Chicks and Apple Pectin~

I had the camera outside with me today and thought I'd take a picture of our little chicks and their mother. They didn't let me get real close, so I had to zoom in to get this picture before they all ran away...

Here are the resulting jars of Apple Pectin from my experiment yesterday. It would have been nice to have had smaller jars, as you only need to use 2/3 cup of the pectin per batch of jam, but I couldn't find any lids for the smaller jars we had... I had fun testing the pectin to see if it would gel or not! It said in the on-line article I read that, to test it, you just put a spoonful of cold pectin into a small amount of rubbing alcohol and see how well it gels together into a large clump. I had to boil it down a couple times until it stuck together and I'm still not sure if it's thick enough, so I'll have to experiment with it when I have something to make jam or jelly out of!

Our guys stacked hay bales in one of our alfalfa fields this afternoon. Andrew loaded bales onto the white truck that Jacob was driving and then they took the bales over to the pile and dumped them. My dad then stacked them and, while waiting for more bales, he'd go row some round bales. The round bales are from the buffer-zone--meaning they can't be sold as Organic hay, as they were with-in so many feet of the neighbor's non-organic field.

Mother and I worked on things in the house a while this afternoon. I did venture out and mowed the lawn across the driveway... It was the first time I had mowed with the swing-set being there, so it was a little more difficult than usual. I wound the swings around the posts as much as possible so that they'd be out of my way and it worked pretty well.

Well, it's almost family prayer time, so I'd best post this and head out to the living room. My dad is still baling straw in the neighbor's field, but we're not sure when he'll get home, so we're heading for bed... Sleep well everyone!

(PS. Does anyone know how to make a computer stop taking spaces out of where they are and scrunching paragraphs together into one big mess?)