The kids have gotten so big, and matured so much. App
leBelle has joined Girl Scouts and is currently filling out the paper work for 4-H. She has been a big help this summer, taking on so much more responsibility (finally!). She entered several items at the County Fair and won Reserve Grand Champion for her ‘Sushi play dough’.
We decided not to enter chickens this year; she needs to work with them a lot more if she wants to win any awards. Last week we drove out to Spokane to pick up some true Ameraucana chicks (they lay blue eggs!) from a breeder we found online, Pips&Peeps. She has decided these will be the chickens she will show next year and has been handling them every day to get them ready. 
Rosey has gone from toddler to little girl so quickly. She is singing her ABC’s and can count to twenty (after that it gets kinda funny!). She still loves to work with flashcards; she whizzed through shapes & colors so we have moved on to sight words. One of the problems with being so remote is that she has no one her age to play with. We’ve tried story time at the local Library, but have yet to find any buddies. While AppleBelle is at school we sneak into her room and play PetShops, which Rosey enjoys very much (I think it’s the sneaking in she enjoys the most!).
The chickens seemed to have multiplied. We went from 2 to 20 in less then a year. They have been very addicting. In the spring I built a incubator out of a Styrofoam ice chest. The directions were found on my favorite chicken website, BackYardChickens.com, and after a trip to HomeDepot and digging out a few parts from the garage, I have a working incubator for only 20 bucks!! After a few trials and errors (on my part) we had a 100% hatch and then the Mr. made me put it away. He just finished the chicken ark for the ten chicks we hatched out. Soooo, I guess now I can plug the incubator back in! I’m thinking of adding quail to the family, their eggs are so tiny and cute!
The Garden has become so much work. Next year I will be installing a watering system with an automatic timer so that watering wont be so time consuming. We did learn a lot
this year though. Timing is everything when dealing with frosts. I should have started the corn, tomatoes, cucumbers and pumpkins a month earlier, as the first frost is creeping up on me and I’m still harvesting a ton of tomatoes. The carrots, potatoes and cabbages did wonderful. Last weekend we cleared out the root cellar and we are airing it out and checking the temp/humidity to get ready for storage. This year the chickens share a part of the garden, and one of them has realized that she can fly over the fence and get to the veggies, so we lost several cabbages and all the eggplant. Next year I hope to have a larger coop and a larger fence to keep them in their own area. All in all we had a wonderful harvest and have gained some knowledge for next year.
The fruit trees are another story. We didn’t want to spray, I was hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary. It is. I have found some organic sprays that we will try next year, and if that doesn’t work I give up. The apples and plums actually did excellent without any sprays or fertilizers. They will get a hard pruning once the leaves drop; it seems the trees I cut back hard last year did better then the ones I gave a light pruning to. The cherry tree is the one I had the hardest time with. We maybe got 10 good cherries. What the birds didn’t get the bugs did. I will be getting fake snakes for all the trees next year, as the one I used in the plum tree worked wonderfully! The deer ate their fair share of green plums and apples. We let one apple tree drop all the fruit in the hopes that they will ignore the other trees. It has worked to far, only one more apple tree to harvest! All the fruit has also attracted a bear. We have found bear scat in the orchard, and he has done some damage to the plum trees, I think he might be pretty good size. Because of this the dog will be sleeping outside until the bear goes to sleep for the winter. This has been a great trial season and I can’t wait for next year’s garden!
