A Play....

Something else we occasionally do for Friday Family Fun Night is a play.  Sabrina is our script writer and she does a really good job.  A couple months ago, we did "David and Goliath".

David and King Saul

Goliath (I'm always given the most interesting parts ;) and his Philistine men 

Collecting stones

Facing Goliath 

(and yes, through the strength of the Lord, David prevailed!  I don't have a picture of the fallen giant :)

Shenandoah had to get in on the action.

Daddy filmed us, so we wanted to watch it once we were done. (In case you are wondering, I'm not going to post the video! :)

Canning Plums

The end of July, Sabrina and Sienna canned plums!

Labor Day

On Labor Day, we went to spend the day with our good friends, the O's.  It was also a time of celebration as Mr. and Mrs. O presented Abby with the special "coming of age" book that they wrote for her for her 13th year.  Thank you all for having us!!!

Mr. O talks with Abby.

Sarah shares some thoughts with Abby as well.

Abby's sisters made her this friendship quilt.  They did a great job!

A closer look. (click on picture to enlarge)

Looking at the book.

Sabrina reads her note to Abby.

Shenandoah....

...and Calvin fell asleep!

Daddy and Mr. O textured the walls in the living room.

Sabrina and Abby

Sarah and I

Mr. Bender arrived at the scene of the action.

It went really well and there weren't any catastrophes. :)

Wallace made himself comfortable.

Me and my buddy, William.

A Cochran and "O" family picture.  I wish I had the first picture we got of our two families almost 8 years ago, but I don't have access to it right now.  Anyway, it was fun to get another one.  We look a lot different now! :)

A funny one just for good measure!!!

It was a great day of fellowship!  We appreciate you all! (and yes, Sarah, you beat me to the blog post! :)

We Picked Pears!!!

Yes, daddy shared with us that there is a frost advisery tonight so we decided to go ahead and pick those pears that mommy mentioned in her post down below. We just got home a few minutes ago and we picked quite a few!!! Now we just have to can them!!!

Daddy is outside right now setting up row covers so that we can try to extend our growing season for a little while on some of the things that we already have planted. Here are a few pictures.



Laying them out to ripen.


Pears, pears, and more pears!!!




Setting up row covers.

More later... I hope everyone is enjoying all of the new posts!!! Thank you for your comments, it's nice to hear from you! :)

--Post From My iPhone

Harvesting Honey

We harvested honey!!!  I had been looking forward to this all year, and now I can't wait to do it again!  The Lord really blessed our bee-keeping efforts this year and we got around 175 pounds of honey.  That makes for about 180 bears (plus the honey that we saved for ourselves in buckets).  Considering all but one of my hives were new this year, that was very good.  As you may remember, last year we did a crush and strain method.  This year we did the whole extraction process.  It went very well.  From start to finish, the whole process (from getting the supers out of the apiary to extracting and bottling) took about 12 hours.  We also took notes and learned several things that we will do differently next year. :)  The flavor this year is a lot different as well.  All of the fruit blossoms this year really changed the flavor of the honey.  We liked last year's honey, but this year's is our favorite so far!  Enjoy the pictures!

Daddy and I did the whole process together.

We tried to leave as many bees behind as we could.  

We harvested our honey in a commercial kitchen.  Thankfully, we did a pretty good job at not bringing bees with us.  The few bees that remained were easy to catch.

Daddy turning the extractor.

A look inside. (You can see the honey and wax that was spun out).

Bottling

Uncapping the frames.  At first, we were using an uncapping knife.  We soon found that dinner forks worked better!

Honey bears.  Such a rewarding sight after a year of work in the apiary!!!

Straining the honey (to get any remaining wax out).  We stirred it to help it go through the filter.

Me with my honey bears.

Saturday - work on the property

One Saturday, we had a big property project day.  Joshua Harris came over and helped daddy outside.  It was such a blessing and they got a lot done!!!  You should see the back woods that got cleared out -they look great!!!

Hauling branches

The branch pile

There was also a war with wasps.

Daddy and Joshua got a lot of them.  Thankfully no one got stung!

Clearing out the woods called for a burn pile too.  It was a mild day with no wind (rare around here :) so it worked out great.

The fire really got going!