Garlic

We purchased some seed garlic from Azure Standard a month or so ago, to be planted in our garden.  We have grown small amounts before, but never actually planted at the proper time.  We had a small raised bed in the garden that Evan and I cleaned up and rototilled.  We amended the soil with some good garden soil from the store.  We broke the bulbs into the individual cloves and then planted them all.

Behind Evan you can see chickens, they were sent out of the garden before we mulched over the garlic with fresh straw.  When the chickens see fresh straw they get all excited to scratch through it and would probably dig up all the garlic.

I am hoping that it grows well enough that we can braid some for storage.

Speaking of digging, in preparation for our cow shelter we had two small stumps to remove, so one Saturday morning the boys each got assigned a stump and they went to work digging them up and chopping the roots off.  I had work to do on the fence and checked on them periodically.  Once they got them pretty well dug up and severed we hooked a chain to the tractor and pulled them out.

Firewood & Chickens

Since we are now burning wood, we are also chopping wood.  So far we have only had one incident with the wood chopping and that involved Fireball (the chicken).  Fireball is one of our freebie chickens but she is a black chicken with reddish gold around her head, hence the name Fireball.  She has always been very friendly and more bold at approaching us than the other chickens.  Unfortunately, because of that she was hanging around me when I was chopping wood, and she was picking up bugs from under the wood.  She was right next to the chopping block when I was splitting a large piece of wood, and I kind of just sheared off a small piece which sent the very large piece over the edge and landed on her head pinning her to the ground.    I pulled the wood off of her, and she staggered off a few feet and then sat down.  We ended up carrying her back down the hen house that evening, Praise the Lord, after a few days she was back to normal.  Maybe a slight concussion.

Here the chickens are wandering the yard on a nice winter day.

Here is a video tour of our hen house.

I consider the chickens somewhat of an investment, and we want to make sure we protect that investment, so we always lock them up at night to keep them safe.  We have had a few nights where we waited a little too late to herd them in and lock them up and have come up one short.  Luckily they always reappear the next day, so we can only guess they found another place to roost for the night.  Ethan is good about taking attendance in the evening's.

This last Friday night we had a 2nd cord of ash firewood delivered and dumped in our driveway.  We covered it with tarps for the night and then in the morning the kids and I moved it into our wood storage area on the end of the barn and stacked it.  Here the kids are loading up the two hand-trucks and then bringing it down to me in the barn for stacking.

Here Ethan, Evan, & Mia are done with the firewood.  We are hoping this will be enough to get us through this winter.  The firewood on the right edge of the picture, running the opposite direction is from our property and needs to dry for a year.  They were happy to be done, and went to jump on the trampoline.

Christmas Time 2012

Before Christmas the kids made some yummy gingerbread cookies.  Here the girls are dumping ingredients into the Bosch mixer.  Jennie loves her Bosch.

Ethan is cutting out gingerbread men, making a little army.

The three older kids sang in a Christmas program at church, they all did great.

As you probably noticed Chloe has the same dress as Mia, Lily, and Grace.  The girls got their picture taken after the program.

Christmas morning we had a yummy breakfast and celebrated our Saviors birth with a Birthday cake.

Lily & Mia both got new princess dresses.

The girls got cupcake hats and the boys got camo with stripes hats.

Funny face picture.

Lily in her new cowgirl outfit.

 

Turner family gathering.

Skate party

In December the Alert Cadets have a Family skate night at Skate World.  Here are some pictures of our time there.

Here Lily and Levi took a break to drive the train.

Lily's skates were probably heavier than she was.  We did bring the kids helmets this time, just to be safe, and most of the other kids wore helmets as well.

Here Ben is helping his son Logan out, with Ethan and Chloe nearby.  Logan was doing really well by the end of the evening, it was his first time.

This is how Lily likes to skate, feet out front and daddy steering her like a wheelbarrow.

I am pretty sure that it was not good for my back!

The boys are getting better, and loved to play all the games with the other kids.

Cross fencing done!

  

 A few weeks ago my neighbor offered to help me work on my fence.  So we spent a couple of hours rolling out the wire and stretching the center section of the fence.  I had not installed the metal t-posts, but we still put up the wire and then I came back the next day to pound in the posts and connect them to the wire.  We also got both of our gates hung that weekend.  Here Evan is drilling the hole for the bottom hinge of the gate. One gate was reused, and one was new.

Next we started on the last section of fence, we dug the post holes for the wood posts, and used concrete instead of just compacted gravel this time.  In the past we had mixed the concrete in a tub, but someone told me to just dump the mix in the hole and let it pull the moisture from the soil, no mixing required.  This was sure easy and seemed to work just fine.  Below the boys helped while Kona hung out with us.

Here is the fence line, once the concrete is set we need to put on the horizontal posts for the braces.

Mia playing fetch with Kona.

Evan helped with this first brace.

It was cold out, with a heavy frost when we finished it up.

Below is the center brace for this last run of fencing.

This is the middle section of fence running South to the new gate.

Here is the last section of fence from the new gate looking South towards the berry patch.

Now, onto the cow shelter.  We want to build a small three sided shed for the cows.