At the moment I have a bricklayer working on the rear end of my stable. He is prepping for the carpenter to put in some new doors and windows. One of the doors had all but disintegrated and the other wasn't too hot either. The windows were perhaps not too bad - but plexi instead of real glass.
The brickwork isn't finished with this. Around the beginning of September the bricklayer will be back to remove crumbling mortar and refinish the walls on the outside (bar the parts which got repaired some years ago). I know this is necessary work, but it does mean unforeseen expenses for this year, not to mention a lot of mess and noise and blokes running around all day.
So perhaps I should focus on some of the good parts. Friday I had my parents around to help harvest my cherries. There was rain on the horizon, and ripe or almost ripe cherries do not handle large rainfalls well. They start to rip open and then all the insects get ready for a party. We managed to get over 11 kgs of cherries picked. Which was pretty good. There were still a good number of kilos left, perhaps another ten or so more, but the rain has been playing merry havoc, and there's no more cherry harvesting this year.
And then there's the whole matter of what you do with 11 kgs of cherries. By the time we had finished picking I had already stuffed myself full of them, so I wasn't in the mood for eating any as such.
Instead I used three kilos for making cherry mush, as I call it. Basically applesauce, just made with cherries and mashed through a sieve. Which makes for good exercise. And a lot of hard work. Mum took a few kilos home, and I gave another to a friend. And the rest got tossed in the steam juicer, or Mehu Maija as we call it, and turned into cherry juice. I didn't bother using any sugar at all - last year mum put in some and made it almost too sweet. At the moment I still have some left in the juicer, and some mush in the fridge, but the rest is now in the freezer.
This of course leads me on to another of the joys, or is it woes, of homesteading. Freezer space. Which I am running short on now. And this is before apple season has started. And mum has now informed me that she has ordered a whole lamb from a mutual friend. I think I'm going to have to get that second freezer I've been talking about this coming month. Which will provide me a few more headaches and decisions; where should I put it, which freezer do I actually want, another bill to pay.
And in spite of these challenges and issues which need taking care of, I wouldn't want to pack up and move into a more urban house. I may not always find it amusing to have to deal with these things, but the pride and joy and sense of fulfillment which comes of eating things which I have grown myself keeps me on. I may never get to being totally self-sufficient, but that's okay too. At least I am trying. And not just dreaming about it.
I wish I had a picture of the cake mum made Sunday. She baked the cake part using my eggs, and then the fruit in it was partly from my garden, and partly from theirs. Cherries, raspberries, red currants, white red currants, black currants. There were a few store-bought strawberries too. And the flour, sugar, and creme fraiche/sour cream were bought too. But half of the ingredients for that cake were home-grown. I'm afraid I just gobbled up my part of it before taking pics. Too tasty to bother with that.
(And in case you are curious - I have now succeeded in getting pics from my phone onto my blog - but it isn't as smoothly as I suspect it could be. I will be experimenting more. But this is a step forward from last.)
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