Let's see, where were we?

Husband and I have been going over our Master Plan slowly. We are trying to capture just what we hope to accomplish with our lives and our family. A mission statement, if you will. And since I am in the midst of reading The Letters of John and Abigail Adams, who happen to be personal heroes of mine, I'm sure you'll be seeing more quotes on here from them, such as this one:

Let us, therefore, my dear partner, from that affection which we feel for our lovely babes, apply ourselves, by every way we can, to the cultivation of our farm. Let frugality and industry be our virtues, if they are not of any others. And above all cares of this life, let our ardent anxiety be to mould the minds and manners of our children. Let us teach them not only to do virtuously, but to excel. To excel, they must be taught to be steady, active, and industrious.

--John Adams, 29 June 1774

I found that this quote captured much of what I wanted to say myself, so I stole it to put into our Master Plan.

We picked apples yesterday, and are going to be making apple sauce and apple butter, along with the requisite pies and bear claws and all those fun things. We'll be canning the sauce and butter, to go along with our raspberry and blackberry jams we've already made. Oh, and the canned peaches :). They are such a lovely color, we picked the white variety rather than the yellow. Husband made a peach blush pie, which is a peach pie with raspberry syrup inside.

The next couple of weeks will be filled with getting garden beds made, spreading compost, hopefully having a few trees taken down; basically getting ready for next spring. Since we did not plant this year, we've been going to farmers' markets around town. My favorite so far is the one on South Main in Worcester. We bought squashes and potatoes, scallions, little tomatoes, honey, beans, plums, pears...I know there was more. Oh, yes, HUGE cucumbers. I love knowing where my food comes from. I like shaking the hand of the guy who actually picked the potato I'm going to eat for dinner.