The Summer 2007 Harvest At Pure Water Hollow

Now that we have hit some of the gloomy days of October, I thought I would share some of the sunny pictures we took of the August, 2007 harvest at Pure Water Hollow.

Our garden went much better, overall, this year than last year. We did not have the problem with the deer or raccoon getting too much and most everything we planted grew well, despite the worst drought in our area in 20 years.

We missed our fruit, for the most part, this year. The drought did not hurt the fruit trees, but they did not fare well after the snow and freezing temperatures we had the beginning of April. We usually have plenty of peaches, cherries, wild plums, apples, and some pears, but this year they were quite scarce.

All in all, though, it was a wonderful summer for things growing at Pure Water Hollow. We are still getting multitudes of tomatoes and peppers even here in the middle of October! God has been good to us!

Last night we noticed that we still have dozens of huge peppers like these on the bushes even though we have picked and picked on them and most of the plants are blooming again!



Bell peppers…



Cayenne peppers…



We had many, many green beans. We actually had more than we were able to harvest! Next year we will do better getting them picked in a timely manner, hopefully!



Christina had great success in a garden she planted and tended all by herself. She grew green beans, tomatoes, peanuts, potatos, sunflowers, and lettuce. Her tomato plants are still blooming! Here she is with some of her green beans:



I liked these pictures of the children in the corn rows. We had wonderful corn this year! Last year the coons got more corn than we did, but God blessed us greatly this year:






In this next picture I tried to get all the sunflowers, but I couldn’t get them all in. They were giant and beautiful and they all produced abundant seeds! In the front of the picture you can see a bit of the tomato plants and green bean plants in front of the corn. The peppers are on the right, out of the picture:



Here we have a nice snack:





By the way, we had our own home grown pork chops that evening, too:



Our grapes did not do quite as well this year, but I don’t think it was because of the April freeze. They were in need of a good pruning, which I did not do this year. Still they were pretty, tasty, and very aromatic:




Our peach crop was taken by the April snow, but we did get one peach on one of the trees in the front yard, and one peach grew on one of the trees on the river bank. They both grew to a nice size and were good, but no peach cobblers this year:



I would like to conclude this summer-time visit with a pretty picture of Mrs. Zebra Swallowtail visiting Mrs. Sunflower:



God is good!

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1 comment

Miss Jocelyn on October 15, 2007 at 11:05 am

Hello!

I've selected this post for the 20th Homesteading Carnival!

http://www.homesteadblogger.com/Jocelyndixon/72920/

Stop by and, would you mind spreading the word on your blog?

Happy fall!!

Blessings!

Jocelyn

Spotlight On Matthew

Today on this homestead blog, I am featuring my eldest son, Matthew.

I am proud of him, as I am all my children, but this post is going to focus just on him. He has just turned 14 years old last week, although most people who meet him think he is much older. This is partly because of the mature manner he handles himself, and partly because of his near 6-foot frame. He is a dependable, hard working, man of character and integrity, with a gentle spirit and a desire to serve God. He is a wonderful son and brother and touches everyone he is around in many ways.

I am very blessed to be his dad!

Matthew has been instrumental this past year in helping to transform the Pure Water Hollow Homestead from just a nice piece of land in the hills next to the river, into a bonafide working farm with fences, pigs, and goats surrounded by the beauty of God’s creation. He has done a lot of hard work this past year, let me tell you!

Since his birthday last year, we have added goats, pigs and honeybees to our homestead to go along with our chickens. He has learned much about construction by building and repairing goat shelters, pig lots, and pig stys. He has learned much about fencing as we struggled to unroll many feet of woven wire for the goat lots and pig lots and driving the T-posts into the ground.

This past year he has also learned how to use a chain saw to cut down trees for posts or to clear trees out of the way of trails. He was already proficient at chopping down trees with his axe and hatchet, but the chain saw really speeds things along! He has also become a master at using weed eaters and lawn mowers and has learned much about other gas-powered engines such as his four-wheeler and our golf cart.

It has been amazing to watch his physical strength and endurance increase throughout the past year as he continually rose to the occasion for so many more and difficult farm chores that needed to be done every day. For almost a year now he has been regularly carrying 5 gallon buckets of water and buckets of food every day, and bales of straw, bales of hay, truck loads of milk crates full of milk, and 100 pound bags of feed on a weekly basis, as well as moving heavy slabs of wood and other material any given day. He can now do many push-ups and pull-ups, which I don’t think he could do last year at this time, and his upper body strength has improved to where he can climb all the way up most any tree or pole now.

What follows is a collection of my favorite pictures taken over the past year of Matthew’s life, which give a glimpse of the types of things Matthew has been into lately.

Let’s start with a picture of his 13th birthday from last year. He fooled the rest of us by having his "birthday cake" made out of meatloaf and potatoes. Lisa had it decorated like a real cake!


When licking the candle, he had to act like it was icing even though it did not taste as good! It even suprised him, a bit!:


Now for some shots of Matthew at work:










And at play:








How about at rest, after working and playing so hard:




Some moments with the animals were captured on film:








And here are some nice looking general pictures of Matthew:








Here is a father son picture taken 11 months ago:


And here is a father son picture taken yesterday:


One of our heights seem to have changed a bit during the past 11 months!

I may come back to this post with a picture of Matthew’s cake for his 14th birthday. Around his birthday, I came down with a terrible stomach virus and passed it on to Simon and Christina and a bit to Lisa. We have had a rough couple of weeks. Matthew is such a nice son and brother that he did not want to celebrate with cake and ice cream until his family could enjoy it with him, so we have yet to sing "Happy Birthday" and have cake and ice cream! We are planning on doing it tonight, so…

Happy Birthday, Matthew!

We love you!!

What a wonderful past year the Lord has blessed you with and the upcoming year is sure to be full of many new adventures that we can look forward to and experience together!