This spring I was at the Extension Service in Yamhill county picking up some bulletins that I needed for the class I did on food preservation.

While I was there, the woman handed me a card for a website to check out.

Apparently, all the extension services have gotten together and put their bulletins in one searchable location so that you can find any information you want that they provide.  That means you can get information about raising animals, gardening or preserving.

The next time you need to know how to grow tomatoes in your climate or how to can peppers, check out http://search.extension.org

Additionally, you can search the Oregon Extension files only by going to http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog

The Oregon site is very useful, especially when you are seraching for something locally specific, like how certain vegetables grow in our area.

We had an incredibly busy day today.  It is the height of the summer which means that the growing season is coming quickly to a head.  After doing my canning class earlier in the year, I swore that I was going to can as much as humanly possible this year.  It has been difficult to make it work with the baby, but I have been pulling it off nonetheless.

I took Daphne and Cyprus out to the farm with me to get some produce.  My list of canning currently includes carrots, corn, green beans, green sauce, roasted peppers and roasted tomato sauce.

The pepper plants were tall, happy and had plenty of peppers on them, especially really big ones.  Daphne grabbed a bucket and we got straight to picking.

I had the pleasure of taking Melissa and her son Jack with me.  It is so much fun to watch young babies helping in the field.  He is getting started early, that is for sure.  Jack helped us pick peppers and put them in the bucket.

Daphne helped get the peppers transferred from the bucket to the bags they were being weighed in to go home.

Jack really did finally get the hang of picking peppers.

He then helped us move onto picking tomatoes.  Jack selected only the lovely red tomatoes for his mom.

Daphne even helped me pick some lovely red tomatoes (and some green ones too).

In the end, I walked away from the farm with an AWFUL lot of food for our family for the winter.  It seems a little overwhelming to preserve it all now, but I will be so happy when it is done.

My friend Rebecca came over for a visit today.  We had lunch together, which was nice.  I enjoy the times we spend doing lunch.  I make something and she makes something and then we eat a lovely meal together.  I love sharing food with someone special, it makes the food that much more special.

We spent the afternoon hanging out with our babies talking about business and baby things.  I really love the afternoons I spend with Rebecca and the babies.

After making dinner,  I decided to really work on getting the house cleaned up and in order.  Rather than let Daphne go to bed on time, I forced her into being my slave labor.  She really wanted me to play with her for a bit before bed, so I told her that I would if she helped me clean the house.  She was an incredible help to me.

I found it particularly funny when I asked Daphne to take the clothes out of the dryer and I found this.  Thanks for the help Daphne!

I am liking the format of summarizing what has gone on throughout the day.  They have been a little bit long lately, but I have some ideas to whittle them down and still provide other useful posts.  I am having ahard time sitting down at the end of the day.  It makes me extremely uncomfortable to sit down and do anything, and by the time I have read my email, I barely have any tolerance left to sit and type.  I’m debugging this, but that is why it’s been 3 days since I posted anything.

Sharing lots of photos has helped a lot with me documenting my life more.  Some weeks I used to go without picking up the camera at all, and I don’t like that at all.  Though not all the photos I am taking lately are professional quality photos, I am working on my photography skills in general, which is important right?

Friday was a fantastic day.  I try to go on lots of outings during the week to keep Daphne happy and busy and to keep me from going stir crazy in the house.  One of the regular things I do on Friday morning is go to Scotty’s.  It is a local play place that is indoors.  It is run by a church that allows free admission.  It has such a clean and friendly atmosphere, and it is nice to let Daphne play how she feels like for an hour or so.

The big news for Friday is that we went strawberry picking.  Though we are getting closer to that time of year, it is still a little bit early to get out and get lots of berries.  We got some rhubarb the other week from our CSA, and I froze it so that I could pair it with some strawberries to make some jam.  The early berries are great for jam because you don’t want to use overripe fruit in your jams.  I’ll post a little tutorial on the jam in another post.  The goal of picking strawberries was to get enough to make a batch of jam and to eat for a few days to satisfy the spring berry craving.

This is the third season that I have been berry picking with Daphne, and I must admit that I really love it.  The first year I just put her in a sling.  Last year, I just sat her down with a bucket of berries, and she ate whatever she wanted.  This year, she was actually helpful–well sort of.  You see, we are still working on colors, so when I told her to pick the red berries that sometimes meant that I got green berries.  She was so excited to help, so I spent a lot of time going around finding ripe berries and letting her pick them.  She really liked that.  The only problem is that she made up a rule that any berries she picked she got to eat, so a lot of the berries that I found, she ate (harumph).  All in all, it was a blast, and I totally plan to revisit next Friday to get some more yummy berries for eating next week.  The berries were totally gone by bedtime on Saturday.  It’s not like we love berries around here at all.

When I got the berries home, I washed them up and took about half of them for jam.  We only managed to pick a little less than 4 pounds in the 2 hours we were out there.  The picking was slim, and having a baby to watch really didn’t help.  However, those 4 pounds cost us only $4.  If we were to buy them already picked, we would have been paying $3 per pint.  Besides, they can’t weigh the berries that are in your tummy by the time you make it back to the register, and let’s just say there were a few of them in there.  (Ok. in all fairness, I held great restraint in eating while picking because I understand that not getting paid for something you grew is more than unfair).

While I was in the kitchen getting things ready for jam, I also got some onions on the dehydrator.  I decided to dehydrate all the onions that I had and make onion powder out of it.  This is the method I use for my veggie salt (yes, recipe coming soon, I promise).  I had WAY more onions than my dehydrator could handle, so the third batch is in there drying as I type this.  They should be done tomorrow.  The 2 batches I already did have been food processed into powder and put in a bag to be used in future cooking endeavors.

While Daphne took a nap on Friday I managed to get out and work on my herb garden.  I have always wanted an herb garden.  I had a pretty sucessful amout of herbs come out of the garden last year, but I was hoping to increase it this year.  I actually pulled up all the mature plants I had and ended up moving them around to put them all in the optimum space to grow me more herbs.  Now I have Greek Oregano, Chocolate Mint, Thyme, Marjorum, Parsley, Rosemary and Bay Laurel.  I am happy with the new arrangement, and if the plants don’t show any more shock from being moved, everything will go on for a nice herb season.

Before:

After:

I made some tacos for dinner on Friday, and they were tasty.  The strawberries made a fantastic dessert with some fresh whipped cream I managed to whip up.

Saturday and Sunday were rather uneventful.  Unfortunately, the camera is really giving me problems.  The battery is almost dead, and I misplaced the charger and the spare battery.  I’ve been through the entire house trying to find it to no avail.  I skipped 2 days of bunny photos because I knew I was almost out of batteries, and nothing else got photographed either.  I’m hoping to find the battery tomorrow, otherwise, I am going to be very sad.

I made some progress sewing the elastic into my diapers and then serging them.  I have very few steps left before my one-size fitted diapers will be totally done.  They are looking really beautiful, and it makes me feel good to have lovely diapers.

Jared and I took Daphne to the park today today play around.  Carlton was really hopping with people out wanting to taste wine for the Memorial Day Holiday.  More power to them.  Our town is so lovely because these kinds of events really do bring in a lot of money for the local people.  I don’t mind sharing our little piece of Heaven with people on the weekends.

The bunnies are doing really great!  I can’t believe the changes I have seen in the Angora kits since they opened their eyes.  It seems that the black ones did it a lot faster than the white ones, which I assume is related to the fact that all the white bunnies are albinos.  Now that they have their eyes open, they are becoming more and more adventurous.  Though they are still staying in the nest box for now, I have a feeling that that will change over the next few days.  As soon as they can get in and out without problems the kits are going back out with mama.  They are getting good socialization for sure, but their mama can do a better job raising them than I can when there is no danger of them being killed from the cold nights.  They do spill out to get their mama when it it time to nurse.

Happy babies in the nest.

I’ve still got my attention on Thing 1’s babies.  There are 12 of them, so though she happily nurses them when I sit with her and help her, she only has 8 teats (it might actually only be 7).  That means that some of the little porkers get fed really well while the rest of them get little to eat.  The little bun that I  noticed was small and hungry the first day that held it’s own, but I am seeing less and less growth.  I can feel the ribs of the baby, and when I check to see that everyone is full at the end of the feeding, I am always finding that there are consistently 2-3 that need more to eat.  Thing 1 has had no problem with me giving them extra nursing time, but I’m not sure that she has the milk supply for it.  I would just foster them over to Daisy, but the week difference is HUGE in rabbit time, so I think it would be a worse situation.  I actually did end up letting them nurse from Daisy before her own babies got a chance tonight.  They seemed to be more full and happy than usual, but they were still very much more skinny compared to brothers and sisters.  If they manage to keep their own for another few days, their chances of long-term survival is greatly improved.  I’ll continue to foster nurse them and make sure that they get plenty to eat.

Chaos at feeding time.

This is a well fed nest of bunnies.

I have some other bad news.  The first day that Thing 1 had the babies, she was a little air headed, and she scratched one of the babies.  The wound looked like it was pretty bad, but manageable.  Over the next several days, I looked for the wounded baby (it is a black baby), but was never able to find the problem again, so I assumed it was not a problem or that it had healed.  On Friday night I was checking to make sure they all got fed and one of the black babies had  a misshaped tummy.  When I looked at it, it was in fact the wounded baby, and the wounds had gotten infected.  The hair in the nest had attached to the wound opening closing it so that it would not drain properly and so large absesses were growing.  I thought the baby was a gonner.  However, I cleaned out the wound (I’ll spare the gory details) and let the baby nurse an extra amount.  I’ve been keeping an eye on it every day.  I was sure the baby would die that night, but when I checked to see that everyone had eaten tonight, the wounded baby was the most feisty and the best fed of all the kits.  I’m not totally out of the woods on it yet, because it is still infected and needs to be cleaned 2 times a day, but every second the baby lives and is not listless and on its way down gives it a better chance of recovery and survival.  My hopes are high.

I took some family photos for Julie recently, and Daphne tagged along with me.  She thought she needed to be in many of the photos.  I did end up taking photos of her to oblige her, but she was so out of place in many of the photos I took!

She was trying to mimic a pose one of the girls was doing.

It must have been as good a time as any to take off the clothes and run around.

This is a blooper of the family, but Daphne really doesn’t belong either!

Always my little model.

This was in the middle of all the other photos.  Daphne really loves to sit at her stool like it is a little table.  This is how she ate lunch on Saturday.  A nice tasty Oregon burrito was consumed at her own little table.

Consider yourself updated.  Until tomorrow.