Happy Valentine's Day!

Wow! I just realized it's been almost 2 months since we've updated our blog! You can definitely tell we are amateurs at this, plus we've been really busy :)

We had a very blessed holiday season, and were able to spend a lot of time with our families. As we moved into January, we worked some more on our living room (but we're still not done), and started to make plans for the 2009 farming/gardening seasons. We inventoried all of our seeds, and put orders in for 2 blueberry bushes and 50 strawberry plants. We are looking forward to growing more of our fruit over the next few years. Sarah has told Ryan if he can't find her in June, to go check and see if she's lying in the strawberry patch, gorging on fresh strawberries (her favorite food!).

In February, we've been moving closer towards making decorating decisions related to our living room. We've already had the laminate flooring picked out for several months, but colors and furniture have been up in the air. We've decided to paint our walls a pale green, and use white trim on the painted walls. On our oak wall we are just going to polyurethane it, and then use antique poplar for the trim. Early in the month we spent a Saturday furniture browsing, and have tentatively decided to go with a dark burgundy Broyhill sofa and loveseat set. We hope to get everything at least ordered by the end of the month, so we don't carry this project into our outdoor work season.

Even though we woke up to snow this morning, the inhabitants of our land are starting to think about spring. Yesterday we spent the morning outside cleaning out the chicken and turkey houses. To make things easier, we let the turkeys and chickens out to roam the yard. We were pleasantly surprised that they flocked together despite their species differences, and were throughly content to stay close to the buildings. Having the extra space seemed to inspire our turkeys to be amorous, and we got to witness the complicated process that is turkey courtship. Afterwards, Thomas, our tom turkey, seemed to be quite proud of himself because he spent the rest of the day displaying, as you can see in this picture.

Yesterday afternoon, we went to pick up a rooster and hen from Grandpa O'Hara. We introduced them to the flock when we got home. The rooster seems to be blending with the flock a little better than the new hen, but we know that it will just take a few days for them to get a new pecking order established. When we got them we had no idea what breed they were, other than Grandpa said they were rosecombs. We did some researching on the Internet, and have come to the conclusion that they are Silver-Penciled Rosecomb Wyandottes, a breed established in the Northeast United States because their small rosecombs made them better able to withstand cold winters. We are very excited to have a rooster back in our flock, and are looking forward to waking up to crowing again. Plus they are truly beautiful birds, and we enjoy the loveliness of our multicolored flock. If we get chicks to hatch this spring, it will be interesting to see what they look like.

Brr . . . It's Cold Outside

Currently it is -3 degrees Fahrenheit in North Manchester, Indiana. Pretty darn cold by Indiana standards. We are celebrating this evening because we finally have electricity to our house after 3 days of not having it.

Friday morning we woke up to an ice covered world. We had electricity when we got out of bed around 5:45 AM but by 8:00 AM ice and strong winds had knocked lines down, and we were in the dark. The photos we are posting tonight were taken that morning before the power went out. We braved falling ice and branches to go outside to check on our chickens, and turkeys, and take a couple of pictures. We were drove back inside quickly by a fierce shifting wind, and THUNDER! As the next band of freezing rain came through we were treated to a very rare lightening and thunderstorm in December, followed by another set of flashes from transformers shorting out in Liberty Mills.

All in all, we are very lucky, and the only damage we have to deal with so far is fallen tree branches. We are looking forward to warmer temperature later in the week to melt the ice skating rink that is our yard.

As The Dust Settles

This weekend, we finished the demolition part of our living room redo, with the help of Sarah's Dad and Mom. Ryan and Dad took down all of the plaster and blueboard on the west wall of our living room to reveal the tongue-and-groove oak sheeting. As you can see from the spotted photos, it was a very dusty process.

After they got the plaster down, and removed all the nails related to the blueboard and plaster, we tried various ways of cleaning up the oak. We tried a palm sander and a wire wheel brush on the drill to try to clean up the surface of the boards without getting rid of the original saw marks. We found that the wire wheel brush on a drill did the best job of cleaning things up, and is fairly quick. After the holidays we hope to get that done to the whole wall, and clean up the plaster on the rest of the walls to get ready to do some finish work. Dad cleaned up and lightly sanded an part of the wall, and then applied polyurethane to give us some inspiration to work from.

Today, we worked on cleaning up the room, and putting our can't live without it stuff back in the living room (i.e. couch, tv, lamps, etc.). We really like the existing tongue-and-groove oak floors, except that they are a pain in the neck to clean because of all the cracks. We are looking forward to the smoothness of a laminate floor, but will miss the old look of the original floor. But hey, it will always be there under the laminate floor, and maybe 25 years down the road when it's time to redecorate again, we'll have more time, money and patience to revive that old floor :)

After we got everything cleaned up and put back, we put up our Christmas tree that we bought last weekend. It's pretty small, only 5 foot, but more than adequate for a room in transition. We hope to decorate it in the next couple of days.

The Beginning

After reading lots of other people blogs, I'm finding that it is a pretty spiffy way to share info, pictures, and whatever with family, friends, and other interested parties. So, here we go . . .

At O'Hara's corner farm we are currently settling into the winter season, and all the holiday partying that goes with it. This evening I am making fabulous smelling stock from the carcass of our first homegrown, free-range, Bourbon Red Thanksgiving turkey. A fairly small turkey by supermarket standards, tipping the scale at 8 pounds, it was nevertheless very flavorful, and provided an overflowing platter of meat for our intimate Thanksgiving dinner enjoyed by my parents, my sister and her husband, my paternal grandparents, and my husband and I. Other homegrown foods at this meal were: sweet potatoes and mashed white potatoes from our garden, and green beans from mom and dad's garden. Everything else was home-made, including cornbread and sausage stuffing, and cloverleaf and cinnamon yeast rolls, and pumpkin pie. We were proud to say that our meal was about 80% locally grown.

After a busy summer and fall, we are enjoying moving into winter with freezers and pantry shelves stocked with our garden's bounty. Since weather no longer favors outside work, we have moved our attention inside, and have decided to refinish our living room. Luckily this does not involve a major remodel, but just removal of wallpaper, repair of plaster, applications of new paint and trim, application of brick veneer to our plastered chimney and installation of a laminate wood floor. We have taken most of the wallpaper down now, and it is exciting to be to start visualizing what the new set-up will look like.

Our "fabulous smelling stock" cooking.