Sauerkraut is bully*

Well, it's official: I just put the last jar of sauerkraut into the canner, thus completing this year's food preservation. Admittedly, I should be using the remainder of naptime to clean the kitchen, but instead, I thought I'd write a little update on what we've been doing this past month.

This guy's busier than ever, walking over to investigate
and explore everything he comes across

While I went down to help my parents with a painting project, Tres and Silas bought 100 pounds of apples. The following weekend, we (S-L-O-W-L-Y) made them into 31 quarts of applesauce. We went with McIntoshes again, as we were really happy with the sauce we made from them last year. As usual, our handy dandy slicer/peeler was worth its weight in gold (even if we have use a clamp to attach it to the table) and I discovered that, since the Macs are so soft, we could grind them without an initial cooking. Despite our time saving, it still took us the better half of the day to get through them all. I'm excited for a winter's worth of delicious applesauce, though. 

75 of our 100 pounds

That same weekend, Tres shredded enough cabbages to fill his birthday crock with this year's batch of sauerkraut. It fermented for about three weeks before today's aforementioned canning.

Don't mind the small photo bomber on the left

There are some new babies around here these days too. A few weeks ago, we received 25 Plymouth Barred Rock chicks from the hatchery. They've been hanging out in a cozy box in the shop, Tres has sold 11 thus far, and we're hoping to end up with a flock of 8 (9 on the outside) hens ourselves. Silas has been very excited about the new arrivals and likes to watch them, while hooting loudly - they might not be quite as excited about him . . .

These are photos I took a few days after they arrived - 

they're in full on gangly awkward mode these days

They have plenty of room, they're just not huge fans of the camera

* Found this while googling Sauerkraut - oh, you Nova Scotians.