?