Monday, July 12, 2010

Blackberries!






My Mom called Saturday and said that their blackberry crop was flowing like milk and honey! She invited me to come up and get some so Savannah and I rode up there and picked up a few gallons. My Dad had rooted me some blackberry plants and we have 6 planted but they are still pretty small this year. Next year we should be "in the berries" ourselves. These are those huge berries like you see in the stores and another bonus is these plants don't have any thorns!




Well Melissa didn't waste any time getting them cooking and made several jars of blackberry jelly, blackberry jam, and blackberry cobbler filling. We will be enjoying these berries for a long time to come. As well as I can understand, this is the essence of sustainable farming. Harvesting whatever is in season and then preserving enough to make it until the next harvest. Blackberry jelly year round sounds good to me. (In moderation, of course!)

Posted by Matthew at 8:18 PM 2 comments

Wednesday, July 7, 2010


That's right! The Durham clan headed out for a little hiking for the 4th. We headed up into the mountains above Lake Jocassee. It was beautiful and much cooler than here! One funny thing was since our cell phones didn't work there no one had a watch so we didn't know what time it was for two days! But then we didn't need to know what time it was...that was the cool part. Savannah did finally figure out that the camera would show the time on a certain setting. Thanks Meredith for taking the picture.
Posted by Matthew at 1:37 PM 0 comments
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Welcome!

Welcome to our family blog. We have a small (55 acres) farm and are attempting to raise beef cattle, some hay, laying hens, honey bees, a dog and a small garden. We also have a small pond that has fish in it but they pretty much raise themselves.The Twenty-eight eleven is the name of our farm. It comes from Deutronomy 28:11 which reads: "The LORD will make you abound in prosperity, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your beast and in the produce of your ground in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers to give you." We count on God's blessings for our life as we know it so we thought it appropriate to go ahead and give Him all the glory for anything good that we produce, be it crops, cows, or children. This blog will be a fun project for us to document what is going on at our farm and hopefully share some natural ways of farming along the way (as we learn too).