When in farm country...

When we lived on the East Coast last year, we tried to take advantage of access to historical sites and cultural experiences to the best of our ability. Now that we've moved on to the slower paced life of small town Rochester, Minnesota, we figured we had best make the most of the experiences that farm country has to offer as well. And so, ever since the berry season opened in early July, we've been hitting every berry farm, orchard, vineyard, and farmer's market we could find. Consequently, we have canned, frozen, dried, and eaten an insane amount of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, peaches, apples, grapes, and tomatoes. It has been a fun way to experience this beautiful farm country while we re-build up our family food storage.

Here are a few photos of our adventures in farm country.

First off, the berry patch. We found a little family farm not too far from our house where they had the most delicious strawberries and raspberries to pick. (Blueberries don't grow locally so we had to order a box from a Wisconsin farmer.) We invited the Andersen's to join us for the fun and set out for the day. Here are Josh, Spencer, Abbie, and Maddie standing in front of the strawberry patch with the beautiful farmland and even a lake in the background.



And here's baby Emmie getting her fill of the juicy, ripe strawberries. We were super lucky because the strawberries were at the end of their picking season and the owners of the patch said we could pick all we could eat and carry for free!



After picking and eating strawberries, we made our way over to the raspberry bushes,





and soon we had a box full of delicious raspberries as well.



These two boxes of fruit, as well as the box of blueberries we ordered, were soon either made into jam (five jars of each), frozen for muffins, fruit smoothies and snack-time, or simply eaten up. We will definitely be back to this farm again next year.

A few weeks after visiting the berry patch, our next shipment of fruit arrived, this time a bushel of fresh Amish peaches. Again our house was busy with canning, freezing and eating fresh, flavorful fruit. We made another five jars of jam, canned fourteen jars of sliced peaches in mild syrup, froze numerous bags of fruit, and made ourselves fat on bowl after bowl of rich and creamy peaches and cream, not to mention a peach cobbler or two. Even though we made jam with the berries, this was the kids first experience with canning--and they absolutely loved it. Somehow I managed to miss getting a picture of Maddi and Spencer perched at the sink peeling our peaches. They must have sat there for at least an hour and a half, peeling and peeling and peeling the 48 pounds of peaches we bought. And they didn't complain for a minute. A few days later I even heard Spencer and Maddi busy cooking, peeling, and canning more play peaches down in their little toy kitchen. The episode just made me smile.

Not long after our peaches were gone, it was time again to gather fruit and store it up against the season. This time the fruit of choice was home grown HoneyCrisp apples. We were lucky to find another local farmer who had them in his orchard. Since we were talking about apples in our preschool class, I decided to organize a field trip out to the orchard so that the kids could enjoy an outing that would bring our discussions to life. Here are the little preschoolers (as well as some of their siblings) anxious to get out into the orchard.



Maddi, Emmie, and Spencer on the orchard hayride,



and hard at work picking the delicious apples.



Here's our littlest love testing a big, red apple. Now I'm not the biggest apple fan, but these apples were GOOD! We ate so many apples while we were there, not to mention grapes over in the farmer's vineyard, that we didn't even need lunch that afternoon.



We also brought home thirty pounds of apples to eat, dry, and make into fresh applesauce. Here is Emmie helping me wash some apples so that we could make applesauce with the preschool kids.



And here are all three of the kids taking turns sending the apples through our apple-peeler-corer-slicer so that we could layer them in the dehydrator. In addition to fresh and dried apples, we were also lucky enough to have fresh apple dumplings, apple cobbler, and apple pie during our Hoskins Family Apple Days. If an apple a day really does keep the doctor away, we ought to be set for the rest of our lives!!



After cleaning up our apple festivities, we thought we would be done storing up fruit for this season; however, some friends brought us a big bag of homegrown tomatoes and we couldn't let them go to waste. So, another session of cooking, peeling, slicing and dicing yielded another ten jars of ripe red food storage.



And another batch of family fun as we worked and talked about following the prophet's counsel. It's truly amazing how these little children just love to learn the gospel truths and how much even in their childhood they have the desire to do what is right. Throughout this whole process, I have also been truly amazed at how helpful even very young children can be. These kids worked so hard to help us prepare all of the food we stored.



And as we layed out several of the cans and containers for a final photo, you could see how proud and pleased they were with our results. Well, what can I say, Nick and I were pretty pleased too.