Peaches, Peaches, Peaches!

Well peach season came FAST and has also gone... for now. We have two more out of our 10 trees with peaches that are late bloomers. They should be ripe and ready to pick in about a month. Meanwhile, apples are still steadily growing and should be ready this fall. In the month of June, we had three sets of visitors, which was SO much fun. And now thanks to our dear friends Ari and Tim who did a cross-country road trip, we now have our second car with us permanently.

See below for what we've been up to the last month, and scroll to whatever part of this letter interests you:

• Peach jam/peach butter canning
• Pantry makeover
• Professional photography of the farm
• Holistic Nutrition Counseling Work Update
• Creamy Chocolate [Avocado] Pudding Recipe

Other fun farm-y things we've been up to: 

• creating compost piles (finally!!! yay!)
• lots, and lots, and lots, of mowing with our new riding lawn mower
• picking lots of blueberries and wild blackberries
• playing volleyball and board games that involve bombs with friends
• trying out a variety of yummy bakeries in Winston-Salem, our nearest city

Homegrown Homemade Peach Butter

Man did we have fun jumping into the world of jam-making and hot water bath canning. A huge part of homesteading is food preservation, so we took notes after our emergency cherry jam-making session from last month and decided to actually buy the right equipment to make jam on a larger scale. We still did small batches of our homegrown, homemade peach butter even with our new fancy water bath pot and tools, and now have about one and a half dozen canned peach jams and "Christmas" spiced peach butters to use throughout the year for galettes, pies, and more. Also shown below is our blueberry and wild blackberry harvest from last week!

Pantry Makeover

When we bought this home, we knew that food would be more or less at the center of most things. Which also means an awesome (or at least functional) pantry is also needed to hold said food. Unfortunately, the shelving situation was less-than-ideal when we moved in, so last week we completed our first room renovation!  Here are some before and after photos, and you can check out more on the blog post. 

And now for my favorite part....

FARM PHOTOGRAPHY :)

As I hinted at in last month's letter, my AMAZINGly talented and delightful friend Marissa Wu stayed with us for two weeks. She also just happens to be a professional photographer and works for an online photography magazine. So as our "fun" project, I was once again her muse and we had a two-part, two-week photoshoot with the goal of photographing the farm as it currently stands, and also to do a little old school farm portrait series. Here's some of our favorites below.

See the full page of photos here.

Holistic Nutrition Counseling Update

A big change has taken place this month as I am officially 100% focused on the farm as well as building my nutrition counseling business here in North Carolina. For those of you who don't know, I worked for a year and nine months at a Functional Medicine and Acupuncture clinic in Livermore, California as their in-house nutritionist. It was a blessing to learn so much from Dr. Christine there and I will cherish every experience I have gathered there that has brought me to where I am today.