Maple Grove Farm

Homestead Updates

Here is a picture of our garden area showing some of the work we have been doing.  The lines in the back are where the blueberries and raspberries are planted.  In the front you see the strawberries and to the left is the garden.  You can't really see the grapes, but they are in front of the strawberries.  This is the view from our kitchen.

Now that our first planting is done, we move on to prepping our canning supplies and cleaning our canning area.  A couple of years ago my husband assembled a canning room for me with a countertop, a few hot plates, and some shelves.  It is conveniently located between the canning storage room where we keep jars and items requiring warmer temperatures for storage and our cold storage room which includes our freezers. 

Over the years all of my "craft" items have come to live in this space.  From cheesemaking to soap to seeds, I store many of my items here and work on projects year around.  We have done our annual clean up of this room and have organized the shelves.  I took inventory of my items and found that I have pectin and wide mouth lids.  I will need to order some more narrow mouth lids.  We have also organized all the jars that are clean and ready to be used.  They are sorted by size and we have consolidated the remaining food items.

This is a good opportunity to assess what items we have a lot of and which we are running low on.  It is amazing how our interests ebb and flow and our needs change over the years, but it all gets eaten.  During the next couple of weeks we will also condense the freezers and clean them out.  Probably the month of April we will eat more meals around what is in the freezer in an attempt to clean them up and reduce the items remaining as we enter in to summer.

YOU DID IT!

09:52, 2008-Mar-5 .. Posted by Alaina

Now I will be waiting to SEE more! LOL Also thanks a yahoo for your comment about freezing things in the car! Only a mom of many children could really understand that fear. LOL OK I'm the idiot that got on line and BOUGHT everything to make my soap, well except the lye and the goat milk and still haven't tried it yet. Where did you get your lye & did you make it with goat milk? Hope you are all feeling better.
Blessings,
Alaina

Edited by Alaina on 2008-Mar-5 at 11:53