Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Farm Happenings!!

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” 
Isaiah 7:14


I am so blessed to spend some time with Kaitlin. As our children grow into adulthood, parents aren't the center of their lives. I am happy to say this beautiful young lady enjoys hanging out with her parents. Any opportunity I get and snatch the chance to hang out with her. Kaitlin works full time and still finds time to spend with me. ❤️❤️

We were out doing some errands and getting some shopping done.
One of our stops was at Costco's. Kaitlin found a pinball game which she played for a good 10 minutes.
She also just loved all the food samples they had out.

Remember the spinach seed that I planted so late??
Well, it is growing quiet nicely. It has been so cold and I haven't wanted to open the wrap that I have my plants in. I waited for the weather to warm back up and took a peek. I've been praying for this to be successful. My prayers have been answered. 

There is just something about the scenery in the winter months.
I wished my phone camera could've captured the beautiful sky in all the right colors. But I will still post the picture for y'all to get the idea. Some things you just have to be there to enjoy.

Hope wasn't feeling well. She had lost weight and was losing her hair on her belly side. With winter coming and not growing her winter coat we had many concerns. 

Tim came with me to the vets office. Since she is a larger dog and not used to riding in a vehicle much less going to the veterinarians office. 

Not sure exactly what caused her symptoms, we took her to the vet. The vet wasn't sure but gave her a shot and medication to take. 

She did really good with riding in Tim's van and having the leash on her. On a norm she never did well being leashed. I think she knew we were trying to get her help. Her tail wagged the whole time at the vets office. When we finished up there were two kids in the waiting room. Kids are her favorite.


Within a couples of days, Hope was feeling better and back to eating, barking and running around the pasture.

Faith is growing and I think will be bigger than Hope.
Faith is only 6 months old and already in a large dog collar. She is the size of Roxy.
Faith is a happy go lucky pup and full of energy. She is so opposite from Hope. Faith is a fitting name for her. 

Cattle and fence checking for our weekend.
Saturday was a really cold day so we decided to wait until Sunday to check on the cattle. Since it was a nice day but still cooler I thought lets just take a nice walk to our back pasture. As Tim and I were chatting we noticed we had more cattle and a really big one. 

Far left side is our neighbors bull with our bull and cattle.
It's never a good thing when cattle get out especially when a bull gets out. They only get out for usually one reason; to breed!!!
We have 3 girls. Two of our girls are definitely pregnant and one of them we don't think is yet or too early to tell. Our neighbors bull is significantly bigger than our heifer. We really hope she already was bred with our bull. We won't know until late summer next year.

We are working on getting the cattle over to one side making it easier to separate them.
Tim and I already got a reel up. Meaning we put in posts and ran an electric wire across. We have a handle on one end making it easy to open one end or close one side of the pasture.

You can barely see the white fencing stakes in the background. That is separating the pasture in half.
If you look at the picture to your far upper right you will see the 2 bulls we need them to be where I am taking the picture. Once they come through the opening, Tim will close off the section.

Hard to take pictures when I'm needed to help.
The bulls finally came through where the girls were at. Now we trick the cattle to come back to the other side of the pasture so we can separate ours from the neighbors bull. Our neighbor was telling us his bull is mean and kicks. We only have one chance to make it all go smoothly so no one gets hurt.
 Patience and prayer!!!

All I can say is it went better than I expected. The bull got back into his pasture. Nobody got hurt so that was a win.
There are several differences in the way we are raising our cattle from our neighbor. His bull is only motivated by a bucket with grain and has no respect for people.  Ours is used to us moving them. Pasture rotational grazing. Moving them more frequently. When we are in the pasture with them they give space and so do we. They are electric fence trained. Which makes it easier to move them or take a line and  walk behind them. Another huge thing is we can holler for them and they will come. 

Other than the cattle thing we had a pretty relaxing weekend.

Who's ready for Christmas??



 

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Thanksgiving and the Weekend!!

Thanksgiving was a little different for us this year.


We normally are raising our Thanksgiving turkeys and then butchering them the weekend before Thanksgiving. This year we didn't raise any turkeys. We did however have some turkey legs in the freezer.
We smoked a whole chicken and 2 turkey legs for our feast this year.

Mine and Tim's Thanksgiving lunch.

Turkey legs is a recipe from the Pioneer Women.

Our smoked chicken.

We waited for Kaitlin to join us for dinner. She had to work but had the evening off.
Smoked chicken, broccoli, stuffing, deviled eggs and homemade rolls.

It was a relaxing couple of days.
The weather being cold nothing is better than watching movies and working on puzzles.



We are so close to finishing it!!

I just love this picture of Tim and Roxy.

We smoked some pork for the weekend.
One of our dinners. So delicious!!!

Out riding our four-wheelers.
It is so cold!!

As you can see Tim is wearing his winter coat as I am too.


Cattle and fencing and water source is all good.

Blackjack

F2

We woke up to four inches of snow. Kaitlin didn't make it into work because of the roads were so icy.
Tim was making us breakfast while I was outside checking on our dogs.

First snow of the season.

So beautiful but so cold!

So Sunday afternoon we worked on decorating our tree and house with Christmas decorations.

This is our first year in this house to not have a real tree up. For the past several years we have been buying real Christmas trees. Every year the price goes up and the trees are significantly smaller. After the tree last year was barely 5 foot and cost 90ish dollars, I decided to buy a fake tree. I think it turned out pretty nice and it is huge.

A little Christmas decor here and there. It was so nice hanging out with the family and listening to Christmas music.

I even bought this cute little tree for our loft area aka living room right now.

We ended our evening watching the famous Christmas show that Kaitlin has never seen...

Die Hard!!!

So we will be watching all the sequels to it now that Pandora's box is open.




 

Weekend Project #3 and Lighted Parade!!

Tim and I always start out our Saturday mornings with coffee together.
The best way to start out if you ask me.

Remember those seeds I started?

Well they are growing. Never done this before and I am surprised. Well sorta. We have had some nice weather and sunny days to help. Its been around 80-90 degrees inside the hoophouse while the temperature outside is 40-50 degrees. Nights are starting to get colder like down to 20-32 degrees.



I did start some spinach in 2 more tubs. The areas where the lettuce was bare and nothing grew I put more seeds down.

Tim helped me cut some fencing wire to make hoops for my container plants.
I am able to take the cover off during the day and put it on back on before night time.
With the nicer weather and temps up I am able to water. Once it gets cold I won't be watering them.


Weather has changed to colder temps. I have now added the plastic over top of the row cover. The wire hoops will help the plants not to grow down. 

Roxy says it smells like lots of work. She is right!!!!!


Wood is so important as this is how we heat our house and heat our water.

This is two loads of wood that got delivered.

(Wood boiler to the left of the picture that heats our house and water)
The coolest thing ever!!



I just got this stacked and was waiting on the next load to get dropped off.

Not sure if I have the strength today. 

So waited on Tim to help get more pallets lined up to stack the rest of the wood.



Such a beautiful day!!

We didn't get the wood boiler cleaned out from our last burn.
So Tim is working on getting this done as our weather is changing to freezing temps.

Job well done!!

Our first fire for the season!!
Tim loads this every morning and every night before bed.

Cattle checking and checking on our creek as it has been low.
It's low but rain is coming. We need it for sure.



They are good. They are out and about and enjoying the weather before the rain and colder temps.

Checking fencing and the other side of the creek that they have access to for water.
 The rain that is coming will help. 

Gutter cleaning before the rain.

So glad he isn't scared to be up on the roof of our garage.

Guineas got excited and was making so much noise.
I guess they wanted some attention so they are making it into the blog this time.




Two of my kids/adult children.
(Kaitlin, Jake, (DIL) Ashley, Kylie, Kelsie and Makenzie)

We are at a Christmas Lighted Parade. The granddaughters were so excited!!

Tim and I 

Kelsie fell asleep and Makenzie trying to stay warm next to her sister.



After the parade was over we all went to grab some dinner at a Mexican restaurant. 

Then we went over to a drive through lighted show.



What a beautiful ending to our wonderful time tonight.
Time with family is so precious!!



"What you leave 
behind is not 
what is engraved 
in stone monuments, 
but what is woven 
into lives of others." 

~Pericles