Sure Water Storage Tank

I've been worried about having adequate water storage that we could easily use in an emergency, even for an extended period of time. We had a 55 gallon drum but it's not easy to empty and refill. We had talked about putting in a well but the expense is out of reach. I think found these sure water tank. It has two spigots that you can use to get water out and a big lid opening in the top for easy fill. This tank holds 525 gallons of water! We decided to order this and used Labor Day to fill it up! It took about 1 1/2 hours but we now have good drinkable water and can use it to water the garden in the summer and refill it yearly.

We are looking into similar tanks to harvest some water off of our roof for water gardening and other water uses in an emergency. Hopefully this plan will work instead of a well for usable water!

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!

Turkey in the solar oven

Our live is getting back to normal. Michael feels he's 100% recovered from surgery and is starting to work outside again! Speaking of outside, we have had some real heat this summer with most days 95+. We're doing as good as we can to keep our tomatoes, peppers, and okra alive.

It's been too hot to cook. So, last week I cooked a turkey breast in our solar oven. It turned out really well and was completely done. The meat just fell off the bones.

A special horn blower at the world cup!

Last month at the World Cup, there was a special horn in the crowd!

The mystery of the missing fruit trees

About two weeks ago, I went out one morning and discovered that one of our peach trees was completely gone.  All that was left was about 18" of the trunk. There were not any branches on the ground or any signs of it being cut by a saw. At first I thought someone was in our garden.  The cut was fairly smooth with a little bit of grooves in it.


On Monday, the same scenario happened again. We were completely stumped (no pun intended).

Living in South Carolina, I didn't believe there were beavers here but the thought crossed our minds. Our property borders a neighbor's 5 acre pond and two smaller ponds and then a creek in the woods on the other side.



This morning, the third or our five peach trees suffered the same fate. We have a total of about 20 trees and they are about six years old so just producing for us!

We talked to one of our neighbors that has a pond and he said on the other side of the 5 acre pond at the spillway, they have discovered beavers building a home.



As I called around farm and garden centers, etc. the most popular solution was a rifle. One guy told me to open two cans of sardines and place them at the edge of the pond and then get a lawn chair and sit with a shotgun on our laps and wait for them to come for the sardines and shoot away!

We did find something called Ropel that you can spray on the trunks of trees that make it taste terrible and also gets on their paws. We bought it at a pest control place and used it last night and didn't lose another tree. We'll see if it works. I stayed out a dusk last night to see if we could see them (we were told they come out at dusk) but didn't see any!

We haven't had too good of luck with wildlife. We have had deer eat out strawberries, a duck get in our garage, the cats bringing rabbits into the house and now beavers stealing our trees!

Michael's recovery

This is Michael last Monday, awaiting his surgery. Boy I'm glad this past week is over but it went as well as we could have prayed for. Just one week later, he's able to move around, get up and down and is no longer on any pain medication.
He ended up with about an 8" incision. This is just part of it. They took out 8" of his colon. The mass was just confined to the inside of the colon. Nothing looked abnormal and when the pathology came back, everything was negative so he is considered cured! He will have close follow up for many years but that is a small price to pay!
Here he is the day before he came home. He was able to come home on Friday night about 9:00 after eating a couple of regular meals and having his bowels move. He's now able to eat whatever he wants. We consider this such a blessing and a real miracle! He doesn't have all of his energy back yet but he is starting to teach an online class tomorrow! Hopefully, he will get his staples out in the next couple of days.