I really enjoy participating in the Weekly Photo Challenges that WordPress hosts.  I can’t usually come up with a picture to add to the mix and I am certainly inferior to the talented photographers that participate, but I do love taking pictures and connecting with other people from all over the world through these challenges when I can produce something.

This week’s photo challenge was “Containers.”

The definition of contain is “to hold or include, to have capacity for, to keep under proper control, or to prevent or limit the expansion of something.”

On Friday, the day when a new Photo Challenge is released, I could think of nothing around me to photograph to submit. When today rolled around, however, my eyes were opened to so many containers.  Maybe being “contained” all day in the house with the kids is good for my creative brain!

Here’s what I came up with:

This is our chicken coop that Jason has spent HOURS of his life on! Our first batch of chickens, which I got for my birthday in April, was massacred a couple of months ago by several different animals that found their way into the coop. Jason has spent a lot of time “fortifying the coop,” so hopefully these chickens will make it!

Here is one of our little chicks that is contained within the coop. We have 2 Americanas, 2 Silkies, and 4 Rhode Island Reds. I thought they were so sweet until the night before last, when one of them bit me and another one flogged me while I was trying to get them up for the night!

A pile of watermelon and cantaloupe from our garden. In spite of the lack of rain (until today) in our area, our garden has been very plentiful this year! Watermelons contain such…goodness!

These are our rows of green beans, which Jason has worked SO hard on. They contain a great surprise….

…beautiful, colorful zinnias! The kids and I planted zinnia and sunflower seeds in between all of the green bean plants in hopes that they would grow tall and the beans would run up the flowers. However, the flowers didn’t grow as fast as the beans. I love walking through the green beans and catching glimpses of colorful zinnias.

And my last container….I recently rearranged our living room, putting this beautifully old trunk that my mother-in-law gave us in the center of the room. Whenever Charlie and Maddie’s friends come over, they have to see what is contained within it. Much to their dismay, it is full of blankets! I should fill it with some sort of treasure one day, just to give them a little fun.

I enjoyed this weeks photo challenge, and I hope you did, too!

Hi everyone!  So glad today is Friday and we have a great weekend ahead of us.  I am especially glad that our new refrigerator was delivered today.  After several weeks of going back and forth to our garage fridge to retrieve juice every time the kids needed something to drink, I am SO HAPPY!  What an ordeal this has been, but I will save that story for another day.

We were late planting our garden this year so we are just beginning to harvest our fruits and veggies.  We have been eating fresh squash, zucchini, cucumber, and tomatoes every night, and today I enjoyed my first tomato sandwich of the summer.  It was so good!

Jason is keeping a close eye on our canteloupe and watermelon, and I think we will get to pick one this weekend.  Can’t wait.

My cutting garden is also very plentiful right now.  I so love to go out back and cut a bouquet of flowers for the house.  Jason built my cutting garden for me one day when I was at work and he had the day off (about 7 years ago), and I have gotten so much enjoyment from it!

Here’s what I cut today:

I am not sure what this red flower is, but it actually comes back every year. I added some rosemary. We got this vase in Tijuana several years ago.

This is a mix of zinnias, cosmos, mexican sunflowers, and black-eyed susans.

I love this print I just got. You guys should check out https://www.etsy.com/shop/LiveAtHome and their gorgeous prints.

Anyway, great day for me!  God has really blessed me.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

My Husband and I both had to work this past Saturday morning.  Luckily, we were both done by lunchtime and when I got home, he said he had a surprise for me!  Yay! I can usually figure out what his surprises are, but this one really had me stumped.  We got in the car and headed to wherever the surprise was.  We ended up in the next town over, Pilot Mountain.  He was taking me blueberry picking!  There was this cute little blueberry farm that he had driven by on his milk truck route and he thought I would like it.  Of course I would!  I love doing stuff like that!  So, we pull in and there are 2 people there, none of whom work there.  We just grab a little bucket and start picking.  It was hot, but we had a lot of fun eating berries and throwing them at each other!.  When our bucket is full, we head back, but there is still not anyone in sight that works there.  Well, there is a table set up with scales, plastic bags, a metal box, and a piece of paper.  The paper says “The Honor System:  You pick them, weigh them, put them in a bag, and leave your money in the box.”  So we did!  I thought that was pretty cool!

Apparently, I was tricked because, little did I know, Johnny had been wanting a blueberry pie, which I have never made before.  Of course, I wasn’t going to tell him that.  And it turned out freaking fabulous!  So, here is my recipe.  I apologize for the measurements.  I tend to not measure things.  I just guess and add and pour, but I will try to get as close as possible.

4 pounds of blueberries!

These were some big berries!

So to start, if you are using fresh berries, you need to wash them of course.  I assume everyone knows this, but I also forget that not everyone has blueberry farms 15 minutes from their house.  If you buy them from the store, I would recommend washing them anyway!  Now, I’m not going to get into the pie/sonker/cobbler thing (that’s a whole other blog) but, I had just bought a deep dish pie crust and I really wanted to use it, while I really felt like the blueberries would work best in a sonker/cobbler setting.  I filled the pie crust with blueberries.  I really don’t know how many it was, but if I had to guess, I would say 6 cups.  Next, you mix together 1/3 cup sugar, 1/4 cup light brown sugar, and 1 tablespoon cinnamon.  I just poured that over the berries inside of the pie crust and kind of tossed it around until all the berries were coated.

Next step is the topping.  This is just a crust, you could use another pie crust if you wanted, I just didn’t want to go that route with this one.  I melted 6 tablespoons of butter a mixed in 1 cup of flour and 1/2 cup of sugar.  I also added some cinnamon and quick cooking oats to it, just to be fancy.  (Reminder:  I don’t measure, so what I am writing on here is just a guess of what I used.)  Mix everything together until it is pasty.  It shouldn’t be runny.  More like a cookie dough.  You kind of have to drop it onto the top of the blueberries in the pie crust as evenly as you can.

That’s what it looked like before it was cooked.

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes.  You can’t cut it immediately, it needs time to set up.  This pie is so good!

Finished Product!

Sometimes I let him do what he wants.

That’s why you shouldn’t cut it immediately.  But, he was going to terrorize it anyways!  It was a great Saturday!  I also got a new planter from my Dad and got my chicks and hens planted (This is what I call that plant, although I have heard several other names.  I do know it is one of the only plants that I can successfully multiply!!!)

So cool looking!