Life on the farm

Crazy start to the day

Posted on July 18, 2013 by farm2011

You know how you walk through your house and then something catches your eye? Well that’s what happened today. I was walking through the laundry room just checking out the chicken coop when I realized that I was looking at our cattle instead. Our cattle that should be in the cattle shed, not in our back yard. The one good thing about when our cattle get out is that they are still pretty tame. Now granted by far not as tame as the cows that I had when I was not working, but still we have No Ears and she’s pretty tame. Even Ed the bull isn’t bad. So I grabbed a pail and started to call them. Soon around the car shed they came and walked up to me looking for crushed corn. I opened the gate and back into the yard they went. Daryl checked the fence and he’s thinking that maybe they got out by the machine shed. He’ll check it better tonight, but for now they’re in jail on the cow yard. I started to think that maybe they were just out checking out the apples. No Ears Loves apples!

So Daryl and I were still trying to get to work this morning and then we started to think about where Pepper the little kitty went. We knew that he was inside, but where? Time was a ticking away and no signs of him. We were looking under everything and he was no where in sight. He still can’t Meow too well, so I knew that he wouldn’t make any noise to let us know. All of a sudden Daryl said he found him. Check it out where he was.

Pepper on our new couch, just hiding.

This afternoon was really hot outside again, so I left both the dog and little kitty inside for most of the afternoon. I know that they could stand the heat, but if they didn’t have too, why make them. I mean , just look at this face.

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Wednesday is Mowing Day

Posted on July 17, 2013 by farm2011

I checked my new schedule before I headed home today from work to make sure that I try to at least somewhat stay on track. I was hoping that Wednesday was just lay on the couch day… but not so much luck! So outside I went to mow lawn. Now I’m not sure how hot it actually got, but for sure in the mid 90’s with a lot of humidity. I decided to only mow with the rider, so really that wasn’t so bad. But even though I was just driving around, it got hot. When I was mowing, I noticed all the small apples that fell off our two apple trees.

Small apples that are starting to fall off our trees

If it get’s hot or really dry out, the apple trees only keep the apples that it can produce in that type of weather. Not too many small apples actually fell, so maybe we’ll get some rain soon. Isn’t that just how it goes? You get wayyyy too much rain, and then all of a sudden it stops and then comes the heat. The crops are starting to take a toll with the dryness, and with a chance of rain coming up in a couple of days, hopefully we’ll get some rain without the storms.

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The Amish Life

Posted on July 16, 2013 by farm2011

I’m back to trying to live the Amish life again. Now before you start rolling your eyes and say things like ‘not again!’, hear me out.

This time I’m trying to be more like the Amish because I think they have scheduled their week and must stick to it. They always say that they bake on a certain day, and they also do laundry on a certain day, so they must be good at it. Well, anyway good at keeping their schedules. And have you ever seen a stressed looking Amish lady? I haven’t. So I made a schedule for what I should be doing every day of the week, you know.. kind of like the Amish. That way when the week is over, I will have everything accomplished that I need to. This whole schedule idea came about when I took a 1/2 day of vacation to catch up on the housework and paperwork. Yea, not cool. I really don’t like taking any vacation hours at work to clean the house, but man at the end of the day – I was very happy what I accomplished. But I for sure don’t want to make taking vacation days to clean a habit. So I got out some paper and a pen and made my list. On the list one day is for getting groceries, another for laundry, and well you get the picture. I’ve kind of been able to follow the list and even if I can do have of it, it’s much better than being disorganized.

So yesterday was Monday and I knew that it was grocery day. Check it off the list 🙂

And today is Tuesday. Now what was I supposed to do tonight? I better find my list again.

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Movies, picking rock, and a bike ride

Posted on July 14, 2013 by farm2011

What a really nice day we had. I don’t know if you have those days when the time just flies by, but today it was kind of a long day.

We started the morning by watching this really scary movie, and I don’t think that I’ve ever watched a full movie on a Sunday morning. But I’m just saying that it is definitely something that I’d like to do again. Daryl, William, and I just kind of hung out and it was nice. After the movie William was heading out to the river to do some tubing, so I was going to go on a long bike ride. I wanted to get some more practice in, because I felt like I was just dragging last week on the ride. Well we hee hawed around and I was pretty comfortable on the couch, and soon it was decision time. Either bike ride or picking rock. Daryl said that he would just go and pick rock by himself, but that would be a bad job now wouldn’t it? And I knew that we really needed to get more rock picked, so we went out in the field and picked up another load this afternoon. Man it sure seems like there is no shortage of rocks this year! After we picked rock, we decided to get out our bikes and go for a short ride. I was going to go by myself, but Daryl said he wanted to go with. The ride that we went on was one that had more hills than normal, but that’s OK. It’s down to the last week before we leave for the long ride, and it’s like cramming for a test. You have to do whatever it takes. But I was happy how I felt after this ride. So much better than last week.

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Spending the afternoon on the water

Posted on July 13, 2013 by farm2011

My friends and I planned a kayaking trip for about 2 months and Saturday was the day we picked to go. With the weather forecast on Thursday for Saturday to be at 0 % chance of rain – things were looking good. Well, until Saturday morning of course. It was pretty cloudy in the morning and Daryl said that it looked like it might rain. I told him that there wasn’t any in the forecast at all for today and it must just be a morning thing. Yea, not so lucky. All of a sudden it started to rain. Now there was a 10% chance of rain, well that was good because it was already raining. As the morning was going by, the rain increased to 80% chance. But again, it was still raining. We met anyway in Decorah to do our annual breakfast get together. The food was good and we decided to keep with our plan and see if it’s going to quit raining or not. Since I haven’t had a chance to get a kayak yet, I had to rent mine. No big deal, but we had to go to the rental spot first. It kind of turned out for the better, because we were trying to kill some time for the weather to get nice. Soon the sun came out and we were happy. Off to the water we went with our kayaks and paddles in hand. Now sometimes when you say that you love something, it’s like… yea. But when I say that I ‘Love’ to be on the water I really mean it. My idea of a perfect place to live would be to live by the river and with no one around. Humm.. after reading that description it kind of sounds like a hermit doesn’t it? Too funny! Anyway, we were on the river and it didn’t take too long and the weather was perfect. The water was a little cold, but with tons of springs feeding the river, it only makes sense that it’s a little cold with all the rain we’ve gotten.

Springs along the river

A little wind to push us, sunshine, and good friends. Life is good. We had a great time today and it makes me really want to get a kayak so I can go even more often.

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Streetscape Project in West Union

Posted on July 11, 2013 by farm2011

Tonight one of our local towns celebrated a milestone. Back in 2008, they started a project that honestly was truly amazing and just as amazing was to have completed this summer. What they did was to take their small town of 25oo people, and completely reconstruct not only their streets, but also how they think about rain water, and geothermal heating. Now I’m sure that there are a million statistics about the project, and I’m also sure that there are almost as many opinions on this topic. So without getting into the political side of this conversation, I’d just like to write what I saw tonight. I saw a lot of people wearing the town’s shirts with pride, people enjoying the nice landscape of the Civic Plaza, and just enjoying the town and their neighbors. It was a great reason to not only witness the ribbon cutting of the town’s project, but just to come out and see what was going on in their town. The reason that I was in town tonight was because the group that Daryl sings in was performing at the Civic Plaza and it was sure a nice night to enjoy the entertainment.

Fusion group singing tonight at the Streetscape Project

The sun was shining, they were serving all different food, but my choice was some white cupcakes with raspberry filling. Yum! After a fun night just hanging out listening to music, I realized that some people are so good on having a vision, and then the strength to try to get that vision accomplished. West Union hasn’t been updated since the 1970’s and now in 2013 their town is not only an example of future cities to come, but also a beautiful city that was able to be given a second breath in life. Congratulations!

A different view from the Court House of how nice the town looks!

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Roots

Posted on July 10, 2013 by farm2011

Did you ever have a situation when someone tells you something and then you kind of store it for awhile and then low and behold you bring it out of your brain storage? Well that’s what happened to me today. I was checking out the corn and I noticed how weird the roots look. I hated to do it, but I asked Daryl why they were above the ground and if that was a bad thing or not. Well, (this is where the brain storage thing comes in) he started to tell me that they were the brace roots of the corn that helps to hold them up when it gets windy. OK, I do remember him telling me that one time. But if you really look at these roots, they are kind of cool. So I was checking the whole reason why corn has these roots on the Iowa State University Extension page and there is a whole lot about corn that I didn’t know.The one thing on the page that was pretty interesting was this information: “Plants spend considerable energy (sugars from photosynthesis) to grow and maintain the root system, therefore growing large roots will usually be at the expense of crop yield.” I would never had guessed that. I would have thought the bigger the roots, the better the corn. Oh well, either way these brace roots are pretty cool and I really have to try to pay more attention!

Picture of the brace roots of a corn stalk

Another type of roots that I was checking out today was an apple that William had for lunch today. He was eating this apple when he realized that the seeds inside of it were all rooted and started to grow. Now I’ve never seen that before either, and after I took a picture of it I wrapped it up in a wet paper towel to keep it moist until I plant it.

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Still out picking rock

Posted on July 8, 2013 by farm2011

It’s July 8th and some people we heard are still planting corn. Can you believe it? Well, Daryl was able to get all our crops in, but we are still picking rock. We got around 6/10 of rain during the night, and with the temperature in the 90’s, it’s been a welcome relief for the crops. So tonight we thought we’d try to get some more rock picked up in the bean field. I think with all the crazy weather that we had this spring, it really brought all the rocks to the service. Well, anyway it sure seems like that. Our mission tonight was ‘to only pick up the ones that will give us trouble’ – that’s what Daryl said. After throwing in some lasagna for supper into the oven, off we went. The lasagna would take an hour to bake.The temperature during the day was in the 90’s and it sure didn’t seem to have cooled down much tonight. But we were only going to pick for an hour and it really needed to get done. We didn’t have any trouble finding rock and man we were sweating. We were sweating so bad that when you bent down to pick up the rock, sweat was just running off your face and dripping on the rocks. Yea, not really a good look, but it was just us out in the field so I guess it’s not so bad. Finally our hour was up and we didn’t want to add any more rocks to the trailer because it was getting pretty heavy by now, so we headed home. Now you know when you’re really dirty when you have to wash yourself off at the water hydrant BEFORE you take a shower 🙂 . Our lasagna was done and I made apple dumplings for dessert. We were all tired when it was time to go to bed and if we can get out in the field just a couple more times this coming week, we should get the majority of all those rocks picked up. Well, at least the trouble makers!

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Feast or Famine

Posted on July 7, 2013 by farm2011

So you probably won’t ever guess what I did tonight. I ended up watering the garden. Can you believe it? We went from having such a mud pile, to now having the plants (what actually are planted in the garden) too dry. So after I watered the flowers around the farm, I dug out the garden hose from the barn and hooked it up to the water hydrant by the chicken house. It doesn’t really reach all the way to the end of the garden, but it’s got a great end nozzle on it that makes it spray water pretty far! It was really getting dark when I was out doing this, so I’m not sure just exactly what got watered and what didn’t. But what I do know is that even with the lack of water that’s been in the garden, the weeds are going strong.

Other stuff that’s going on is that Daryl got the straw round bales moved yesterday into the shed. He didn’t get as many has he was hoping, but at least he was able to get some. Now we’re keeping our fingers crossed that our new seeding of hay will really take off and grow in nice and thick.

We were even able to get in a couple of bike rides this weekend. It’s really getting close to when we’ll be leaving for our week long ride, and after riding today I know that I’m really not ready at all for it! But I’m going to give it my best shot and have a good time! Our bike ride last night was the new bike trail in Decorah and it’s pretty nice. There wasn’t too many people on it when we were there and that was good. We also went to the Fish Hatchery because Daryl said that he never was there before. It’s always fun to go there with someone who hasn’t seen the fish jump when you walk by. I’ve been there a couple of times already, and I still love it when they do that.

Some really big fish at the Hatchery in Decorah

There is a spring that’s also at the Hatchery and it was really flowing when we were there.Then today we went with my brother and another friend and rode on the back roads to Charles City with our bikes. I laughed when Daryl said a bird came down and was hitting his helmet when he was riding. Because that’s what happened to me once and it scares you to death. You just kind of look around and wonder just what in the world happened! You try to act cool, but when it happened to me I know I didn’t have the ‘cool’ part down. But we eventually made it to Charles City for dinner and we ere surprised that there was a car show going on. We heard that there was around 100 entries. They really had a nice turn out for it, but with the weather at 91 degrees and with a good wind, we just did a walk through and headed back home after dinner. We did take the time to stop and visit with a couple of people that we knew. It was a fun weekend, and we sure got a lot accomplished.

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Bike Ride and baling

Posted on July 6, 2013 by farm2011

It is beautiful outside. Maybe a little windy, but really really nice. Daryl is out raking the oats that he cut the other day. I found out that he cut it kind of green he says, and was planning on leaving the oats on it. Then he wants to have it round baled. Our neighbor has a round baler so he’s hoping that he’ll be able to find him today to get it put up while it’s still fit. As for me? Well I’m putzing around the house and farm this morning. I watered my flowers and I’m so surprised how well they’re doing. I did buy some, but I also grew a lot of them from seed in the green house. I’m quite shocked to be honest. And I’m cleaning and doing laundry. Nothing too exciting. This afternoon we’re planning on going for a bike ride. Our ‘big’ bike ride is 2 weeks away – AAHHH! Up to yesterday, we might have had 10 miles in. But we did go yesterday evening and it wasn’t as bad as we were thinking it was going to be. The bad part isn’t really the riding, it’s just getting your backside used to the bike again. But I’m sure it’ll as work out.