Good evening folks. We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, with lots of good things to eat. Lori here from McDowell County West Virginia. So, how about this weather! It’s a beautiful spring we are having this winter, at least until Friday when it is supposed to get cold and possibly snow a bit.
Looks like I will be using pictures from the internet this time since none of my electronics want to cooperate with me, which isn’t really surprising since everything else wants to tear up too.

Since last time I posted, we had to replace the glass on one of our cold frames. Not a day after I shared that with y’all, the winds came and blew the window off one of the dang things. We fixed it back with clear plastic and duct tape. Take that Mother Nature! The good thing though is that the beets that we planted in them are doing amazingly well.

We had a huge carrot harvest that the rabbits missed, I think there were 4 left; not 4 pecks or bushels or pounds, just 4. We had a hand full of huge radishes, and over a bushel of rutabagas as well. The rabbits did finish off the Brussel sprouts.

We are lining up our participants for next year, and have ordered a whole bunch of seed catalogs. We have been planning our seed starting so we can jump right into it when the time comes. We saved thousands of seeds this year and are getting them package up for our participants. Those little silica packs are the greatest thing ever for keeping the moisture out of the seeds.

We were recently gifted an amazing wood cook stove, so we will be turning the gazebo into an out door canning kitchen. It already has water and electricity run to it, we just need to close it in then get it inspected and approved as an extension of our regular commercial kitchen. This is very exciting for us because it won’t cost anything to get it set up. We already have everything we need, and it will be considerably cooler doing canning in there as apposed to our windowless kitchen. The only downfall would be that it won’t be a gazebo anymore. We are hoping the winter will be mild enough that we can work on it during this slow time and have it ready for next season. If it doesn’t stay mild, we have a promise from a work group to help get it done this spring.

I’m sure there are things that I am forgetting, but it’s been one of those days. We were going to Bluefield today for office supplies and animal feed; and our car dropped its guts on Route 52. The sub-frame, and motor fell down to the road, it was hemorrhaging transmission fluid everywhere, the radiator is damaged, the front passenger tire is in the wrong dang place and the steering wheel spins freely. The tow truck took it to a garage for us and they said they have never seen anything like that before. When we break something, we don’t play. No one was hurt thankfully. Good thing we had a Chevrolet for back up, the chickens, goats and pigs got their feed.

Until next time:
We at HEP hope you all have a wonderful Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukah, or Yule, and a great New Year.