Rockstar

Every once in a while Evan really gets in the groove.

Another gorgeous weekend gone

I thought I would just take a minute to throw up some pictures from the weekend. Unfortunately my lovely wife is not feeling well, possibly got what the kids have been fighting. I put her to bed early and tried to clean up the kitchen to the best of my abilities. Saturday was initially spent getting the chicken coup ready for the chickens as they were quickly outgrowing the nursery.

Ethan and Mia fed them from their hands today, and they seem to be pretty happy with their new house.

Chicken boy! It is extremely important to always have a bike helmet when handling poultry.

Ethan has gotten pretty good with the gas weed wacker and can really do some damage (to the weeds).

Today we worked on getting the garden ready. A while back we purchased some heavy black plastic to put down and then held it in place with some tires. By the way if you want to try it, I can hook you up with some tires cheap. Our property came with a nice pile of them, BONUS. And you can not burn them like your tree trimmings, they frown on that. Here is what it looked like this morning, at least the main area.

After:

You can clearly see where the plastic was and then the area that I got rototilled. It was so easy to rototill with no big clumpy weeds, I am now wishing I had purchased more plastic. Hopefully we will be able to stay on top of the weeds more this year with some experimental tactics, like newspaper mulch and straw.

Later in the afternoon I took a break to check on the bees. I took a helper to snap pictures of the frames and he also refilled the feeder with sugar water while I inspected the frames.

Here is one of my frames with the bees starting to work on it. Thanks to Ethan for the photo!

After dealing with the bees I needed to relax so I rode bikes around with the kids. We also set up a tetter-totter. I had ridden on one once before when we went to Blackrock freeride park with a crazy guy named Cliff. The boys did pretty well on it.

There is so much to do and so little time. I had really wanted to get a couple of weaner pigs this spring to butcher in the fall, but it has just not worked out. Right now my focus is on getting the garden going and checking on the bees, and in our spare time trying to clean the place up.

Our Weekend

It has been non the less, a very busy but fun weekend. Friday started out, actually Thursday night, with helping Jennie's parents move into their new home. We got the POD unloaded in a few hours and then we were able to get some things put away. Friday night we went back over in the afternoon and helped some more. It is looking so good and it is fun to see them start a new chapter in their lives. We had two really late nights with the kids, but even so they still cannot sleep in. I don't know how they can do that.

Saturday morning Dave was able to get one of our many burn piles going and then left to go pick up a much needed riding lawn mower. He went to view it , from a craigslisting on Friday and made a down payment so we could wait to pick it up on Saturday. We had been waiting and watching the listings for a while now and we wanted one that the kids would be able to handle. Ethan is very excited and couldn't wait to start mowing.  We call it "little red". Our tractor is " big red". I know pretty generic but it will be easy for me, Jennie to remember.

Today was a big day too for Mia. She is officially a no training wheel bike rider. She is so excited. Sometimes a little to much and scares me as she goes so fast and crazy with her steering. She has been working on it this last week almost every day. Her bike is small enough that she could just touch the ground very easily and push off by herself. The boys helped her get started on Monday and took off her training wheels and were helping run along with her. That was so sweet of them and they were really an encouragement to her. They could keep up with her a lot easier then I could since they were so much shorter and didn't have to bend so far over for a long period of time. I had tried that one day with her and boy did it hurt. I'm realizing that I am not that young anymore as my body is hurting at things that it didn't use to a few years ago. That 30 year mark really starts to change things. Hmmmm!

Bees are buzzing and doing their business. Dave took some really neat pictures of the bees coming into the hive. You can actually see the pollen on their legs. So amazing. It has really been fun to learn more about them. I always thought that they were bad. But they are actually really nice if you don't hurt them.

Spring has started to come about. I love this picture of a tree that is in our front yard. It is a small weeping cherry tree with pink flowers. We took the saw and clippers to it a lot earlier this year. It needed some much needed pruning. I have a lot to learn about gardening and taking care of plants. I'm sure to kill some on the way because I don't know what I'm doing, but that is the process of learning things.

We also got a lot of other things accomplished.. Dave got a big tree stump taken out. That is huge. We got some more bushes either trimmed or chopped down, we found more garbage hiding in the bushes that we cut down, the ducks got lots of yummy worms, and we all got some fresh air. 

Paper pots

So Dave found this great idea for making your own paper pots for seedlings from thyhandhathprovideth.blogspot.com . We have been enjoying their blog on gardening and other homesteading ideas. So we tried it out with the help of Dave's parents. Thank you for providing the paper!
Dave worked one night and made them all up and he and Mia got busy filling them up with dirt. We planted some Tomato seeds and some broccoli seeds too. Watered them and then saran wrapped them and put them in our west facing window. One week later the broccoli is already coming up. The neat thing besides that it was mostly free, at least the pots, is that the paper will help mulch the ground for us. This last week the kids wanted to help Dad out someway and Ethan thought about filling up all the rest of the pots with dirt. He and Mia got to work filling up the rest of them, about 40 and were very eager to get them done before Dave got home. So eager in fact that he had to learn the hard way about carrying them with two hands instead of one. He dropped them just inside of the doorway. Dirt was all over the rug, floor and doorway. He quickly picked up the dirt and put it back in the pots, and then with two hands put them back on the shelf by the window. After asking him what lesson he learned from this, he said that he will always hold it with two hands from now on. I love seeing their eagerness to see what dad will say when they do something to help him out. They can hardly hold it in. They have to tell him as soon as he comes in. But that is what we want to instill in them. An eagerness to serve. This is where is starts. But our hearts for them is to learn how to eagerly serve the Lord in any area that He calls them.

Camo kids

So with Dave's dad retired, we are finding that he has a lot more time to go fishing with the grandkids, go on trips with his lovely wife and also to start cleaning things out in the house. We happened to end up with a bunch of his old army gear, which the kids were beside themselves. It was like Christmas all over again. Here are just a few pictures of the kids in camo. Ev is always in his camo gear or dressed up like Davy Crockett. He is very steady with a rifle too. He says he wants to be in the army like grandpa or live on the other side of the mountain from us. We will see. We would be proud of him to go serve but it would be very hard for me to let him go too. But thank the Lord we have 10 more years with him here before that happens.

Our new babies!

Well chicks that is. They are so cute. Dave was able to get the chick nursery done Friday afternoon and evening with the boys. They were out there until 8:45 working on it in the chicken/duck house. I guess we could start calling it the poultry house. Saturday morning Dave took the 3 older kids to Coastal Farm to pick out our chicks. They were having 5 free chick day if you bought some starter feed, which we needed anyways, so why not get free chicks too. I was at home with Lily Mae and we were watching Addie, our niece, for the day. When we were ready to put them into their new home we captured some fun pictures. Oh by the way we ended up with 15 of them. Crazy I know. But I'm sure we can find people who would want some eggs every now and then. We go through a lot of eggs when we scramble. We can't keep up with our duck eggs though, primarily because the boys are the only ones who eat them. So if you, or you know of someone who, wants duck eggs, please let us know. Enjoy the pictures. They are so cute.

Finally, caught rat-handed.

It is getting close to bedtime and my jokes, or catchy titles don't seem to be as funny as they should be.  Just an update on the rat situation.  The rat trapped failed, which reminds me I need to pull it out from under the floor of the duck house, but the live trap triumphed.  Thanks to my father for loaning it to us!  Last weekend when I was quietly sitting in the chicken side of the poultry house contemplating my sliding door, the rat actually came out and I watched it crawl into ducks food bowl and chow down.  All I had close by was a drill and a hammer.  I chose the hammer as I did not think I could actually drill the rat.  He of course got away, I should have thrown the hammer, oh well.  Once we had the live trap we tried a cracker with some peanut butter on it, but what finally got him was a piece of bacon.  At least he had a good last meal.  My daughter called me at work early Friday to inform me we had caught him, it was a joyous day.

Since we are on the topic of wildlife, I am pretty sure Evan and I saw a bobcat Wednesday evening.  It was sitting in the field behind our barn when I went walking up the driveway looking for the ducks.  My first thought was WOW that is a huge owl, but when it looked at me I realized it was a very large cat.  It promptly turned and headed down to the bottom of our property with Evan and I following but we never saw it again.  It does make me somewhat concerned for our lady ducks, who love to free-range around the yard.
Maybe later this week I post some pics of our chicken coop and the chic nursery I have been working on.  We are hoping to get some chics in the next couple of weeks.