Canning projects

We have made quite a bit of canning this year. I think it has been our biggest year yet. The above is homemade concord grape juice, 100 percent juice. Our dear neighbor told us about a church farm that lets you come and pick grapes for free, so we went and picked our 4 buckets, and came home and made 23 quarts. It tastes YUMMY!
This is also another year of MASSIVE apple production on both our apple trees. I made more than I can post, but we did red apple pie filling, dried apples, diced apples in the freezer....
both smooth and chunky red applesauce...
Our raspberries did AWESOME this year! I have tons in the freezer, and I finally had enough to make my own raspberry jam. YEAH!
This has nothing to do with canning, but conference weekend I made pumpkin cinnamon rolls with maple frosting. YUM!
Our neighbor let us take a cooler of peaches from his peach tree, so I did a batch of fresh peaches.
And thanks to a friend at the gym, I finally got enough tomatoes to do one batch of salsa. Granted, I also made my sister's HEAVENLY fresh salsa recipe.
I truly felt like a pioneer and thanks to Ryan for helping me out so much with it. It's definitely a challenge canning with two little kiddos in tow :)

2011 O'Berry pumpkin weigh-off

A couple of weeks ago, we had our first O'Berry pumpkin weigh-off with the pumpkins left growing in our garden. Collin's little "eebe" witnessed from afar.

Collin has LOVED watching the pumpkins grow, like his daddy.

Liam, well, he just crawled over to the bark. He thinks bark is ice cream by the way.

Starting the cuttings...

Liam staying still for one second. Actually, while posting this, it makes me want to have summer come back. Please.

The "big mac" pumpkins. They are quite large.

We had a record breaking year!

Don't you love how we color coordinate with the pumpkins :)

Happy carving everyone! I can't wait to make pumpkin puree out of these again!

Random Septemberness

Yes, you get a bunch of posts from September in October. My apparent "priority" of journaling blog posts is falling by the wayside. These are just some random pics from earlier in September. I loved the above picture of Liam, maybe because he was wearing shoes :)
How about those GORGEOUS raspberries? They did AWESOME in our garden this year. Maybe due to super hot September weather, but we could get a bowl like this about every 3-4 days. Heaven.
I know it appears I only take pictures of Liam in his BYU shirt. I don't, just post those ones :)

Playing with the bigger white pumpkin we grew in our garden.

A new post...kind of....finally!

I admit.... I have been a lame blogger for 4 months. Life got the best of me, our camera died, we couldn't figure out how to get pictures to post, and then....well, you get the picture. Life is still getting the best of me blogging, but I still have goals to try and do something once a week so friends/family can see our family, which basically means our two little boys.

The above picture of Liam was when he was almnost 6 months old in our pumpkin patch. He has to wear a helmet to help the flat spot on his head. More about him in a future post.

Collin turned three a few weeks ago.....and so did his attitude. I say that with some joking, but some not. I'm open to inspiration on how to get 3-year-olds to sleep through the night and listen...at all :) But honestly, he is such a cute fun little boy. He starts preschool in a few weeks, whoa....I feel old.

I know this is a lame post, but just wanted (since I mostly do this blog as my journal now) let you know how things are going at the O'Berry household.

The pumpkins are arriving

Every year since we have lived in our house, we have planted a pumpkin patch. Ryan is very good about growing them and watching over them, and now so does Collin. He LOVES to go out with the "pumpkin stick" and count the pumpkins (he can count to three now) and study them, and tell us which ones are orange. Though are pumpkins are smaller this year, we picked the first one and named him Gorbert and put him in Collin's room. He LOVES it!

I also am going to try and cook something with one of the pumpkins later this fall....

Canning, reading, pottying :)

So, apparently, I have totally decided to stop blogging for awhile....no, it's just with my free hour during nap time, I choose to do other things, but am finally doing a post.... This is Collin trying to look Harry Potter like. Yes, our family is Harry fans.... so good thing Collin was deciding to be one too.

At the park a month or so ago wearing matching shirts.

Hey, who knew I could can green beans from our garden? Hopefully these babies will taste good sometime in the bleak mid-winter.And yes, canned salsa wtih stuff from our garden as well. This salsa is so YUMMY and the woman in our ward who helped me can WHIP out 7 quarts in under 2 hours. She is superwoman.

And Collin now reads a zillion books a day....or wants to be read a zillion books a day. I don't mind. Every week I get the max from the library (30) and you would think this would take 3 weeks to read through? Nope, I have to hold him off to make the list go longer than a couple of days.

Usually he will say "mommy, read" but sometimes he will read on his own and it is really, really cute to me. Yeah for books!

Another thing Collin has discovered with new vigor....

the potty. And yes, for some reason the picture wouldn't turn, and no we aren't quite ready (well, I'm not) for potty training, and yes his legs still don't have any rolls, but yes, he loves the potty.

And I haven't scanned the pictures, but for those who haven't heard, Collin is going to have a baby brother in January! YEAH!

Gardening this summer

It's been fun (always actually) to see the garden grow this summer. This summer we planted eggplants for the first time, and though they struggled for a bit, they are going gangbusters. We have already picked probably 8 or so and still tons on there. Collin loves to carry in the food to mommy.

Our favorite way to make eggplant is eggplant "cake" for Collin or eggplant parmesan for the rest of us. Collin loves it and so do we!

This is the first year my green peppers are outgoing my tomatoes.... but I finally found enough red tomatoes to make this....the YUMMIEST fresh salsa in the entire world, courtesy of my sister's recipe. That's half the reason I want to do a garden each summer...this stuff. It is HEAVEN!

Yeah for gardens!

Riverton Poop

So, last weekend, some friends of ours had mentioned they were going to get "Riverton poop" for their garden and I was interested. They get it super cheap from the Equestrian Park in Riverton. These friends grew AMAZING corn so I'm always looking for some way to get ours to grow better. Three years and running and if we get more than 4 ears, it's a miracle. I asked my friend if we paid her she could bring us some....Last Saturday afternoon, they brought some and it was warm enough outside, the fam decided to watch Daddy work hard at moving it, smells and all.

Though Collin had to be trapped in his stroller (I did NOT want him playing in the Riverton poop) he quite enjoyed the movement.

We had to borrow a wheelbarrow from our other nice neighbors and Ryan went to work. You can see the "outside working hat" in full gear. He bought that on Cruise 2 on the beaches of Mexico. I thought it would never see the light of day, but ironically, it is a summer staple now.

Collin intently watching his milk, between watching the poop.

We got enough to cover all of our garden area and now it looks all fancy schmancy, despite smelling a bit :)

This made all of us VERY happy....the strawberry patch is starting to green up! YEAH!

Here's to hoping Riverton Poop will bring the O'Berry garden into its full glory! Thanks so much Cyndi and Ryan!

Apples, apples and more apples

Many of you know, we have two VERY large apple trees in our yard. Luckily they produce only every other year, and this year was a producer. The second summer we lived in our home they produced, but we had no clue what was going on, and so a lot of the apples went to waste, which we felt badly about. This year we determined to be better.
So, besides making 14 quarts of applesauce, and giving about 15 boxes just like the ones below away to friends and neighbors, it came down to the last box....apple pie filling and apple butter. Granted, I think we were a little too ambitious this year, we did the 14 quarts on a Tuesday night after I got home from work and Collin was none too happy about it. The same week, Thursday night, we did things a little differently. We learned our lesson and with the apple pie filling, we brought in a box for him to play with.
For about an hour, he was pretty happy, playing in the box, throwing out the apples. So, I decided to make apple butter (long story that probably won't get posted, but involved some pennies that just barely got unstuck from our pan) that I still have yet to eat a lot of....anyways, back to the canning.

Oh, mom is it okay if I eat some of these? Don't you love the guilty look on his face?

Oh, I can eat away? Thanks mom, already was!

Uh oh! I have decided enough of this box mom! I'm going for gymnastics instead.

This is the totally insane nasty kitchen while we were making the "apple concoctions". So, for two nights in the same week (granted, I know a lot of people this is a regularity at their house!) we had a totally out of control kitchen, late into the evening.

More apple nastiness. And how silly am I that I didn't even take a picture of all my apple goodness? Oh well...it is still sitting on my counter not put away, so maybe if I get ambitious before putting it away, I'll take one and post it. Nah, probably not.

However, tonight we had apple crisp for dessert, and YUM!

Summer is here!

Need I say more? I made this homemade salsa (with only half of the ingredients from the store)....YUM!