Food, Friends and Hobby Farming

Lots of grape vines on the property. It's been fun (and very therapeutic) doing a little bit of gathering.

The old owner left a juicer behind, so we got to try it out on a few of the grapes we harvested. Very yummy, and even better if you mix it up with a few other juices. Also discovered an apple tree as well, and made a small amount of apple juice from the few apples that were left. 

A PG friend game to visit while they were down visiting family, and soon Hazel was showing them around the property. I'm very glad that Hazel has adjusted so well so far (way better then I ever expected her too). 

In the process of trying to decide which grape vines should stay and which could go. We (Oma/Mom and me) decided to pick a laundry basket of grapes together and try make grape juice by boiling the grapes and mashing them rather then the little juicer. We probably would have been able to process them all had we stuck to one laundry basket, but I brought one and Oma brought one and soon they were both full! We learned that de-stemming grapes is very time consuming, but also made 3 very large juice jugs full of yummy grape juice that we got to share over the few family events happening that weekend. (we did run out of time though and only made it though about half of each of our baskets)

Family from Smithers was down for a visit, Hazel had not seen them before (at least not old enough to remember). But she warmed up much quicker then expected despite the large amount of people around and really seemed to have a good time. 

Hazel has also grown a lot during and after the move, so we went to the shop to find some Sunday boots that would fit. And what did we find tucked in one of those boots? a long lost favorite little pink bear!

Tired of renos and sorting items for the day, but still wanting to spend time on our property, we started clearing away the grape vines from the shop's back door. 

Hazel was content making flower juice. I love when she just plays and makes things with what she finds in the yard!

Much better! Now I can walk into the shop without ducking under grape vines and walking into as many spider webs!

Playing on a trampoline at a friends house, though we didn't maintain that much contact over the years we had see each other once and while. It was nice to have a catch up visit and see our two "slow warm" girls slowly warm up and play together. 

This is Dad/Opa's hobby barn. A wonderful place to head to every morning!

It has a nice spot inside where you can watch the chickens. There are a few other pens as well with different stages of meat birds too. 

Hazel and Jade really enjoy collecting eggs when they don't need to walk through 90-100 chickens to get to them. 

So far our cats are still sticking around.

And Custard had 5 kittens that we found behind the hay bales (poor cat must have been moved pregnant). I was surprised that they are all so similar looking, so far all the kittens litters have had more variety in coloring.  

Quite a few years ago Dad/Opa gave me a sign that said "Home is where the barn is" with a horse head on it. Though there are not any horses in this barn a lot of concepts are the same. There are animals that need to be cared for and fed, routine chores, the smell of feed and hay, a place to go that just makes you relax as soon as you walk though the doors. 

Puppy Time

The puppies have grown quickly! Each Wednesday we would go check on them with Hazel's friend which just made me really pay attention to how much they change every week.

Jade thought the puppies were great until she figured out they were a bit scratchy. She would often pant if we opened the outside door or were talking about the puppies inside.

Puppy Social!

The "sit with the puppies" stage was really well enjoyed. A little sad that it is over, but we are learning new ways to play with them. 

Trying to take picture of puppies and accurately note male and female proved to be more of a challenge than I thought. This was round three :P

Nova needed a break from the puppies as I think she is trying to wean them, so we let her in the back door for a bit. I believe the girls were playing off and on deck which is why Jade is still bundled up. 

I think Jade was thrilled to have a tired Nova to play with, often when Jade walks up Nova just walks away. 

Hazel joined in the fun later and made sure the tired Nova was nice a cozy. 

I was very surprised how long Nova put up with the girls and their play, the back door was open enough she could have left if she wanted to.

Tug of war with one puppy proved to be quite fun...

Tug of war with 3 or 4 puppies was a bit much 😅

Took the puppies a little farther out this time, and they really enjoyed playing in the long dry matted grass.

This puppy has been nicknamed "Bandana" as she was a white triangle on the back of her neck, she is one of the most playful and social of the puppies and gets played with a lot. After lots of running she was ready for some snuggles which was really cute. 

This is the puppy we decided to keep! Not that we really want two dogs, but this is our best chance to try and see. This guy is one of the calmer and gentler puppies, so we thought we would give him a try. Any name suggestions?

 

Enjoying Home

Two sleeping girls in the middle of the afternoon and I had to decide whether to take a nap with them, clean the house or try catch up on blogging, blogging won 😊I am very behind on my blog and am missing most of the summer, rather then try and sort though a whole summer with of pictures I decided get past my writers block and just continue from my last post. Hopefully I can get to all those missed memories soon!

Had Grandma Wendy over for a visit, which has been very special. We both don't have much family close by so it has been neat to be part of each others lives. 

Hazel and her beloved kittens. The whole story on that later on. 

Very much enjoying our big playpen, they both come in rather sandy, but they play so nice!

Having kitten friends are extra motivation for Hazel to play outside

We had a big Thanksgiving dinner at the Voorhorts on Monday evening with the church family, and a little Thanksgiving dinner with W&A on Tuesday evening. We have finally stopped being down in the valley at opposite times and were able to get together which was really lovely!

Went outside for a fire after dinner, burn bans are finally off and Jared was itching to get though the burn pile that had to wait all summer. The sparks with tails was so fun to watch.

Hazel can now crack, mix and scramble her own scrambled eggs. A good skill for a chicken farmers daughter 😊

Hazel's kittens. 

Pirate surprised us with having another litter early this fall! She ending up having them in the neighbors wood pile, I guess our was feeling a little over crowded.... When the neighbors found them they dug them out of their wood pile and returned them to us, we weren't sure what we were going to do with them as we already had lots of cats, but Hazel was instantly attached and Pirate has continued to let us play with them so they got to stick around. We put them in box Jared's shop for the first while hoping that Pirate wouldn't hid them from us in there, which worked great until they were able to get out of the box and explore and one of them fell into a oil pan 😬Jared ending up finding it soon enough and we got to see is dawn soap takes oil off of kittens as well as it get oil off of ducks. The kitten did survive, we named it Oliee, it is the fluffy kitten in the picture. The two other grey ones are Custard and Pudding, they look very similar beside have opposite long socks. The striped on with the white paw Jared name Tiger. 

Once Oliee was mostly dried off and moving around we return it back to Pirate who promptly moved all the kittens to our wood shed. I was thinking that was going to be the last we saw of the kittens, but the next morning Oliee was out and about and to Hazels delight was happy to follow any pair of boots around. (Hopefully in my catch up I can find the video of that). Oliee is now the most loved kitten and the first one Hazel goes looking for when we are outside. 

Hazel wanted two pig tails, so I tried it with all her hair this time, which I though looked cute. When I showed Hazel the finished product she happily announced "I look like a goat, meeehhh meeehh!" 😅 After that I couldn't quite un see it. 

Enjoying the variety of the fall weather, we got a lot of hail one afternoon. Hazel had fun putting it in a bowl, bringing it into the house and making hail soup with her toy dishes. 

One of Hazel's favorite things is to match Jade. So when there was two owl toques in the winter clothes bin she was thrilled!

Found a new fridge! We had been looking since we got home from our late September trip as the freezer had stopped working when we were gone.... even though it did start working again when we got home I didn't quite trust it. In my mind we just needed to pick up a fridge, so a 6:00 pick up time was fine, but getting the fridge into the house, getting the old one empty and then out and then setting up the new one while trying to put two kids to bed and put the food back into the fridge before it thawed out turned out to be quite the task! But the new fridge has been working well and the old one is making its way to the barn as another egg fridge. 

Setting up the church basement for a potluck, our first once since the renos started last fall. Lots of TLC was added in the previous weeks which made for a very cozy environment. 

Home made tortillas, yum!!!

Our weekends worth of eggs to wash. We typically wash our eggs every day, but Sunday, and then end up washing Sundays (and sometimes Saturdays) eggs on Monday. Washing and packing eggs takes us about 15-20 minutes a day and about 30- 50 minutes on a Monday depending on how behind we are and how much Hazel likes to help. It has become quite the efficient task, and very rewarding! 

Flokstra enterprises also officially has a Facebook page to keep our regular customer notified. Not sure how many are actually on it... but that's the idea. 

Feeding the kittens some warm soft food on a crisp morning. 

I hung some lights on the clothes line so we could see the food table when we hosted a Pineview families fire one evening. They looked stunning in the sunshine and blue sky. 

A frosted plant the caught my eye. 

Set up this crate for a few chickens who were getting pecked at to much, hopefully they will heal up and we can put them back with the rest. 

Climbing on the tires with Hazel. 

Breakfast Pizza for dinner as we celebrated a whole month of eggs sales at full production, 200+ dozen sold in a month.  

Hazel and Oliee

We got a little bit of snow on Saturday night and Hazel was outside right away on Sunday morning!