It probably seems a little ironic that a blog titled “Home Works Best” so rarely says anything about how my household works. (It does sometimes talk about why “home works best” for raising and educating our children, etc., but the practical matters of running a home in day-to-day life are often absent.) The main reason for this is that the day-to-day workings of my home are so mundane to me that either I don’t know how to write about them, or it never occurs to me that someone else might be interested in hearing about them. Sometimes, though, while reading other blogs, I’ll come across a post and think, “I do that.” I’m going to try to be better about this, but I don’t want to bore other homemakers to tears by telling you what you already know! 🙂

To start with, I’m going to describe how I divvied up my large container of honey. (It’s not exactly an every day occurrence, but it does pertain to homemaking. I also can’t take credit for this method – my mom came up with it – I’ll just take the credit for being the one to actually write it down. 🙂 )

I bought a 60-pound (5-gallon) bucket of clover honey from Dutch Valley. (It’s been a while since I made the actual purchase, so I don’t recall the exact price.) I divvied this honey up into jars and ended up with 23 quarts and most of a half pint. My mom’s brilliant method (no, I am not being sarcastic; this really does work wonderfully) is to pour the honey from the 5-gallon bucket into a 5-quart ice cream bucket, and from that bucket into the jars. The ice cream bucket is not only much more manageable for pouring into a fairly narrow opening, it “squishes,” too, to help direct the flow. Now, I am not strong enough to lift a 60-pound bucket of honey to pour it, so I actually ladled it from the original bucket into the ice cream bucket until it was about 3/4 empty.

(As you can see, I’m wearing pretty bummy clothes. I recommend this, as this is a very messy job! You can see the puddle of honey on the floor; there’s some on the stool, too.)

I tipped the ice cream bucket over the edge of the regular bucket so that whatever ran off of the ladle would (largely) spill back into the bucket rather than all over my kitchen. When I finished ladling a “batch,” I used a silicone spatula to scrape off most of the excess. (There is a clean plate on the floor beside me where I set the ladle and spatula between batches, but you can’t see it in the picture.) I also used this spatula to scrape out both buckets after the last batch, so we didn’t waste any of the honey (except for what spilled on the floor, which was probably less than a half pint, and perhaps less than a quarter pint).