Taking Advantage of the Sun!!

So the hunter's are off on their yearly sojourn.  They tried on the west side, but there were way too many hunters and not enough deer, so they just arrived in Colville this afternoon and will be hunting there for a while.  

Kara and her boyfriend Tyler carved pumpkins the other night and the one on the left is Tyler's.  If you look closely, you can see he asked her to homecoming.  Very sweet!!!  She did say yes of course.  Unfortunately, the chickens were out the next day and they enjoyed the pumpkins very much, so they don't look quite the same now.  But at least we got photos before that.

Mom and I cleaned all the pumpkin seeds from the pumpkins Kara and Tyler carved and dehydrated them with a little bit of olive oil and salt.  They are so very, very yummy!

Here is the pig pack in all their glory.  They are eating and growing like crazy and they are so funny, running from end to end of their pen.  They really liked all the raw pumpkin pieces from the pumpkin carving!  Marty got some too!

On a sad note, last Thursday and Friday, the Welsummer chicks we were raising had an unwelcome visit from an opossum, raccoon or something and well lets just say only two survived.  They are in with the meat birds and are doing fine.  We did lose only one meat bird.

So below, after searching online for chicken types and what we wanted to get to replace the Welsummers, I decided to get Light Brahmas which are a large chicken, very tame, very friendly, and very hardy bird along with the Buff Orpingtons, which again are a larger bird, very tame, friendly and hardy.  We got 11 of each with hopefully at least one rooster per breed.  These were all hatched on 10/05/11 so they are a day shy of two weeks now.  The Light Brahmas have feathered feet and black wings with the Buff Orpington being all, well, buff.  Colored that is.  hahahahahahaha  They are all so cute and very soft!

Mom and I purchased two different kinds of garlic to grow for this next year and planted it yesterday.  We got Italian Late and Chinese Pink which is a very early maturing variety.  We are very excited to see how this turns out next spring.  We also pulled all the pumpkin plants, all but two of the zucchini and have the lettuce that we let go to seed in bags to dry.  Yay!

These are the sunflowers on the side of the house that have all started to open.  Not sure due to weather if we will get any sunflowers off them, but they look so pretty!  And they are huge!!!

All is well otherwise.  Mom and Ray's house is getting together slowly but surely.  They now have gutters, the skirting is being put on today, they had their oven installed, have the washer, dryer, and the fridge also.  They are still waiting on their stove top, though.  Otherwise, they are very happy to be in a little larger space than our RV.  To say the least.

Enjoy the sun while you still can!