A Busy Time of Year!

Phew!! We have been busy putting away our garden. We have canned a dozen pints of beets, a dozen pints of peas, fifty quarts of green beans, and ten quarts of peaches. The tomatoes are ready, we have put up 24 quarts so far, and will continue to can until there are none left! The potatoes and onions are all in and stored, and we have five, one gallon bags, of cut up green peppers in the freezer.
Dave cut our hay, we obtained a sickle bar this year, and after some new blades were put on and couple of adjustments made, it worked well. The hay was then raked up with a leaf rake, time consuming job, especially wearing when it is 90 out and very humid. A few days later the dried hay was hand loaded onto the pick up truck and moved to a couple of spots to make huge haystacks, fortunately our neighbor was able to help out, it was quite a job getting everything raked, collected up, and stored away.
On Monday we will be taking our steer, Banana, and our neighbors cow, Sprinkles, to the meat packer. Banana and Sprinkles have lived together in our field for the past year and a half, they were a few weeks old when they arrived, and so very cute, they are now large lumbering beasts, I am glad that they are not aware of whats going to happen next week :( We will have just one steer left, a jersey, that we share with our neighbor, he will be ready later in the year, notice we don' t have a name for the jersey.
A few weeks ago we added a puppy to our family, Lady is a blue heeler/golden retriever mix, she is now ten weeks old, she was free, is a friendly little thing and has settled in well. Lady is slowly getting the idea that we really would prefer that she take care of her personal business outside. Our older dog, Tasha, is sixteen, she came to live with us when she was six weeks old, she was the runt of the litter, she was free too. Tasha has been a great dog, she is now old, very stiff in the hips, and spends most of her day napping, she particularily enjoys a nice snooze on the deck each morning, and when the sun moves around the house making the deck too hot, she walks around to the front porch to take another nap!
I will post some pictures of Tasha, Lady, Banana, and Sprinkles.