Idaho is on fire right now, which isn’t unusual but it is seriously affecting my ability to function. Hopefully the rain that is predicted to fall over the next few days will help extinguish the wildfires and clear the air.

Until then, I’m left with no choice but to stay inside as much as possible. On the bright (?!) side, all this smoke makes the sunrises and sunsets quite beautiful…

I just hate being trapped inside especially now that the days are cooler and I can be out more (theoretically).

Not that I don’t have plenty to do inside. I have a ton of onions to dehydrate, more carrots to blanch and freeze and I still haven’t made an apple crisp or crumble. I did make some more of the mini apple pies with half of my Honeycrisps, though…

It turns out my hubby does have a preference when it comes to apple pastries and right now these are his very favorite. 😄

Mine, too! They are incredibly yummy and super easy to make.

The weather should hold out through this week and we should be able to get out there to harvest the corn and potatoes this weekend. Hopefully we can butcher the meat birds as well, although I do need time to rearrange my freezers to make room for them all.

Since we’re not sure all the corn will be mature enough we plan to feed whatever we can’t eat ourselves to them to finish them off, so processing them may have to wait another week or so. I’m hoping to give them some sunflower seeds to help fatten them up, too, but the sunflowers are still blooming and not many heads have went to seed yet but we’ll see…

We can’t wait too much longer as they will start to die off naturally because these particular birds are bred specifically to be butchered at about 8-10 weeks. If you don’t do it by about 12-15 weeks, they grow too big and won’t survive long because their hearts give out.

I know to some people, even to many meat eaters out there, this sounds rather cruel but I much prefer to raise our own meat ethically and avoid factory farmed animals altogether. We make sure they have a good life and a quick, painless death when it’s time.

Speaking of time, we only have a few weeks now to pull together our Halloween decorating and I’m already so anxious to start putting it all up! We played with the projectors and the window holograms last night and they look AMAZING! I kind of went a little crazy with upgrades for this year but I couldn’t help it. Some things I bought new but I’ve gotten quite a few other things for cheap from Craigslist and Goodwill so it’s not breaking the bank or anything and will look so good when we pull it all together.

As soon as this smoke clears I’m heading back into town to hit some more thrift stores to see what else I can find. 🙂