They're everywhere . . .

Lately, the skies around here have looked a lot like this a great deal of the time (I have quit counting how many days in a row of rain):

On a hot summer day, I would almost welcome clouds like that; they mean a big shift in temperature is coming . . . hopefully for the better. But we may have just seen a few too many of these lately.


At least the rain makes somethings grow and bloom. Just in time for Memorial Day as usual the irises are in full swing. Somebody who lived in our house a long time ago like irises, and as required with them, they get dug up and spread around a little more every couple of years. So now they're pretty much everywhere, and we are blessed by their colors during a dark, rainy week.



Light purple:

Dark purple like a royal robe:

Mauve and burgundy . . . like a fancy coat and dress:

Bright yellow, like lemon meringue and sunshine:

And every year I get excited knowing that soon I will get to take this picture, all red, yellow, and purple . . .

This year the purple is a little lacking . . . the dame's rockets are not hardly there for some reason. A couple of years ago it looked like this:

Which makes me a little sad, that it is has changed. Really though, that's part of loving our own little spot here on earth, and really anything I suppose . . . is knowing that it will change, but loving and finding the wonder and beauty of it still . . .



Here's hoping you have a blessed weekend, and that you take a few minutes to find the beauty and wonder that is your own little corner of the world. Happy Friday!

New Arrivals

As of about 6:20 a.m. this morning we are the proud owners of 26 baby chicks. Picked up from the post office in their little box with holes in it, and the bright orange label that proclaims that the box contains LIVE CHICKS, postmaster please do not expose to drafts, extreme heat or cold. When you get to the post office, they don't have to go searching for your box; they've been spending the last hour with the noisy little guys and will meet you at the door with them if you call ahead.

Now they are settled in the our new brooder box designed by Ryan to take the place of a less than efficient hardware cloth cage we'd been using the last couple of years. For the next few hours, eating, drinking, and trying to peck the print off the newspaper in the bottom of the cage will be all the rage. Then the excitement will wear off, and they will fall into alarming baby chick naps; alarming because one second they're wide awake, and the next second collapsed on the floor, wings splayed, eyes closed. Looking for all the world like there is something desparately wrong, but then 10 seconds later they hop up, seemingly refreshed and ready to take on the world, or at least the water trough :)

 















The other occupants of our garage are not as loud, and are quite a bit larger. Three baby Bourbon Red turkeys have been growing in their little brooder tank for a week now. As you can see, they aren't overly fond of people. And have yet to figure out that they are now too big to hide behind the thermometer. At first I didn't really think they had grown that much, but then I took a good look at them yesterday; they now how good starts of feathers, and have probably gained an inch or so in height since I brought them home last week.


Outside, a new crop of flowers is coming on.

These irises are the ones closest to blooming of the many, many to be found on our property. Closer to the ground are these:

Lily of the valley. This morning showing the heavy dew and spider webs that seem to be covering everything.


Looks like its going to be a beautiful day around here . . . have a wonderful Friday!

Rain . . . again

The rain measured in the above picture occurred in less than 24 hours here on the farm, so spring gardening has come to a halt until the ground can dry out that 2.8" plus 0.5" plus whatever we have gotten in sprinkles the past few days. What is in the ground in the garden already (including the grass and weeds), is soaking it all up, and growing nicely (or too fast in the case with weeds). We are blessed that we live on sandy soil, and seemed to have just missed the complete deluge of 3 to 4 inches that happened just to the south of us the same evening. So things will not take a horrible long time to dry . . . we hope.

Until there are always the critters to take care of. Three baby turkeys living under the heat lamp in the garage. The two pigs who are eating like crazy, and make me sad that I don't have something that needs rooted up . . . they root with vengeance whenever we let them out of their pen. The calves are enjoying lush spring grass and have grown to be almost as tall as me, which is good but now allows them to reach over and slurp on my hair when I'm doing chores, which is not good. At least from my point of view . . . they seem to think its fun.

Random Bits

If I ask you to look at the above photo and pick out the turkey egg, which would you choose? Probably not the tiny one on the far right, but believe it or not that midgit showed up in the turkey pen the other day. All the rest in the photo are average run of the mill brown chicken eggs. Haven't really researched what causes that; since then they have laid 2 perfectly normal looking eggs in the nest. Hate to crack it open to find out what's in it, as its such a neat size, would be fun to joke that we have a hen that lays "bantam" turkey eggs. We're doubting that there is a yolk, probably just white, maybe it was just the result of a turkey oviduct malfunction.


Over the weekend, we did some around the farm spring cleaning . . . putting stuff away, getting equipment ready in preparation for baby poultry, and transplanting peppers and tomatoes from starter kits into pots. Part of putting stuff away was working at salvaging (i.e. pulling nails and cutting off rotton parts) some lumber that was removed from our house when the new roof got put on. I didn't really thing that most of it looked that old, until I started to notice that the garage floor was littered with these:

 



















The old kind of hand cut nails. Wish the 12" wide poplar boards Ryan pulled them out of could talk. And even though parts of the boards had water damage or were split beyond use, we saved enough to be useful in some little project down the line. Saves money, and in a tiny, tiny way preserves a piece of local history.

Now living in the garage, anxiously awaiting their debut in the garden are the tomato and pepper plants. All of these guys got potted out of seed starting packs into these little pots, where hopefully they will only live a couple of weeks. They are really getting too big for the grow light, and will get spindly on us if we can't get them in the ground soon. We planted them too early for this late, wet spring.

The sunshine reflecting off this flower this morning caught my eye. Strawberry blooms finally! I will have to go back in the farm journal and count how many weeks until strawberries now.


And just when I think that barn cats might be somewhat more industrious than the well fed house-dwellers . . . I find them sprawled/snuggled on the hay in the hay shed in the middle of the day, when there's plenty of work to be done like catching mice, moles, etc.

Just Another Monday

I'll give you two guesses as to what city we visited this weekend:

If our photos weren't good clues . . . we visited good, ol' St. Louis. We were in need of a couple of days away from the farm, and knew it was now or not until September as all our baby poultry will be coming soon. We don't think it is nice to try to pawn off all those noisy, needy little guys on family members for a whole weekend, so we try to only take trips before or after their 18 week lives.

We only truly spent 1 day in the city, but enjoyed getting a taste of things, and have a feel of what we want to see the next time we go. We visited Grant Farms, the Dent-Grant historical homestead, Anheuser-Busch Plant, a quick visit of the St. Louis Zoo, and then roamed the park area around the Arch. Neither of us had a grand desire to go up in the Arch . . . it was dizzying just to look up at it. We have to say though, that not having a GPS, the maps provided in the Visitor's Bureau Guide were awesome! We managed to get to everywhere we wanted to go, even when our Google Maps we printed out ahead of time didn't take into account road construction, etc.

But enough of that. Back here on the farm, it's a gray, damp Monday. But there is a suprising spring warmth to the air (there ought to be . . . it is May!). Since everything was already damp, I got the hose out, and scrubbed down the stock tank and cover (being particle board, its a little worse for wear after exposure to water and cattle all winter) that we pulled out of the pasture last night:

And rinsed out some seed starting kits . . . which might be funny since they're just going to get dirty again, but hey if they're coming back in the house, the less dirt the better

And then surveyed the garden, where the peas have finally popped, and are getting ready to reach for their trellis

The older radish seeds that we planted kinda thick, anticipating a poor germination rate . . . well they outperformed our expectations:

The potatoes that I was beginning to think had rotted in the ground are finally showing up:

And the rhubarb is begging me to come pick some, and turn the acidy smelling stalks into some delicious muffins :)

Also . . . the asparagus is up . . . I think it will start appearing on our daily menu soon, and I just glimpsed the buds of some strawberry blossoms this morning.

(A side note . . . sorry the photos are sorta of wierd, I'm trying to figure out if my camera lens has something on it or if my camera just has issues!


Happy Monday!