A week in a day

So a few days ago Kathy from Its About Time did some baking and I was inspired. Last fall I made 10 Quarts of Apple Pie Filling (we live on an orchard after all) and so I decided to make a pie. The recipe I used allowed me to make 1 pie (I only have 1 pie plate) and 12 mini apple pies. The 8 serving recipe gives you enough for the base (9 inch pie) and you could make a strip top for the pie but not a full top, I had doubled this recipe to get 1 pie with full top and 12 mini's.

Round 1

We sent 4 mini's home with Stacey, 2 went to our neighbour next door and the big pie went to our landlords which didn't leave much for us. The pie crust recipe I found for that was sooo flaky and delicious that I decided to make more...

Hummers are happy

At Dollarama the other day I saw these hummingbird feeders, I have had it in my head to have 5 strung across the deck but they are almost $20 each so I haven't done it yet. But at Dollarama I was able to get the extra 4 I needed for $3 and yes they are plastic but BPA free.

The birds finally found the feeder but then we were overly inundated with birds and I was concerned for our BBQ cover so I moved it to the garlic box below, we had a hook to hang it but our drill has died...

1st pie of round 2... I made a 6x batch this time... this one also went to Stacey and Jon. The recipe calls for it to sit 4 hours or overnight so I overnighted it.

I'm calling her Martha since I just shipped out Mabel

I was waiting for an email notification that the new machine had shipped but yesterday morning a woman was at the backdoor with my new machine. So today I will be doing some sewing finally. Our front curtains are more than a little saggy because they are so long and it has been driving me nuts.

2nd pie of round 2 and 37 mini pies.

The feeder is hung

Stacey came to pick up her pie and brought us her drill so we could hang the bird feeder. We can clearly see the feeder (there are birds out there as I type this) from our dining room window. I'm sure they appreciate the feeder with everything covered in snow this morning.

As you can see from the bird feeder picture, it snowed last night and continues actually... they are calling for 9 inches although again - I expect that will be in higher elevations than we are.

The broccoli microgreens I planted on Tuesday are coming along very nicely. They have a 2 week grow period before you can harvest them so it won't be long now. The other tray I did on Tuesday has a few sprouts coming through, mostly leeks and red onions.

Dog fight overhead and Hummingbird Heaven

Our house operates on a cistern (massive concrete water container in basement), as such our water is collected from rainfall which runs down the roof (house, woodshed, cabin and carport) into the gutters and is funnelled into the cistern to provide the house with water for daily life. 

On Wednesday I cleaned out the gutters on the wood shed and yesterday the gutters on the carport of the cabin next door, both were quite blocked with crud which would obviously have to absorb the water before allowing it to trickle through into the gutters and a decent amount of our precious water would then simply evaporate before getting to the gutter. The main house and the cabin roofs themselves are just too high for me to contend with, if we owned the home I'd bother but as its not ours I'm just not going there.

Not the worst one, but the only gutter I got a picture of.

Basking in the shade... typical men.

Wood shed is filling in.

View of our place from the cabin.

When we moved in the peaches looked like this.

Now they look like this.

Some interesting ships sail by here so I think I'll create a photo collection of them.

(Looks Titanic-ish)

Yesterday we had Eagles and Buzzards fighting over our heads. The buzzards had a significant amount of feathers missing from their backsides - the eagles were clearly winning. One older and one younger eagle (perhaps it was training day). You can see the missing plumage (lower bird) in this picture if you look closely.

They flew around very close - we'd never seen an eagle in flight within 20 feet before. Beautiful.

Second unusual ship. Reminded us of an old Japanese ship (name escapes me).

I am going to show before and after pics when I get a better shot with sunlight... supposed to rain all week but I'll watch for a moment. Meanwhile, the wood pile is stored.

All the wood is put away and there is still room for our garden tools.

The grape vine was overgrowing the upper deck in the front of the house, the landlord said we could cut it out but we felt so guilty about it that we are trying to keep them alive... Absolutely no clue if this is doable but we had to try. I know from an app that this is an invasive species so we are hoping that they will take if we keep them saturated for a few days. They are clearly not doing well right now but they appear to still be salvageable. We will see. 

Special treat. 

There are dozens of Hummingbirds around here and they love the feeders the neighbour has on the cottage. They will drink my feeder but not to the extend they do his, I'll ask him today what his secret ingredient is.