Monday Catching up

A lot of things get disrupted when Daddy goes on National Guard orders. With all the things that fall behind when Mommy and Daddy are both here, it is inevitable that with one of us gone for an extended period, things will fall apart a little. Honestly, if it weren’t for Uncle Adam, we could not homestead. With National Guard and other occasional work trips, there is just no way we could manage it.

When we get back from trips, there is always a cleanup and recovery period that takes a few days, sometimes longer. In this case, in addition to the usual chores that keep the house and farm running, and the schooling, we also ran into an issue that cost us most of our pumpkin and some of our squash. We store the squash on the back porch, where the temperature is cool, but usually not too cool, and the humidity is high, but usually not too high. But in the week of the flooding, with the combination of a hard frost, and then several days of continuous dampness, most of our sugar pumpkins ended up molding, and had to be fed to the pigs. The Georgia candy roaster squashes were also starting to show some spots. So bright and early Monday morning we pulled the remaining squashes and pumpkins inside and began to process them.

But the Christmas cookie baking has also fallen behind, especially Mommy’s favorite Braetzli. So while the squash was steaming in batches, we whipped up some braetzli dough.

This is a team effort. We need to make sure that all the “dredients” are fresh and tasty…

Winnie thinks everything is yummy, so we had to bring in an impartial witness.

Evie also thought it was yummy. So that’s good.

We ran out of alfalfa hay while Daddy was gone so we took a quick trip down to the hay store. With our new old truck, we don’t even need to take the trailer, we can put half a ton of hay right in the bed of the truck.

This lady happened to be there with her pony named Taco, and gave the two little ones a quick ride around the parking lot in her pony cart, which the kids loved.

Now we have alfalfa and dry hay, hopefully enough to keep the animals in good condition until spring.

Back to the house, continuing to steam the squash, a new batch every hour and a half or so.

Then we finished the squash and moved on to the pumpkins.

We noticed that Seppi was not acting himself. Instead of running around like a tornado with a gravelly alto voice, he was lying silently on the couch, watching his sisters play.

Turns out he had hand foot mouth disease too. His feet had bumps and ulcers so he didn’t want to walk, and his tongue had ulcers so he didn’t want to eat or talk. Poor Seppi.

Squash continues on with only Ellie and Winnie to help.

Two bags of pumpkin, six bags of squash.