Missionary Fireside

We had a missionary musical fireside and open house at the church on Saturday. Michael sang a beautiful arrangement of "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief."

I was in charge of the Relief Society room for the open house. I am artistically challenged on decorating but put a table display together showing the some of the various activities we have done in the past year.

The sisters in the first ward made some posters and then we had a wonderful video put made by the Relief Society called something extraordinary. If you'd like to watch it, you can see it below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqfCXBsXGfQ&p=3268AAAA91633703&playnext=1&index=23

Canning our own pears!

We picked our pears earlier this week and I canned the first pears ever from our own trees! I canned 7 quarts and probably have enough for five more quarts that still need to ripen.

PS - I love my new stove with the boost burner. It doesn't take long at all for the canner to get going!

Our new stove!

I thought we were buying a great stove when we built our house. However, after nine years and four service calls, our oven went out yet again around Easter. I don't use it as much in the heat, and I put my toaster oven in the garage to do minimal baking. Finally, I had enough.

I love our gas stove and the convection oven that it had (when it worked). With just the two of us at home, I noticed that you can get double ovens so you can use a smaller one when needed and not heat up the larger oven. That's what I wanted!!! I found it also had the convection oven and the stove top had various sizes for burners (even a fifth one in the middle to keep things warm or melt chocolate (who wouldn't want to do that!

My problem was that it is more expensive than what I wanted to pay. Fortunately, I found a great deal online which was much cheaper than buying it at Lowe's. It arrived on Wednesday and Michael went to work to get it installed and the old one out. He carefully took it out of the cardboard (he wants to use it for target practice).

After moving the old one out of the way, and cleaning the grungy stuff on the floor underneath the old one, he was ready to set it all up!

Now, we have a new stove in place! We put my old stove downstairs (the top still works) and hopefully in the winter months, we can make me a canning kitchen downstairs! When we built the house we plumbed for a sink and I think now is the time to set it up to use!

Peaches!

South Carolina is famous for their peaches. At one time more peaches were grown in South Carolina than Georgia. I don't know if that is still the case.

After losing our peach trees, we were bummed. We went last night to buy a bushel of wonderful sweet peaches. They are expensive to buy the #1 quality but I counted that we got 112 peaches so they were about four for a dollar which is cheaper than the grocery store. I'm treating this fruit like gold and went through the bushel and layered them on the table to keep track of.


Of course, we needed to have a sugar free deep dish peach pie! Yum!!!

Gearing up for a fall garden

Our pears are almost ready to pick which we will probably do next week. Last week we picked a bushel of apples and made some delicious applesauce and apple butter!

I'm praying our weather will become more mild. I've got a lot of plants started for our fall garden including broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage as well as some tomatoes and peppers I'm going to put in the greenhouse. Tomorrow I plan on putting in a bed of green beans. We are still getting tomatoes, okra and peppers. We have another bed of tomatoes about 2" high and blooming and a bed of summer squash that is starting to bloom.

As of tonight, no more signs of our beavers!