Everything Honey Today!...Well, As Honey As It Can Bee!...

Recipe from Company's Coming Millenium Edition

Honey caramels/fudge

Beautiful Comb

Hollow Log with Honey Bees and their Combs

Busy Bees and their combs and honey!

The winter time, is my favorite time of the year for making fudges.....It's too hot in the warmer months, and in the winter they chill and set up much easier with the help of placing the old pot into some snow to help cool it down faster for whipping....This recipe is so nice, delicate, and the honey hit's the spot! I was so proud of back in the fall that we had our first harvest of homegrown honey! By chance last summer an old hollow log that was brought up to the yard/laneway near our barn for firewood, and never got cut up, made for a perfect home for a colony of honey bees! All summer we watched, and eventually in the heat of the summer and fall, could smell this sweetness as we'd walk by it to go to the barn....Come the fall, when we started to get cold/freezing spells (the bees went temporarily dormant and hid way back in the log), my mother started to venture into our log to see what she could find....we removed some of the comb, and slowly drained the honey. Just so amazing! What a beautiful, and neat first time experience of discovering our organic honey! Anyways, we are hoping they will continue to produce this spring/summer season, and I'd like to bring out more hollow logs from the forest for them to settle in as well....It's all new to us, or me, so i'm starting to do some more research on raising honeybees, and would like to do it as naturally, and simple as I can. So I made up a batch with the little bit of honey that we harvested!  I love making fudges, from various recipe books, or mixing up my own concoctions, especially candy coatings for candied popcorns.....Another one of my fave all natural ingredients is using our own fresh maple syrup from our forest! That will be my next topic on here soon, maple sugaring! We are currently getting ready to tap, and the weather is just not behaving very well for sap to run, or so we feel by the cold/freezing day temperatures we are still having! Stay tuned for pictures and tidbits on that!

~Rosemary~

All of us together.....sorta.....

We don't have any real recent family photo's of us all together (taken on our first ever family boat ride to a lovely island on Georgian Bay to check out a camp the children were going to be attending! We had a blast, since we are only use to canoe's and not powered boats!), something that i am working on.....in the meantime, this is a "homemade" photochop picture of us all, that i created for my daughter who is in junior kindergarten this year....the teacher loved it, since we are the largest family in the class, and most of the other classes at the moment in the school! From left to right, Big Daddy, Eugenia, Opal, Issy, Queenie, Emma, George, and Big Mama!


~Rosemary~

A Few Of My Favorite Things......Cookbooks!

My mother's mother bought all her daughter's one of these!

A few of my fave seed/plant catalogues

My Bible, my Mom's originally!

I love Canadian Living publications

Another great one, has the danish recipe inside!

Has some nice tasty fudge recipes in it!

A rummage sale find that either me or my mom picked up!

The Place We Call Home.......

The Ol' Girvin House facing west

Side View of the house, addition that is being added on

Paul's Big Daddy Van 12 passenger

This is our home, my hubby was the second owner in the history of this old place, and at one time, a female family member from his clan married into the Girvin's who built this lovely house on the hill! Its still under construction, and like most older homes, needs a lot of TLC and time and money put into it...it's all original in the inside, except for the kitchen....I have my moments i'll tell you about this old place......

This is our lovely Ford 350 diesel 12 passenger van! Paul first started out when we got married with sporty snazzy GMGrand Am's....what a laugh....then we went on to a Ford Explorer, then onto a Ford Windstar, and finally straight to the top, the Ford 350! Couldn't live without it, and we use it for pulling tractors, wagons, loads of hay etc....built tough for our large farm family needs!

View to the old barn

My Darlings......

The Darlings!

From left to right back row first, Isabelle, Eugenia, George, Emma holding Opal, and Queenie in the red dress!

~Rosemary~

And Here He Is......

My Farmer.....Paul!

Here is a nice smile from my farmer after a long hot afternoon doing up square hay bales! He was bashful of me taking his picture, and I said, na, don't be silly......

~Rosemary~

How I Met My Farmer.....

My mother said to me before i went off to college, farmer's college that is...to either do really good, or find a rich farmer.....I did really good! So much for fetching a farmer while i was there....oh well, there's a reason for everything in life.....I did get a farmer eventually, just not that easily...well, i guess it wasn't too hard....all i had to do was put an ad in the local papers, stating i was looking for one! When people ask now how my farmer and i met, i just say "i bought him in the newspaper".....Little did i know then, that i was getting more than i paid for (stories for another time)...Here's a bit about my farmer....His name is Paul, he's seven years older than me, not a very big fellow, but i fattened him up over the years that we've been married!....he's gentle, kind, soft spoken, respectful, kind hearted, hard working, loyal, smart, kinda cute, jack of all trades kinda fellow, determined, and really crazy for marrying me!!!!I don't know how he's tolerated me all these years...I can be quite the opposite to him at times (perhaps that's the reason we attracted to each other so well), and determined that I wear the boots in the house!!!!Oh well, anyways, that's how i met my lovely Paul...short and sweet, i'll spare you all the details! I can talk way too much, and i don't think everyone wants to hear every little thing i have to say!So, now that you know how i became "The Farmer's Wife", I can now get on with all my stories, recipes, pictures, and tid bits of life here on our farm....Thank you for reading my blog, and I hope to be of some sort of interest to you all!

The Kiss! Our wedding day! Paul & Rose!

~Rosemary~

I always knew I was destined for farm life.....

Growing up as a child in Canada's largest city, Toronto, I always new I was meant to be living somewhere else....From going to my grandparent's hobby farm of ten acres since I was a squirt, and going there on the weekends and some holidays, I always just knew I was meant for so much more than living in the city...those fun times as a kid, and playing with my older sister, and aunty (who was a year older than me), having the time of our lives, playing in the fields of wild flowers, playing in an old shack in the forest, and playing at the pond, and helping with the family garden, growing vegetables, and getting into mischief like finding rotten eggs on the manure pile that came from a neighbouring farmer, and stepping on them and running for the hills because they stunk so bad and killing ourselves laughing, and just feeling carefree, happy, and full of life...it's endless the times we had there, endless...anyways, besides getting a taste of my grandparents hobby farm, I also got to get my hands dirty in our small backyards in the city, ever so proud to help out my parents with the small vegetable garden, and plantings of fruit trees, and perennials and flowering shrubs....The chance at around the age of ten, to travel with my own parents to the shores of Lake Huron, and take in some of the towns along the lake (like Kincardine, Goderich, Port Elgin, Southhampton), going to the beautiful beaches and camping, renting cottages etc...also taking in the Bruce Peninsula, and Manitoulin Island, and other parts of Georgian Bay....all good memories, and times I would never have had, if it wasn't for my mom pushing my dad to get us there! Little did I ever know then that one day I would be eventually living in that area and near the towns that I once visited as a child, and tourist! Years past, and my mother was determined to get us out of the city, she too longed  for something more, an escape from it all, no more hustle and bustle and rat race.....she wanted out of it all...it was a big chance, a big risk, others thought she was crazy for her idea (including my dad)....it took some time, some research, and several trips back up to those areas we enjoyed so much, and scouting out the perfect farm for our family....my dad was on board, but barely(he had to worry about making an income in the country, even though we'd rent out the land to a local farmer for income)....we had fun sorta, checking out farms, and the area...my parents made most of the trips themselves to scout things out....eventually narrowed it down to one farm...a lovely ninety acre cash crop farm one concession over from the beautiful shores of Lake Huron just north of Grand Bend....just perfect, prime land, ok old farm house, and near towns for school and hospital etc...they took it...we were moving, and moving fast....we sold our lovely home in the city, and packed everything up, and moved on my seventeenth birthday! Quite the birthday gift I'd say, and only the beginning of my life as "The Farmer's Wife".

~Rosemary~