April showers bring more showers in May

It's been mostly miserably grey and damp for the past week and a half or so. Last week, I wasn't feeling well - mostly allergies with a cough and also was a bit depressed because of being sick and getting no sunshine. Whole week was mostly a right-off.

Did get the lawn mowed around the house in the short time between the rain showers. And planted potatoes that something dug up and around. There are some that are showing signs of green leaves growing, so I'm hopeful.

Went to my first farm swap this past Saturday in Glenn Allen, VA at Gilmanor Farm. I got some good advice, a big barrel to make a hog waterer, a rabbit pot pie, a jar of wine jelly, and some contacts for later down the road. I also met up with the woman from whom I bought the bacon seeds and she had picked up a fleece for me from another FaceBook farm friend. It's huge and fluffy and very soft. I can't wait to figure out how to make it into yarn.

The hog waterer building didn't go as planned - several adjustments later, I think the leaks are gone. Now it's getting the damn hogs to figure out how to use it! LOL One of the figured out to keep bumping it with his nose but the other ones were complaining so much that I just went ahead and filled up the trough so they could get a drink.

Sunday morning, Catherine and I went to my friend Valerie's place to check out her LaMancha goats. Originally I thought I wanted Nigerian pygmy goats but after talking to a man at the farm swap about how hard it was for him to milk them because they were so small, I got to thinking about the logistics of an Amazonian-proportioned woman trying to milk a little tiny goat. NaaaaaaahhhhhhH!~ LOL

So my friend said I should get the kinds that she has so of course I wanted to check them out. Catherine had so much fun playing with them. Two of them were copying her jumping around! It was too cute. She really wants goats and now that I've seen how Valerie keeps hers (uses chain link fence panels joined together so she can move the pen around and the goats sleep in igloo type dog houses), I convinced we don't have to set up a permanently fenced pasture for the goats but move them around so they can graze/mow the grass.

My husband and the hogs

Cam was out this weekend scratching the hogs behind their ears. Apparently Martha and William Howard Taft (WHT) both just LOVE to have their ears scratched. WTH loved it so much that he flopped down onto the ground onto his back and had Cam scratch his belly too! It was freaking hilarious to watch.

Martha is the one on the left; she has white front feet. I think that other hog is Abigail. The gilts are noticabley smaller than the barrows but Martha is getting chubby - if she keeps it up, she'll have a ground-dragging belly! :-)

Lots of yard work done this weekend but still no plants in the ground. Kind of grateful for that considering that we had a bit of a frost last night. I think we're safe now though and after I pick up some nitrogen, I'm going to plant some potatoes this week. I also have a ton of tomatoes to get moved out to the garden but I still need to get more beds made. I'll work on that tonight, after I get finished with my day job.

That is, if my elbows can take it.



 

Progress Report

I painted the kitchen! It's a very cheerful aquamarine-ish color named "Woodlawn Charm" which gives no indication of the color. It's on the National Register of Historic stuff and is a color from George Washington's neice's house. He bought her the house - apparently, she was like a daughter to him.

I tried to post pictures of the kitchen on FB but the color doesn't look right and frankly, the countertops have been rather messy with me moving things around so I could paint so when I'm finished with everything (still want to install two more upper cabinets flanking both sides of the window over the sink and install a glass mosiac tile backsplash. But so far, I'm LOVING the look.

The chickens seem to get bigger everytime I go outside. Yesterday, I rented a mega-huge ultra powerful tiller and got about 1/4 acre garden plot tilled up. They LOVED following behind me and snacking on all the bugs that were turned up! Tomorrow I'm going to start digging the beds and paths. Next I'll start moving the vegetable seedlings that are all over the house down into the garden.

I got some soil and compost in my cold frame boxes near the kitchen. I'm going to move some of the herbs and the lettuces in those as they are closer to the house. That way, if I want some herbs for cooking or some greens for a salad, I don't have to go all the way back to the garden.

I got in touch with the previous owner today and she called me. She told me there were pecan and peach trees, maybe an apple tree, and some blueberry bushes on the property. There were also like three dump-trucks worth of garbage and tires that they cleared off the property when they bought it. 200 tires? That's nuts. I'm glad they got rid of that much - we still have a bunch of stuff but in comparison, I'm very thankful.  I asked her about what they did to the house - she said there was only one bathroom (the master) so they added the one in the front entrance way under the stairs as well as the one off of Catherine's room. They also pulled up tons of orange shaggish carpeting and refinished the original hardwood underneath. I have beautiful floors throughout the house; again, another reason to be thankful. One of my neighbors told me that they also are the ones who put the siding on the house and the replacement windows...I'll find out more as I know her. I extended an invitation to come visit whenever she wanted. She said selling the house was a very hard decision because she loved the house so much and she was thrilled to know I love it too.

As I look out my office window (really, the sun room / breakfast nook area) out into my backyard, I can see my chickens pecking and scratching in the grass, and see my hogs rooting around in their pen. I can see at least a dozen type of birds that call this farm their home as well as honey bees, moles, and wasps. Overnight, the combination of warm weather and rain has started all the trees to start greening up and the grasses to grow.

I do love it here.

Birds on the Farm

Since moving here, I have seen the following birds:
Turkey vultures - landed back behind the kitchen and was hopping around - I tried to shoo it away but it just hopped and hopped into the woods. I'm sure something ate it as I think it had a problem with its wing.
Hawks - several kinds just can't identify them from the house.
Doves - have seen them up closer to the road than to the house.
Red-headed Woodpeckers- can see and hear these guys around.
Crows - there are so many that one morning it seemed like it was Crow-mageddon. The squawks were heard up from the creek so loud with so many crows cawing that I was having a "The Birds" moment and ran back into the house.
Blue Jays - they are big and obnoxious but so pretty!
Eastern Bluebirds - one was caught trying to get into my bathroom. Was perched on the ledge when my husband managed to get a picture.
Carolina Chickadees - this one seems to hang out the most in the bushes.
Cardinals - males and females - we have some FAT red dudes hanging out here. They like the pig feed and will drink from their water trough.
Sparrows - they are so small and so colored as to appear as an undulating mass in the brown/green grass.

Snow Days from March 8

It snowed about 6 inches total around the house on Wednesday, March 6th. I was going to cuss the groundhog but really, what kind of person uses a groundhog to predict the weather? I might has well start throwing chicken bones and rune stones around.

School was closed for two days and had a late start this morning. It wasn't too bad because we never lost power and we have a decent sized house so people can avoid one another if need be. The twins actually played nicely together and Andrew played hide and seek and other games with them as well.

If it weren't for the PHI-redaction project from hell for work this week, it would have been just about perfect! :-)

Took some video of the pigs - they will be 8 weeks old on Sunday and they are getting bigger. They all travel together around their area. Although if you startle them, it always seems that three will go one way, and the fourth will go the opposite direction and then look back as if to say "Aw dang it, GUYS?!" 

I have two rubber feed dishes for them to share - I had to get something small enough for them to reach into but tough enough for them not to destroy. Three of them were fighting over one dish while Martha, the smallest, was happily and quietly eating from the other dish, enjoying it all to herself! LOL


 

Random Stuff

Done this week: I built a handrail for the stairs that lead from my office to outside. The home owner's insurance policy is going to be cancelled if we didn't get that and a missing brick repaired on one of the defunct chimneys before the end of the month. I FREAKED out because they sent us a refund of the balance before the policy was supposed to end. So how fun is it going to be to have to get that check deposited so I can pay them again? Yeah not because my closest bank branch is like 50 miles from here. Joy.

Also had the oldest son build me some cold boxes. We used extra lumber lying around the property again and I had taken the 9-paned windows from the rent house for this reason so all I had new were the nails. My design, his labor. He built those while I fixed the handrail.

Recently finished painting the kitchen cabinets. After I put in a new counter, sink, and faucet, I had to do something about the god-awful ugly cabinets. They were painted a baby-shit green with a pearl or metallic glaze?

Like shiny baby shit is a pretty color?

In addition to painting, I popped off the rounded molding detail attached to the faces of the doors and drawers (you can see where they used to be in the picture), filled the nail holes with some putty, sanded, painted, sanded, and painted them bright gloss white and found beautiful coke-bottle green glass reproduction depression glass knobs. Now I'm going to paint the walls a tame aquamarine.

I have seedlings all over the house now - cabbages, cauliflowers, peppers, tomatoes (14 kinds), lettuces, herbs, and onions. I'm trying to get a price to get someone to bring in a dump truck of top soil and some compost (if I can) so I can get the raised beds built. I don't have enough space in the cold boxes for all the plants I'm currently growing. And I have more still to plant but need to wait til their times... :-)

We had snow today, yes the second day of spring was heralded with about a half inch of snow. My middle child grumbled the entire morning. Truth is, the school district has had two-hour delays with less on the ground and this morning I was very surprised that I wasn't woken at 5am ish with call from the school district. The bus driver showed up on time as the roads were clear - another reason the middle child grumbled. He saw the clear road and realized that there would be no turning around.

Since last I wrote I pulled boy twin from school. They were under-programmed to deal with his sensory processing disorder and ridiculous intelligence. It worked fine at first because he was put in a special ed (and these kids were true "speds") class where he was doing nothing. Then he was tested for reading placement and the main special education teacher discovered he was reading with comprehension at the 6th grade reading level. So then they tried to mainstream him and all hell broke loose. As the principal put it, "The honeymoon is over." All his negative behaviors started manifesting - hitting his head, running, screaming, and threatening other people (in this one, he was within his rights - there was one little "extra" sped-ish kid who would just sit and STARE at James - for a kid with sensory issues, that is a giant freaking NO NO and she did deserve a smack up side the head but I never said that to him). So, he's being homeschooled now. He does some math on the iPad, and some handout work that I've found but I think I'm going with the unschool method for him. Normal learning environments don't work for him....the challenge for me is to keep him challenged without frustrating him because he's wicked smart and he's a giant sandy butthole with anger issues at times. I need to find him a social skills class but being out in the middle of bumfuck VA doesn't lend itself to that sort of social situation. He hates writing BUT he will happily take dictation when I need to create lists. He doesn't want to read UNLESS I find subjects that interest him (like ancient China did recently). He doesn't like people much but does like the one boy who's his age and lives right at the end of our driveway so I'll let him invite neighbor boy over whenever he wants to play games and have snacks. I think I'm going to sign us both up for a yoga class in Yogaville. I think I need the exercise and the adult interaction and he could use some grounding in his own body and some techniques for self-calming.

Dinner time with the pigs

Two dinner dishes and three of them are fighting over one. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the fighers, Martha, the littlest, is happily and quietly eating all alone.