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Apricot Fruit Leather
So, I guess I am a little particular about my fruit leather. Partly because my kids are. I mean, what is the point of making fruit leather if my kids won’t eat it? I have posted about making Pear fruit leather. My pear fruit leather almost always turns out the way we like it. Which is chewy and kind of thick. The taste is never really a problem for me. If it tastes good before you dry it it will taste good after. The problem comes in the texture. I have had fruit leather that turns out more like paper in texture and it just isn’t as enjoyable to eat.…
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Garden Watering System
My husband is very good at solving problems. He is always innovating to make things work better in our home and garden. This year he had some great ideas for our watering system in the garden. There is a lot to it and I mostly just want to document that it happened. If you would like more details I will happily write more. Otherwise, I am just going to let the pictures do the talking. Here in this great state of Utah we don’t get enough rain to keep our plants growing so we have to devise ways to get water to our plants. In the past we have used…
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Cabin Fever -Fireplace
I have already posted that we have been making some improvements in our living space. If you haven’t seen my other post about the shelf you can check it out here. The other thing we wanted to improve was the fireplace. We didn’t hate it but it was just a little too interesting for our taste. Here is what it looked like: Another strange thing about it is that it didn’t have a mantle, just a little “shrine” (for lack of a better word) above it. We filled in the tiles with mud and sanded them to make it look like one piece. We plan to paint it white with…
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Cabin Fever -Shelf
Winter is way too long. We always get a little restless this time of year. So we decided to do some home improvements. Not a lot because this is not our house yet. Don’t worry everything we did was approved by grandma. From what I understand, this used to be a doorway that they filled with a shelf. This was a somewhat small project but we feel like it made a really big difference in the feel of the living room. We are really happy with the change. Stay tuned for what else we updated.
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Cabin Fever -Fireplace
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Black Raspberry Jam
When our fruit starts to ripen it seems like it is all we can do to keep up with the harvest. To give myself a little breathing room I have discovered that freezing raspberries is a big time saver. When my raspberries are ripe I try to get out and pick them every morning. That is the way to get the raspberries at their peak of freshness. I don’t always have enough raspberries in a single day to make much jam with. And the times I have tried to save up two days worth, the first day’s pick either gets soggy or it gets eaten, which isn’t necessarily a bad…
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Why I Prune Fruit Trees
If you have a fruit tree, you should prune it. I have learned this through personal experience. The first time we pruned my grandparents trees we had a bunch of family come and help. We were only planning on staying for one semester (ha ha, so much for plans) and it had been a few years since the trees had been pruned. I figured I would learn a lot. I was totally shocked when my family members started asking my opinion on which branches to cut. I quickly realized how clueless I really was. When we didn’t end up moving out at the end of the semester I decided I…
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Turning Compost
One of the things we do during the winter to make our garden better is to keep a compost pile. My husband is the one who really gets credit for this. I am just along for the ride, but I am learning a lot. I have posted about compost before, so I won’t go into detail about how we get the compost pile going. Just read the other post if you want to know more. This month we have turned it a couple of times, and I got some really great pictures that I wanted to show you. After we finished turning it. (Yes, I actually took a turn pitching…
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Starting Seeds Inside
Last week, February 6th, We woke up to a foot of snow on the ground. And yet, we thought it would be a good idea to start our seeds. A little crazy. But, it also gives me hope that the dark cold days will end at some point. We decided to try planting our own starts again this year because we have a few varieties of plants that we really liked and we are not sure if they will be available at the nurseries near us. By the time we find out, it would be too late. Two years ago we found a variation of the Santa Fe pepper that…
