It has been a very busy past few weeks.

First I started by summer pruning some of the apple trees. Just a couple.

Then we realized the pears needed to be picked. We picked all the Bartlett trees. One hundred forty-six pounds of pears.

Since it was getting close to the end of August and you want to do summer pruning before the tree sends its energy to its roots for its dormant season, we all needed to finish all those apple trees. It was also over 100° those two days,

A side benefit of summer pruning is the goats get to eat all those leaves. This is just a small bit of the stems we gave them. They were happy goats.

A few days after putting the pears into “cold storage”, they were ready. This summer, the boys convinced me to take every Friday off of school. Thankfully, when I realized most of the pears were ripe, it was a Friday. The boys delightfully accepted my offer for them help me and boy did they help. Over six hours of cutting, de-stemming, de-coring and peeling while I was heating them and canning them. 24 quarts later we were done with the ones that were ripe.

Of course, I had forgotten about the three baskets Michael had put into the refrigerator. Those combined with the others that still needed to be canned were done the next week. We ended up with 54 quarts of pears.

Here is a part of them.

There was also some green bean canning in between pear canning. Can I just say, canning green beans is SO EASY. The problem for me is picking the beans before they get huge. I did a better job this year but I’m hoping to get out and pick beans every morning next summer.

I picked all my basil and turned it into two ice-cube trays of basil cubes.

There was also a boys birthday party to get ready for. Each year we celebrate Nicholas’ “half birthday” at the same time as Joshua’s early birthday with their friends. Guess what the theme was…..go ahead, guess. You’re right, it was AIR SOFT again. Hot dogs, cupcakes, and air soft wars for hours in over 100° temperatures. They had a blast.

I had made more Blackberry ice cream, but I was enjoying my time chatting with the moms that I completely forgot to get it out.

Well, that should catch everyone up on our activities.

Enjoy the last days of summer,
Karen