Lazy Days

Hey Welcome back ya'll! Not a whole lot going on around here this past week. I've been picking up an extra night of work the past couple weeks so that has cut out one day of pool time or anything extra fun we might get into. Esp. since we usually use my other two days off to fix fences, swap animals around, or fix the garden. This week we planted two new green pepper plants and a few rows of corn in what was the green bean garden bed. We also dug up the onion garden and I went back to small plastic buckets for the green beans. That should do much better that this previous round in the other garden bed. It's only been a few days and everything is starting to sprout, even the potatoes!

Good news also, Madelyn was accepted into the Hanover County Preschool program! Yay! Now we just have to wait and see if they will let Baylor transfer to that program or stay where she is in the two day program. I'm hoping they will let her go into the full day program just because it will be easier for transportation purposes. Anyway Frank is working on making his own hot sauce with all of the peppers we have been growing so we'll be posting that process soon as well! Also wish me luck because I've had a couple job interviews and one more lined up for this week! Here's hoping! With the girls starting school this fall it's really time to try and find a more Monday through Friday job with weekends off. Any leads send them my way! Thanks and see ya'll next time!

Oh and one more thing! Congratulations to my brother Marshall and his wife Kenzie on the purchase of there first house, its amazing ya'll!

Finger Painting

Beefy has arrived!

Welcome back Ya'll! We've had a busy couple of weeks around here. Time just flies by! Firstly it was finally time to cut back our potato plants. Then you have to let them sit for 5-10 days. We didn't quite get as many as were expecting but we still did get a big storage bin full of them so i'll take it! I think it was because of the dirt we used. We had a whole truck load delivered when we started building the garden and it wasn't exactly the kind I wanted. It was a mix of dirt and that clay dirt. So to fix the problem we spent all day yesterday tilling the garden beds; adding good dirt, compost, and pig manure. This hopefully will yield more potatoes since they will be able to grow in better soil. The next round is planted and now we can just wait and see. Look for a canning post soon!

Secondly we have two new arrivals to the farm! Welcome our new Nigerian Dwarf goat Rick and surprisingly we now have a Jersey Calf! We were planning on getting another male goat to bred with our two female dwarf goats Maggie and Judith but the cow was somewhat an impulse buy. We have been toying with the idea of a cow for a while but I've been on the fence about it. They get so big and  I just wasn't sure. Plus they are expensive, normally a few hundred if not more. However I was browsing craigslist and found a post for a baby Jersey Cow for just $100! Apparently he was so cheap because he still has to be bottle fed twice a day. So now that's added on to my daily to do list. He's so cute though! He's not getting a name, (Frank is calling him Beefy) I thought about calling him Hershal but have decided against it. Ya'll can probably understand why. We'll have him for maybe year or less and then should get about 600 lbs of meat out of it. In the end i'll let you know if this was all worth it or not. Stay tuned. In the mean time here are some super cute pictures of him!

In the Weeds

Hey and welcome back! So our garden is just growing and producing a ton of peppers and we're finally starting to get tomatoes. This is first year we haven't gotten red tomatoes before the summer solstice, but we did start planting later this year due to having to build the garden. However I think we made a bad call with the beans. In past years we always used buckets, like we did with the peppers and tomatoes, but this year I really wanted to do garden beds because I just think they look better. Well apparently I didn't take into account that the buckets keep weeds from growing up around the plants. So our garden beds become over grown with weeds and I just didn't keep up with them. Needless to say it became a huge pain when I finally went out there to get the job done. So now I have to figure out how to keep weeds under control if I want to continue to use garden beds or go back to buckets. Google here I come...

We have two new additions to farm as well, i'll be introducing on the next post! Along with how our potatoes are doing. I should have potatoes out of the ground by the next time i'm back! See ya'll soon!

My poor onions didn't even grow

Happy 4th of July!

Hey ya'll! I hope everyone had a blast this past fourth of July! It's one of my favorite holidays and we had so much fun at my dads river house. This year my brother, SIL, and their two fur babies came down and stayed the two days with us also. It was so nice to get out there and just relax and have fun. We had all different floats to play with, went on a couple boat rides, and Madelyn tried tubing for the first time and loved it! Obviously not by herself; she went with my brother, Safety first! Of course the one down side to having animals is you have to get back home to take care of them so we packed up after lunch Thusday and headed home. Everyone survived the night without us, Charlie wasn't to happy about having to stay outside overnight with the big dogs. We wrapped up the day fixing our electric fence for the little goats and FINALLY cutting back our potatoes plant. So in 5-10 days we can start digging them up! I'm so excited to see what we got this time and then its on to planting the next set. Anyway my work week is just starting tonight (I work weekends and am off Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays) so i'll be checking back in Tuesday! See ya'll then!