Yesterday was Harvest Thanksgiving at all our congregations. Our little family has been so blessed with the harvest from our orchard that we did not plant and the grape vine that we did not tend, we really do feel like we have come to the promised land in so many ways. That and our veggie patch that we planted has kept us well supplied. This was our opportunity to formally give thanks to God for the wonderful and great blessings here.
So I brought along a platter of my grapes, thinking I would be giving them away. What I didn't know was that here they give all the produce from Harvest Thanksgiving to the pastor's family! I came with my small offering and ended up with 50 fold back!
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| Massive zucchinis |
So today was a preserving day. The kids and I spent the afternoon making "Harvest Jam" - grapes (from Thanksgiving), apples and figs (from our own trees) and making Tomato and Zucchini chutney.
After all that it was time for a break, so we went out to feed the sheep and Mum's horse. It looked like a storm was coming so we decided to head into the paddock and up the hill to check it out.
Have I mentioned our property is over 130 years old? We have plans to do some archeology at the old school site, which we think we have found through looking at the topography in the old school area. We have had a few minor finds in our walks, like a glass drink bottle from a cordial company that closed in the mid 1950's, or a piece of coloured, patterned glass that may have been in a window above a main door. But today Tank made a major find.
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| Our archeological finds. |
Tank found an uncovered brown coloured glass bottle in amongst some old bits of flat tin. Tiger gave it a bit of a clean with his hands and found a date "1925". So right up front we dated our find. A wee bit of hand digging and lifting a few bits of the tin and we discovered an old tin pot and then an old cast iron cooking pot. We also found a number of tins stacked inside each other, and so we think that this was one of the old house rubbish tips that we have been looking for.
At which point Christian arrived home...and the storm did too. We quickly bundled the kids out of the paddock (away from a bucking horse) and into the house. Then managed to get the clothes off the line just as the first big drops started.
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| The "pool" |
It was a great downpour. We walked around our verandah as we cooled down from the day. The paddocks were all misted from the rain, our down pipes were overflowing and when we got to the back of the house we discovered the area we are about to pave was flooding.
What a blessing! We had heard about this kind of downfall from my brother, but now we got the chance to see it and work out what we could do to mitigate it before we pave our back area!
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| Our back door. |
There was much fun for the kids building dams to save the unpacked boxes of books in the garage, building dams to redirect the water into the veggie patch and away from the laundry door...digging trenches. We were all thoroughly drenched, so the kids had a play in their "pool"...an area thats a part of a large contour drain to stop the flooding.
All topped off with a dinner off the land. What a fantastic day!
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