Canning 101

Okay, so I copied that title from The Pioneer Woman. She had a lovely description of canning strawberry jam. I, too, have been busy canning. Last week, we canned the rest of the tomatoes. Of course, I didn't bother taking pictures. It was all I could do to manage the canning. If you want to see lovely pictures of canning, click on the title "Canning 101," but instead of strawberries and sugar imagine tomatoes and lemon juice.


The garden has pretty much come to an end for the year, so we let the chickens go into the garden to play and eat whatever they wanted, bugs mostly.


Here's an example of one of the bugs that the chickens enjoyed. We pulled this huge caterpillar off one of the tomato plants. The chickens loved it!



I'm glad we had the garden and have enjoyed the delicious vegetables, but I'm ready for a break.

Lizard poop and other thoughts.

Today's blog will be a mishmash of various events from this week.

Today while I was walking outside I found this lizard poop. It was about an inch long, so this was obviously from a large lizard. You can see a crack in the poop. I had already broken it open before I thought to get my camera. Anyway, this poop was near an ant hill. In the past, we have seen lizards just sitting by the trail of ants and picking them off one by one as they walk by.




And as you can see, the poop is full of ant carcasses.










I've been asked to post pictures of the dogs, but their normal pose is sleeping, which is not very interesting. I was able to get them playing a couple days ago, but every time I got the camera out they would stop what they were doing and come over to me.

So this is the best I could do from far away and the dogs moving around quite a bit. I thought this was interesting because Findlay is actually the one chewing on Chani (usually it's the other way around). Now, just imagine them chewing on each other and making the Wookie noise from Star Wars for the full effect.


Last, but not least, one of the chickens has started jumping on our shoulders whenever we squat down. When we stand up, she won't jump off. She just kind of arranges herself so that she can go for a ride while we walk around. It can be kind of painful when she digs her "talons" into your shoulders for balance, and you do have to either wear glasses or not look directly at her. She tends to want to peck at your eyes.