A New Castle Keeper Year Has Begun

Our 3rd year of Castle Keepers has begun. Well, it actually began a few months ago. We have 29 girls involved in the club now but only 11 of them are local.  Most of our members are located far away from our state of Arizona. It has been really wonderful to see the girls getting their challenges done and encouraging one another with their projects.

Fall means cooler weather and it also means it’s time to find a tree that you can pick apples from here in Arizona, so we started the year off here locally learning how to make applesauce and apple butter.

September

“…he kept him as the apple of his eye.” Deuteronomy 32:10

I told the girls to look mean. The really tried but…

 Ladling the apple butter into the jar.

 Cooking the apples in preparation for applesauce.

Each of the girls designed their own tags.

And got to take home a jar each of apple butter and applesauce.

October’s meeting the girls made sugar scrubs.

October

They each scented their sugar scrubs with Doterra essential oils.

That has been our meetings so far but we also have monthly challenges the girls have to complete.

I just loved September’s monthly challenge. The challenge was to prepare a picnic and to have it somewhere besides the back yard. I just wanted the girls to get out and do something different even though the back yard is the easiest! It was delightful seeing all the picnics and snapshots of them and their guests. They outdid themselves and prepared lovely picnics.

Locations for picnics abound and we had a big variety.

Picnics by the water…

Picnics in the park.

And if it’s too hot in the day to have it, why not have it at night?

Picnics in the desert.

(Brazil)

Picnics in the mountains

 Most of the girls’ picnics had at least one unwelcome visitor, ants, bees, mosquitoes… 🙂

One girl, who lives on a farm, had to haul her things out to the back pasture.

Fall theme

The girls did an amazing job presenting their food. It was all so lovely.

If the girls were under 13, they were to assist their sister in the preparations and read a poem at the picnic.

Audrey made my favorite – chocolate chip cookies and she recited the poem, “Bed in Summer” by Robert Louis Stephenson. She is so animated when she recites.

This year we’ve added a new challenge for the girls to complete each month. It’s called the Mystery Culinary Challenge and is a spin taken from the Master Chef Junior television show. I’ll tell you all about it next post.

So do you enjoy picnics? What’s some of your favorite picnic foods?