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.

Advent Season

Here we are the first day of December.  My wife has been listening to Christmas music for three weeks now,  mainly after she found out I had a Christmas Music station on our Pandora account.  We pulled all the decorations down from the barn earlier in the week, and the house is mostly done.  Often this time of the year gets so packed with activities that it becomes somewhat stressful, but for some reason our calendar appears delightfully open.  To start our first day of December off the boys woke up early to make a surprise breakfast, which they had apparently been planning for a couple of days.  We awoke to some clanking of dishes, and whispering coming from the kitchen area.  After awhile we could hear someone cracking eggs, and we finally decided to get up and see what all the commotion was about.  The boys had got up, made their beds, got dressed and then Ethan started making scrambled eggs and Evan set the table.  It was a fun surprise and we had to wake the girls up, otherwise they would have missed breakfast.  The weather looked pretty decent so we decided to go Christmas Tree hunting before the next storm came in.  We found a nice little Christmas tree lot close to my parents house, with very friendly people and good prices.  Much to our surprise we found our tree very quickly.

 

 The Family in front of the tree

This year we are locating the tree in the taller side of the living room, so we went with a tall skinny one.

I started cutting the tree but the boys always want to use saws.  They ended up working together and it went much better than one person.  Meanwhile I stood there and pulled on the tree to keep it from pinching the blade.

The girls hung out and took pictures.

Mia took this picture, and it turned out really well.

Mia loves her Owl hat that Mommy made.

We also ran across some cool looking mushrooms, not too often that you see these.

After visiting with some country friends near the tree farm we headed home to get things done around the house.  We needed to add the pipe to the outside wall for the combustion air on the wood stove.  So the boys took turns helping me with that.  It is best to have a small kid available to get behind the wood stove and cut the hole in the drywall.  That is Evan you see peeking around.

Before it got too stormy we got some of the Christmas lights up on the house today, but had to stick the tree in a bucket of water since we ran out of time in the day.

Advent Activities

Here are some of the things we do during the season to focus on the true meaning of Christmas.  We have an advent calendar, which is a little wood house with doors for each day.  Behind each door is a Bible passage that we read from "The Jesus Storybook Bible", aimed more at our younger children and then an activity, or candy, or craft etc.  Today's was watching "The Nativity Story".  We also have another little fun advent calender type thing that we have done for quite a few years, it is called the Noel Calendar, by Noel Piper.  Unfortunately it appears that it is not available any more, but it looks like this.

Each day of the month you read a little bit more of the Christmas story and slowly put the scene together.  

And of course tomorrow night we will start our advent wreath, where we read some scripture, and sing some songs.

Finally, last year we read for the first time "Jothams Journey" and the kids loved it.  In looking it up we just realized that the author has two more books that tie into Jothams adventures.  We might have to look into getting a different one for next year.

Warm heat

For some time we have talked about wanting to get a wood stove, but financially have never been able to quite get there.  God is good, and we were recently blessed with the opportunity to purchase a wood stove. After much deliberation we bought a Quadra-Fire 3100 that was on sale at Coastal Farm.  We have had the corner of our living room picked out for some time and after making the purchase we taped out the required hearth size on the floor.

 

I figured I could build my own hearth, but after reading up on it I was not so sure.  To get the required thermal rating you could end up putting quite a few layers on there plus possibly using metal studs underneath instead of wood etc.  As it turns out Coastal had a discontinued hearth pad that we got a pretty deal on, and it met the required thermal ratings.

We did bring two samples home to check out the colors, and decided on the one at the bottom of the picture.

We picked up the wood stove on a dry Saturday and with the boys help and a piano dolly we got it into the house.

The hearth pad slid in between the van seats nicely, but we need the piano dolly for it as well.

As for installation, I was a little concerned about cutting a hole in my perfectly waterproof roof, so we decided to pay a professional to do the install.  The double wall piping is probably 3/4 of the total installation cost, it is expensive stuff.  Below Ethan is helping Mr. Ryan with the installation.  

Ethan was very excited to help out.

Finished product installed, with a fire in it.

We had some wood here, but none of it was seasoned, so we found some on Craigslist, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out the that the price included delivery.  We had them unload it in the barn so that it will stay dry.  

Wood heat is different than our furnace heat, it feels warmer.  You can really get warmed up good sitting next to the wood stove and it will be nice to still be able to heat the house in a power outage.

We are very excited about it!