Wild Rose Pastures

PFI Conference & Mr. Fix-it

2012-01-16T21:52:00.000-06:00

Last weekend was the annual PFI conference, at which they asked us to present! I love presenting. I know it's weird, but put me in front of a crowd of people and tell me to talk about something and I'm happy.

I know, I really look happy in this picture, don't I?

There, that one's better. Hazel had a ball playing around and trying to steal the show.

We were presenting our business plan to a panel of experts, one of which was a small business financial expert in from Connecticut for the conference.

We got some good feedback and people said our session was good. Hazel did not do well traveling, however. She just really didn't sleep on Friday night at all! It made for a long Saturday.

One of the questions from the audience was something along the lines of asking if we were handy since we were doing things on a shoestring and I'm an engineer. Ha! I laughed out loud. It was very inappropriate. But when I recovered, I basically said that we either didn't do handyman type things, or we bartered product for them. Seriously, our tractor hasn't had an oil change since we got it. It's a miracle the thing runs. But then our dumb soft maple tree tangled its branches in our TV antenna on top of the garage.
This called for drastic measures.

So here's Mr. Fix-it on our garage roof, working it.

Go Ryan Go!

And now we have ABC back. I guess we can be handy when we have to be.

Roosters and Angel Quilt

2012-01-07T21:59:00.000-06:00

Roosters are interesting creatures. Watching our roosters and their hens in our farmyard is a lot like having a fish tank. I don't know what it is about them, but just watching them hunt for tidbits, fluff their feathers, and cock their heads to look at things is fascinating. Everyone who comes on our farm always asks about the roosters, so I decided they needed a blog mention.

This is our first rooster, he's the non-dominant one. He's prettier than our other guy, but really he's a weenie when you get down to it. He's supposedly a Cuckoo Maran, but we think he has some Barred Rock in him too. He doesn't really have much of a posse, and is a bit of a loner most of the time. He was hen-raised (that makes them a tiny bit wilder), and we bought him with a couple of other gals about 2 years ago.

And this is the rooster I call our "stealth rooster." Now, I say that because he really shouldn't be here. He and many of 2010's hens are the Red Star breed, which are a sex-linked chicken breed. This means that when you have chicks, the hens will be red and the roosters will be white. This lets the hatcheries figure out very easily what gender the chicks are, because determining gender on a day-old fluffy chick is really hard. People actually make professions out of doing it.

So do you see how he has a lot of red on his wing? Well, on a baby chick there is a high wing-to-body ratio. So as a chick, this guy looked like a gal. Hence, stealth rooster. He's a big boy, you can see him next to his hens. That's why he's dominant, and he has some wicked spurs on him too.

We don't mind him, though, it's good to have a few roosters around. For the large part, they kind of keep the flock together. I don't think they do much to defend from predators since I never see any battle scars on them, but at least they're intimidating. I know Nermal's kinda scared of him.

This is a quilt top I finished from a commission. I have a gal at work who has a quilt like this for her son and wanted one for her daughter. The hardest part of this was just that the small calico prints aren't really in style right now so I had trouble finding fabrics that were the same style as her existing quilt. The blocks themselves were simple, and there's some handwork for the angels' heads and halos. Each angel is a 6" block and the sashing is 2". My client (?) says she'll have her mom do the quilting, so this will probably go to her some time in the next couple of weeks.

I had two extra angels who didn't really fit in the main quilt, so I made a little doll quilt/wall hanging for her daughter. I think it's cute! And if I ended up machine quilting the big quilt (the original is hand quilted), I think I'd do something like this with the clouds. But I'd make the clouds a little bigger and I'd mark them out ahead of time so they end up in balanced locations.

Lastly, Hazel pictures! These were taken by my dad and brother while we were in California for Christmas.

Here I'm putting Hazel in her Christmas dress as she plays with her uncle David. David had this cute playhouse that is used to pack the solar cell kits his company makes. They decided to make their packaging also functional instead of a waste of a bunch of cardboard. So much fun!

She also figured out how to do somersaults there, but hasn't really done any since.

And I love this one. These Mardi Gras beads became a new favorite toy (they came back with us), and my brother really has an eye for photography. Love the way he composed this shot!

Finger Paint & Failed Houndstooth

2012-01-01T21:00:00.001-06:00

A few days ago, I made finger paint using an online tutorial. Oh my gosh, so much fun! Finger paint, like play-dough, is a magic material. It goes from liquid to proper consistency on the stove and is super easy and cheap. Love it!

Now that we have the magical internet at our fingertips for recipes, I don't think I'll buy finger paint or play dough again. I did just buy some icing coloring (which is more concentrated than liquid food coloring and is a gel) and I think that will make colors brighter next time. Although Hazel's favorite part of finger paint was when I would take a cloth and wipe it off her hands. Toward the end of the activity she kept dipping her fingers in the paint and coming straight over to me for me to wipe it off.

Before I made my Houndstooth table mat for a gift exchange...

... I tried a different method and had a bit of a fail moment.

It was generally concluded (by my quilting compadres) that although this was not houndstooth, it was cute in its own right. So off it went in the mail as a Christmas gift! Waste not, want not, right? Hopefully its new owner does not mind the distinct lack of houndstoothness that defines its existence.

Year End 2011: How are we doing? & Lamb Chops

2011-12-29T00:22:00.000-06:00

I get this question all the time: How are you doing? And I don't mean psychologically or health-wise (although people are usually courteous enough to ask that too); I mean our business. So I feel close enough to all of you (and know most of you personally since that seems to be who reads this blog) that I'm going to share a little.
It's been a rough year this year, as some of you know. We had 100% losses in our first two batches of broiler chickens and only about 5 layers survived from the 50 or so we started with. We also had TINY turkeys with an average weight of 8.2 lbs.

This is a picture of our ~~milk crate~~ hospital pen, there is a chicken in there in the middle of the shot, halfway into a cup holding feed. That's about as big as they got from that first batch.
I know it sounds like I'm a little grim, sorry about that! I'm trying to be hopeful and look forward to this year when our brooder will be in our new chicken building!

This should help with the disease problems, which were a large portion of our losses.

Ok, so now for some numbers. If numbers want to make you want to hurl, just scroll down a little for pictures of my first lamb chops and Hazel!
2011 is the first year I was in charge of record-keeping and it's also the first year we're following the Schedule F form for taxes in our expense calculations. This is a HUGE improvement, so before this year's numbers I don't guarantee any of it (and I'm not really guaranteeing this year's either).
In 2008, our first year on this farm, we had $7800 in sales and $6500 in direct expenses for those sales. Then there's a bunch of supplies and fencing and capital stuff and all that rot for a net loss of $820.
In 2009 we had $10800 in sales and $8000 in direct expenses. After all the other stuff including a $9000 fencing and water system (of which about half was reimbursed by Uncle Sam) we had a net loss of $8000. Actually, that's not too bad considering the capital expense.
In 2010 we had $17000 in sales and $13700 in direct expenses. After all the miscellany including $1200 for a tractor swap and $3000 in cows we come to a net loss of $4200.
In 2011 we had $13300 in sales and $9500 in direct expenses. After all the other stuff including $5000 for the new building we have a net loss of $3000.

So how are we doing? I'm not sure. I've never done this new business thing before. I know you're not really supposed to make money until at least year 5 if not year 7 or 8, but I certainly would like to be closer to breaking even than we are. Of course, this is without taking out truck mileage or accounting for labor (that's free, right?). This year I think we would have made money even with the building expense if our turkeys had been "normal" and our chickens hadn't died in droves. In the spirit of the end-of-the-year wrap ups, I'm going to try to put 2011 behind us and look forward to 2012!

Are you interested in this info? Or is it just TMI and everyone scrolled past it?

Now, as promised, here is a picture of the lamb chops I cooked up!

They were rubbed with a mint sauce/rub, and served with some golden potatoes. Totally completely awesome. They practically melted in our mouths. Ryan suggested I cook some because until now we've just sold them without ever having made them! He's right, of course. Here's the whole rack, in a less presentation conscious arrangement:

We may not be making money yet with our business, but I tell you the perks are un-freaking-believable!

And now for the Hazel pics of the day. We were folding laundry and tossed a Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) T-shirt on her. Ryan wears these constantly and has 4 or 5 of them. So here's our future practical farmer:

We're going to the PFI conference in a couple of weeks, I'll try to remember to report in on it.

I think you are probably aware we just had Christmas. Therefore, we need an obligatory opening presents pic of the munchkin.

Lucky you, we even got Nermal in the shot!

Christmas Dress, Edie's Quilt, & Giant Turnip

2011-12-14T22:38:00.000-06:00

I decided to try my hand at making Hazel a Christmas dress this year using a tutorial on The Cottage Home. Success!

Love it.

I'll change a few things if I make this dress again to make it fit better, but overall I'm satisfied. Hazel did a little dancing for me to help show it off.

And some kitty chasing. I admit I did some photoshopping to make the horrendous mess that is my living room less obvious. Forgive me.

Here's the dress by itself.

And the back. Satin really is a pain to work with!

I made a little rosette embellishment using the tutorial at Craftaholics Anonymous and french horn button I have kept for at least 13 years. Apparently it was waiting for just this occasion! This embellishment actually pins on so I can wash the dress without the rosettes fraying.

My next craft o' the month is the quilt for our quilt guild president. Every year the previous president of the guild gathers blocks from guild members and makes a quilt to show appreciation for the current president's service. So now that I've given Edie her quilt, I can show it here!

This is a wall hanging, and I decided to go a little funky on the profile. I'm not sure why, it just struck me as right. All those little inside corners are no fun to bind, though! I'm so glad there is an internet that I could look up how to do it, it wasn't immediately intuitive.

I asked for my guild ladies to give me earth tone blocks to match Edie's decor. I hope she doesn't think the funny profile is too strange!

So now it's quiz question time. What happens if you plant turnips in July, they are pretty happy all summer, and then you forget to harvest them until December?

Answer: You get this!!

Giant turnip! This thing was as big as Hazel's head. Apparently I'm not as horrible at gardening as I think I am.

Hazel was terrified of this thing. We got her to touch it once, but then she went and hid behind Mommy, like it was going to jump out and bite her.
Killer turnip!

Handmade Gift Exchange and Xmas Wreath

2011-12-04T20:49:00.001-06:00

Twice a year the sweet gal at Craftaholics Anonymous hosts a Handmade Gift Exchange. This is super fun, and this is now the second one I've done. My partner was from the blog Who Makes up this Craft, and she sent me a 9x13" baking dish with my last name etched on it! So cute! I didn't take a picture, but hopefully she will and post about it. If not, I may do so. So here is what I sent her (minus the creamer and sugarer, they are for scale)

She told me she liked houndstooth, so I went with a traditional Christmas candle mat.

This is actually my second attempt at this thing. My first houndstooth, while cute, was not houndstooth. The ratio of the small triangles to the squares was way too small, so I ended up with something very funky looking. The gals at my quilting retreat told me they liked it just on its own merit, but they agreed it wasn't houndstooth. I may post it in a later set of projects if I remember. The whole project is about 10" square, and I also quilted the outside border in gold thread. Doing that reminded me what a PAIN it is to quilt with gold thread! Some company really should figure out a better way to make that stuff, because it is such a nightmare.

It must be Christmas craft time, because I also threw together a wreath from some cedar branches Ryan brought me when he cut down our Christmas tree.

I'm pretty please with how this turned out, it's made just with wire and cedar branches, and a little ribbon for color. I didn't use a wire wreath frame so it's not the world's roundest wreath, but I'm OK with that. I will give a word to the wise: if you make your own Christmas wreath out of cedar branches, wear gloves! I picked tiny little bits of cedar needles out of my fingers for three days. This is one of those little things on my mental bucket list that also fits into my personal "things a farm wife should do" category. There's just a big part of me that thinks a traditional-minded farm should have a traditional Christmas wreath!

Not Easy Being Green

2011-11-26T13:52:00.000-06:00

The building has a new theme song. In soliciting advice on the building color, someone pointed out that in the grand scheme of things, we could actually work toward a cohesive farm color scheme. Now, that appeals to the organized, crafty side of me like nothing else has. So that left us with pink, yellow, or green if we wanted to use the colors in our logo.

With this in mind, green actually made some sense. So Ryan took the little can of paint we had from painting our sign into Menards and had it matched.

I think that was the way to go. I know, lots of people liked the blue, but it really was much bluer in the real world than the picture. Really blue. Crazy blue. Anyone who was here for Thanksgiving can back me up.

We're also thrilled Thanksgiving is over. Thanksgiving is my second favorite holiday (after Halloween) and I LOVE having people over. We had 11 here, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

That being said, I'm always glad when the turkey season ends. Last Sunday was our delivery day and our biggest day of the year. We go to Picket Fence Creamery for their special "Sample Sunday" every year to have our customers pick up preordered turkeys. Here's Ryan helping carry turkeys to someone's car.

We bring the truck with two old chest freezers in the back to most of our drop offs, and this time they started out completely full with lamb, chickens, and (of course) turkeys. Here's what was left after the day was over:

A few chickens, a couple smoked turkeys, and a little lamb. One lady came and added two racks of lamb to her turkey order, bless her! We actually sold more lamb than I expected to, which was great. We get better at orchestrating that day every year, this year was the smoothest of all. The weather was pretty nice, sunny and not too cold. Last year it was freezing, windy, and drizzled all day long. Hazel also behaved very well and enjoyed chasing their farm cats around all afternoon.

And now the Hazel picture of the day. The dryer was making a funny noise, so we were getting into it to clean it out. Turned out we had a broken piece of some overalls between the dryer drum and the support and it was scraping when the drum turned. But it all lead to another little engineer moment for our little one.

Work those pliers, girl!

Blue Dabba Dee Dabba Da

2011-11-20T08:39:00.000-06:00

Ryan painted our new chicken building yesterday. Now, I'm not saying he has bad taste in color, because he doesn't. He just has trouble picking paint colors in a hurry. So he was thinking he could paint the new building approximately the same color as his grandpa's barn. I looked for a picture of that barn to show you, but Google Maps doesn't have streetviews in the middle of nowhere and I don't have any pictures either. Anyway, Grandpa's barn is light blue. Like robin's egg blue, but lighter.

Enter Ryan's interpretation.

He calls it Pepto Bismol blue. When I see this building, I hear in my brain the song "Blue" by Eiffel 65 from 13 years ago (has it been that long????). If you don't know what I'm talking about, their music video is here. This building will have white trim, but right now it's just very blue.

I admit, it's actually growing on me. It's a landmark. But I'm asking you now. Do you think it should stay this blue? Do you think we should paint over it with a much lighter blue? Or should we go get a bucket of barn red paint and just paint it barn red? Ryan and I have decided to "ask the blogs" and see what you all say. So please comment below or on my facebook posting about this blog and tell me what you think! What color should this building be?

Some things are hard to blog about

2011-11-17T22:00:00.000-06:00

Some things are hard to blog about. I will tell you right now that, for your sanity and mine, this blog has no pictures.
Ryan called me tonight while I was writing customer reminder emails (turkey pickups are almost done!!!) and told me, "I need the gun and the bullets NOW." He said he had a 'coon pinned with a stick. His words. So I rushed out there with these items and he had a raccoon half in and half out of one of our traps right outside the shop. He had a big dowel rod (broom handle?) and had it pinned against the wall.
It wasn't moving.
So while I held the stick to "keep it pinned" and Ryan loaded the gun, we contemplated this raccoon's current status. I released the stick a little, and the 'coon didn't move. I poked it. Still nothing.
So yes, my husband called me in a hurry to grab the gun to kill a raccoon that had already had a heart attack or suffocated by the door of the trap or something. He shot it for good measure anyway.
If 'coons weren't such destructive rascals, I'd feel bad about this. But since moving to the country I've realized the little devils are a menace.
Ryan and I joked that this was not something we could blog about, but I decided to do it anyway. After all, this falls into the category of things I just never really considered before moving out into the middle of nowhere!

Farmsitting, Wiring, and Reupholstery Work

2011-11-06T22:40:00.001-06:00

It's been a busy week on the farm! Ryan went on a boy's weekend starting Thursday, so I've been tending the farm for 3.5 days. I know that man is overworked and underpaid, but I'll say it again! I am going to give that man a new job title: Bucket Manager. I learned that the state of our 5 gallon buckets around here are dismal. Half of them can only be used for feed and not water because they have holes in them, and most of the rest are missing their plastic covers for the handles. There are 2 decent buckets on the farm and the rest of the time I spent trying to figure out what to carry in what bucket! It's nuts! So I went to Theisen's tonight and splurged on two new buckets for $6. I meant to take pictures of the various sad and sorry buckets around the farm, but I'm afraid I failed at that so you'll have to take my word for it.

On Monday Ryan had a bit of a run-in with our ram, Hades. Apparently Hades decided he didn't want Ryan around, even though he's usually even tempered and not a problem. I guess Ryan looked askance at one of his ladies, and that was that. Ryan limped for a couple of days, but was otherwise unharmed. Our video baby monitor that was in Ryan's pocket however, now looks like this:

We miss it!

My stepdad has recently been a huge blessing with our new building. It's now almost completely wired (except into the breaker panel), and he has been down here 4 days in the last week and a half working on it!

Here he is putting on the exterior lights.

Here's Ryan fiddling with something, I'm afraid it's pretty cluttered in the building right now with all the tools scattered about.

So now the building has all 4 walls, roof, doors, windows, etc! The soffits are still open and so Ryan is going to shove some foam board up there before we have a local company come cover the inside with spray foam. It's going to be awesome!!
I actually helped quite a bit with the wiring (the lack of heavy lifting makes it something I can do) and had more fun than I expected. Wiring a building was surprisingly similar to wiring a machine at work!

Lastly, every time Ryan leaves for a guy's weekend, I try to tackle something on the home to do list so he feels like he comes home to a house that's better than when he left and so he feels like he can leave when he needs to. So here's this weekend's project!
Ryan has a favorite chair. This monstrosity was actually in the house when we bought it, and he loves it. I failed to take a good "before" picture, so here it is after I took the arms and back off.

People would come over to the house and we would run out of seating around our kitchen island, so I would have to have people sit in this chair. It was embarrassing!

You can see the faded fabric in this one. It's, um, dated.

So here it is after I reupholstered it!

I didn't do much to it, but I just recovered it so that it's clean and fabric actually covers all of the foam. I know, big deal. But I know that he is going to love it! Not to mention, I won't be embarrassed to offer it to guests anymore. At least until he and the cats wear this one out.

Turkey Noises and Barn Quilt Progress

2011-10-27T22:50:00.000-05:00

Turkeys really are interesting creatures. They're fun to watch, kind of like watching an aquarium. But one of the things that always struck me about turkeys is that they make a lot of noises, very few of which even remotely resemble "gobble."
When they are really little, they predictably say, "peep peep peep peep!" Seemingly, always 4 in a row on the same note. Ryan and I now use this noise to indicate distress as one of our inside jokes; there was an occasion in Ikea where Ryan used that noise to mean "oh no, now what?!" and the rest is history.
But when they get older, the first adult noise they make is a bark. Then they make this contented little trill noise when they are content. In this video you can hear both of those noises.

They really only make a gobbling noise when they are in full adulthood, and even then it's rare.
I took this video today, so you can see that the turkeys are growing well! It's been a very nice, mild fall and that has helped us. We process the first batch of these in a week or so! I think we're ready to be done with this season, Ryan especially needs a break from constant running around.

On the quilting front I have things in progress, as usual, but the barn quilt has looked like this for about the last two weeks:

The yellow part is all painted, and the beginning of the pink is masked off, but that's it. It's not really an "I'm too busy" situation, more of a mood thing where I just haven't felt like finishing it. It's amazing how much dust comes down from our gravel road, it is well documented on the perfectly white paint. As a reminder, some day this thing will look like this:

Although the green is a little darker because it's what is left over from painting our sign.

And as is my recent habit, I end with a Little One picture (or two) of the day. Here she helps Daddy pick up fiberglass posts. The dog in the foreground is my mother's, we were watching it for a couple of weeks while she was traveling.

Our farm absolutely runs on these posts. Along with a little electric polyline, these things carry current all over the farm as well as hold the single wire to keep the cattle in (most of the time). Until they get too hungry and "storm the gate."

Cast of Characters: Nermal

2011-10-11T22:01:00.000-05:00

Nermal is our farm kitty. He was raised on the farm where we buy our feed and he charmed his way onto our farm. In some ways, he's a totally normal cat.

He's a little destructive. Here he got ahold of an egg carton.

Suffice to say, there wasn't much of that egg carton left.

He's also a bit of a climber.

Here he is on the top of the bathroom door.

Then, of course, he likes to be in the middle of any quilt in progress. Quilts I'm working on are there expressly for his pleasure.

Even barn quilts in progress apparently count, as evidenced by his actions yesterday.

As of tonight, I now have the yellow painted on it, but as soon as it was marked up Nermal climbed aboard.

Somehow, he just knows.

Date Night & Diaper Bag

2011-09-27T22:39:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago Ryan and I had date night. I was thinking, "Ah, we could go do something together. Relax. Get away from farm work for a couple of hours."
So what did we do for date night?
We picked up a hay trailer. From an hour's drive from home. And we had a babysitter for about 3 hours.

Sigh. Do you see the red thing in the foreground here? That's it. It really is pretty nice and well built, but we'll just chalk this up to things I never expected to do on date night before being a farmer's wife.
On a related note, this picture is a little out of date and at this point we actually have steel on the roof of the building! You can stand in the building, in the rain, and not get wet. It's exciting.

Tonight I finished a new diaper bag for my daughter! I loved my old one, and I'm forever grateful a friend of mine made it for me, but I decided it was too small and was getting a bit beat up. So I got the pattern "Case Closed" from Stitchin' Sisters, and this is my result!

It might be too large, but I like it. After I packed it with what was in the other diaper bag, it didn't seem too big anymore... I modified the pattern heavily. The three pockets on the front exactly hold the pyrex 1 cup containers I use to transport her homemade baby food, which is a very custom need for us.

I tried not to go overly baby-like and not too floral, but Ryan may still feel it's a little feminine. Ah well, if he doesn't like it, he can make one!

I like the end result for a diaper bag, but I'm not sure how much I'd recommend the pattern. It needed a lot more diagrams, and the ones it had weren't very clear. I've definitely worked with better patterns, although this was my first bag I've ever made that had real structure and a zipper, etc.

What do you think of it? Too feminine for any future boy babies, or OK?

Calves and Hot & Cold spots

2011-09-25T18:40:00.001-05:00

It's calving season here, and as of writing this I think we're up to three.

I say I think because calves are kinda little. They're shorter than the grass the cows are currently grazing, and they have a tendency to wander off. Can you tell there's actually two in this picture?

I think.

The other night Ryan and I were walking the field right after dusk and it was perfect weather to find the warm spots and cool spots on the farm.

This is one of those things I never knew was real until I owned 40 acres. There are noticeable warm and cool spots in the landscape! And I mean they're about 100 ft in diameter and are probably 5 degrees cooler or warmer than the ambient temp.

It's really pretty cool. I kept getting all excited when we hit a warm or cool patch and I'm pretty sure Ryan thought I was nuts.

As usual, I'll finish up with the little one picture of the day. Ryan always wanted to throw dry ice in a bucket of water because he heard it was cool. We had some left over from our locker date, so we did.

Our little lady grabbed a stick and spontaneously started stirring. All I could think was "double double toil & trouble." Halloween costume idea perhaps?

Slopes and Charity Quilt

2011-09-21T21:19:00.000-05:00

We had another work day with some friends coming out to help with the building, and Ryan got himself in a bit of a hurry on Saturday morning getting ready for people to come out. He was frustrated with the water trailer not wanting to come off the truck hitch, and then when he finally got it off he misestimated the slope and we had a bit of a mishap.

We had a bunch of steel for the building roof in the back of the truck, so we couldn't have the tailgate up. Everything (500 lbs of feed, tools, 20+ 2x4's, etc) including the 20 sheets of steel slid down out of the truck and onto the grass.

Our friends, and their iPhone camera, were just in time to help pick up.

Do you see the cow in the background of this one? At least the weather was really nice, usually this sort of thing happens at dusk in a snowstorm in December.

Then we got down to the business of building. Jim and Ryan framed windows and doors while Drew trimmed the rafters to the right length and Michael, Adam, and I put purlins on the roof. I actually thought that was kind of fun, apparently childhood monkey bar skills have application in the "real world!" This pic was taken by Adam from the roof while Ryan and Michael go fetch tools.

I recently did some scrap organization in my quilting area and decided I hadn't made a charity quilt for the year yet.

This one will go to Quilts for Kids, which is the charity my guild has picked for the year. It's about 36" square, and I have to say I like this one better in person. The border fabric doesn't look quite so busy in person somehow.

Last for anyone who stuck with me this long, Ryan sent this picture of my "Little Engineer" to me at work. He was repairing his chair in the kitchen, and she got the idea that she needed to figure out how to use the screwdriver too.

Sorry the pics are fuzzy. Ryan wanted to capture the moment so he didn't have time to focus, etc.

Totally made my day.

Morning Glories and Peach Jam

2011-09-03T14:46:00.000-05:00

I don't have a green thumb. It's just something I have to get over and admit to myself and the world around me. I know as a Farm Wife (yes the caps are on purpose) I should have a fabulous garden, both flowers and veggies. But those of you who read this blog or know me (or both) know that I just don't. So instead, I love my volunteer flowers. The ones that reseed themselves, don't have to be watered, and are pretty.
Go Morning Glories!!

While the blue ones may be nicer, these purple ones just keep coming up and taking over my porch. I'd be annoyed if they weren't so pretty! So instead, I encourage them. And by encourage, I mean in the fall I spend time on my porch with my daughter picking the seeds off the vine and tossing them back into the garden.

So as I posted a few months ago that our peach tree actually bloomed! It's taken a beating in the snow storms of the past few years, so it didn't make very many peaches. But I did google a white peach jam recipe, and found this one on a blog:
Peach Jam
So I made it today!

Yum. I've tried some, and it's delish.

Lastly, last weekend we went to Kansas City for my high school best friend's wedding. It was totally awesome, and then on Sunday we went to the Kansas City sculpture garden. So I'll close with some pics from the trip!

The giant shuttlecocks are one of the more famous sculptures in KC, although I don't think my daughter saw the artistic significance...

The sculpture in the background is called "sheep piece" because the sculptor's sheep liked to climb all over it. Love it!

Marquardt 102 beats Fisk 101

2011-08-24T22:38:00.000-05:00

I have a phrase I like to use when I do home repair around here:
"Marquardt 102 beats Fisk 101."
It's kind of like the way classes in college are numbered. If English 101 is the intro class, English 102 will be just the tiniest step above it. Not the intro, but no expert level. So our house was previously owned by people named Fisk.
They were do-it-yourself-ers.
I say that with a bit of tongue-in-cheek because, well, in many ways I'm just as cheap about my home repair.
So there are some things that they did that are.. um... less than perfect. Not that they started with perfect materials mind you, since this house was built in 1868. But here's a good example.
This is our coat closet:

It is a folding door with a rail at the top. When we moved in, if you closed the door all the way the little guide would often slide off the rail. This would be Fisk 101. So I employed all of my handyman style skills to fix it.

Can you see my fix? Here it is from the back.

Oh yeah, check that bad boy out. That's a shim that's been broken off so it's not too long. I unscrewed the rail on one screw, slid in a shim, and rescrewed the rail in through the shim. (rescrewed; is that a word? Hmm... spell check doesn't think so.)
And that would be Marquardt 102. Pretty good, huh?

So recently we decided we hated the storm door on our house. Chances are 90%+ that it was purchased at an auction for $20 or less and it showed. Darn thing was a pain in the keyster. (Huh. Keyster is also not a word. I'm full of these tonight!)
Here's the old door

What you can't see is that I've ripped out the bottom screen because our cat clawed it to death. If you've never seen a screen clawed to death, consider yourself lucky. It's ugly. Not to mention the screen totally loses its purpose in life. I've also already replaced the broken latch on it once, and the entire open edge was coming off so it made a horrible cracking noise every time the door opened and closed.

Turns out if you replace a screen door, it's not a super easy process. It involves, like, drill bits and stuff.
But two days later, here's what we have!

I feel the need to say "voila!" Maybe this one was actually complicated enough to be Marquardt 103. Or even Marquardt 201. Anyone want to hire a contractor? No job too small!

So I invite you to share. Do you improve the things the previous idiot did to your house with things that are only borderline less idiotic? Or do you hire someone?

Lady in Red & Talking to Sheep

2011-08-15T22:21:00.000-05:00

As I helped Ryan herd sheep tonight--this consists of standing in a spot he dictates and just being generally intimidating--I looked down at my red shirt and red polka dot farm boots and thought to myself, "this is probably not what Chris De Burgh was thinking when he sang 'Lady in Red.' "

While I do actually own a red dress that cleans up ok, this is not it.

My daughter's newest, best trick is that she makes sheep and cow noises. Not "baa" and "moo" but "me-eh-eh" and "maaahw." Altogether more accurate. Considering her current words are "Mama," "Daddy," "ball," and an occasional "num-num" in reaction to food she likes, she's soon going to make more animal noises than words. She's working on turkey noises too...
But here's a video of her talking to the sheep for your viewing pleasure.

Bad Summer Night Poetry

2011-08-01T21:54:00.000-05:00

There's a party in my garage,
and everyone's invited.
Turkeys, chickens, garden tractor
coexist united.

In amongst the concrete mixer,

a brooder design is working well.

But can you tell turkey from chicken

in a building hotter than heck?

Cicadas and crickets harmonize
in a sky marbled pink.
They tell me "go and get a camera!
Then just stop and think."

So I leave you with the sound
of an Iowan midsummer night.
It's time to go in and wash the eggs
before I get a mosquito bite.

Garden Update & Weathervane Table Topper

2011-07-24T22:54:00.000-05:00

At the beginning of the season I said I'd keep you updated on my garden, so here we go. As a reminder, this is what my garden looked like at the beginning of the season.

Cute, huh? Well, I have to preface this next picture by telling you that this is actually a better-looking garden than any I've ever had. Keep that in mind. I took this picture of my garden tonight.

There are wax beans on the left here, and some sage on the bottom right. I think there may also be thyme in here...

This is the end of our broccoli (we actually harvested two little heads of these!).

This bed was largely spinach. It was yummy, I just didn't really replant it. There's some zucchini in the top left.

There's a stripped out tomato in the back of this one. I think bugs got it.
So the moral of the story is that I'm just not very good at this gardening thing. But I'm still planning on retrenching. I'm not giving up on gardening yet. Someday I'll be that 60-year-old farm wife with a wonderful garden. I'll let you know when that happens.

I also finished up the little tabletopper that was my giveaway prize for a little giveaway I hosted in March. It will be the design I put on my barn quilt whenever I get that going.

Traditionally I would hang it this way (square), but I'm contemplating hanging it on point, like this:

Do you have thoughts?

Lastly, for those of you who want more pictures of my little girl on this blog (Don, I'm talking to you), here I am reading to her. We do this a lot, and she will grab a book and then climb into my lap and sit down. This particular book is from my childhood and is about moving, but the little girl in it has a little gray cat on almost every page. Therefore, my daughter has decided that this is the "find the kitty" book and she finds that little gray cat on every page of the book.

Raspberry Hunting & Poll Ending

2011-07-04T15:40:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Ryan mentioned to me that there was a small patch of raspberries in the pasture that he had the sheep graze around that might be ready for picking. His directions to find it went like this: "You know that one big soft maple with the overhanging branch that's about to fall off? Follow that branch and it's the next tree west of there."

After a couple of clarifying phone calls to Ryan, I found the small patch.

I had the baby on my back in her Chicco carrier for a little outdoor adventure.

This picture's actually a little out of date, but it's the one I have on file.

Anyway, we got to the raspberry patch and found a very unsurprising surprise: Poison Ivy. It's all over the place on our farm. So now it's time for a little game! Can you spot the poison ivy vs. the raspberry plant? Hint: the poison ivy has a 3 leaf pattern. Oh, wait. So does the raspberry plant.

Well? How did you do?

Here's the raspberry leaves:

And here's the poison ivy.

So the poison ivy and the raspberry and I played a game of "touch this, not that," only complicated by the whole "raspberries have thorns" thing. Everything good is worth working for!

A meager harvest, but completely delicious. There weren't enough to make anything with them, so I just ate them. Perhaps in the future our patch will be big enough to make jam!

On a separate note, my poll ends tonight and so far it looks like my readers want to know more about my farm and home life. I definitely think people who read this blog at this point generally know me personally, so they are more interested in my daughter than I thought people might be. I will try to adjust accordingly. In the meantime, thanks for reading!

Lily Season Begins & Poll

2011-06-27T22:53:00.001-05:00

It's my second favorite time of year for flowers: Lily Season! I love lilies, but they are second to lilacs. Most of my heirloom bulbs will bloom a little later (they are budding now), but the "cheaper" bulbs are working it right now!

This lovely red-orange specimen was elected to adorn my kitchen island. Just one stem and a few hosta leaves and I have an arrangement.

Side note: if you've never tapped your hostas as a source for arrangements, you are missing out. They add wonderful texture, last forever, and it's hard to feel guilty about taking a few choice leaves because there are so many!

Also, because I can't stay on one topic for too long, I thought I'd note that Ryan and Jim and Michael C. got another wall of the building up this Sunday. Yay!

I didn't help this time. Sorry boys. I'm kind of a mess with a hammer anyway (my motto the last time I helped was: "Whoops. Is this close enough?" Answer: No. Pretty much never.)

Last point today: I've put a poll on my blog off to the right, it will close at midnight on the 4th of July. You can put in multiple answers (you don't just have to pick one) and the question I'm asking is: What do you like to read about on this blog? I'm just kind of curious if there are things I should focus on. I think about blog thoughts a lot, but sometimes I second guess myself and decide not to post because I don't think you'll be interested. So please be honest and I'll work on posting more of the things people who read this thing want to read. If what you like best isn't on there, just leave me a comment on this post.

Those of you who read with a reader (like Google), please please please go to my blog and fill in the poll. If you're reading this, I want to know what you like no matter who you are.

Side note again: Google has a cool "next" button you can add to your browser that lets you see new blogs on their home blog page. It's in the options somewhere and I have discovered I love it far better than RSSs because I get to see people's actual blog.

Ok, before I side note again, ta ta for now!

June Exchange & Another Quilt Relish

2011-06-23T23:17:00.000-05:00

I signed up for a June Craft gift exchange thing this year, from the Craftaholics Anonymous blog. Not quite sure what possessed me, but I thought it would be fun. Anyway, it's in the mail now, my gifting partner was someone who likes all the owl patterns that are hot right now and is also a Scentsy dealer. So I made her a candle mat from an original pattern.

The owls are appliqued with button eyes, the rest is all free motion quilted in.

I also finished another one of the Modern Quilt Relish patterns, like the one in my cubicle quilt. I have to say, these patterns are very well written. I did cut the size in half, however, just because I didn't really want anything bigger. There is a pencil in the picture to give a sense of scale.

To anyone who is looking for farm news, I apologize for no update on that front! It continues to be a very rough year here. Our energizer is back from the manufacturer and we now have fewer sheep, but we're still having chicken problems like crazy. Our broilers just aren't growing like they should and the layers are falling prey to clever raccoons and foxes. My co-workers are telling me that we should just set traps for the coons. This is funny. Ryan actually tied the bait to the trigger and the next morning the bait was gone and the trap was still untriggered.
Crazy coons.

Barn Raising & Cubicle Quilt

2011-06-12T00:48:00.000-05:00

Let me start by saying that people are awesome. I expressed a plea at work in our Friday morning staff meeting for help with framing our building, and lo and behold two of my co-workers were game! One brought his fiancé and we also had Jim out to help. Our farm would not run without that man and this was yet one more thing where he knew all sorts of useful things!!

Barn Raising! Greg is in the gray, Drew is in the orange, Melanie is in the green, Ryan is on the left in the blue and Jim is on the right in the blue.

By the end of the day we now have the front and back walls up, which is awesome. We also learned a bunch about how to do this in the future, which was super valuable. Knowing how to frame is another one of those skills that we city kids just don't know.

Ok, so it's not truly a barn but is a 20 ft x 30 ft chicken building to be a layer house and brooder. We're using a blueprint written by Kasco poultry in 1943. We went back to that old blueprint because it's from a time when people did something closer to what we do.

A couple of weeks ago I also finished a small quilt for a wall hanging, and when I started it I was planning to use it to start on Christmas gifts, etc. Instead I liked it so much that I decided to hang it in my cubicle at work, at least for a little while. I refuse to feel guilty about that because, well, I just do. The one that was there had been there for almost 2 years already.

It's a pattern from two ladies in Ames who write modern quilt patterns and it was super fun to make! The pattern is Modern Pickle Relish and their pattern shop can be found here. I will also note that it was a very well-written pattern, and I loved that it still has a very modern feel to it even though I used civil war reproduction fabrics.

Chinese Balance Quilt & Escape Artist Sheep

2011-06-04T15:40:00.001-05:00

I finished another small quilt today, it's intended to be a baby quilt for my next baby (no, I'm not expecting yet. I'm just a plan ahead type person).

With my first baby, I found that a quilt that was about 27" by 33" is just right for a "traveling" quilt. It fits my carseat, is the right size for a changing table, and fits in a grocery cart seat (if I don't just leave the baby in the carseat). This is my daughter's traveling quilt:

But back to the topic at hand. I'm calling this newest quilt "Chinese Balance" because the focus fabric is this awesome rainbow phoenix fabric that I found in Madison, WI a couple years ago at Gayfeather Fabrics. Then I hand quilted it with dragons. In the Chinese culture phoenix represent a feminine aspect and dragons are masculine.

Then in each of the 4 squares I quilted a different Chinese character, meaning Phoenix (male), Phoenix (female), Dragon (common form), Dragon (royal form). Hopefully someone who really knows their Mandarin won't see it and totally laugh, but I really like the way it turned out!

On the farm front, the sheep are currently getting out daily. Our good energizer is back at the manufacturer (broken), so the backup energizer is... well... less than intimidating. Here the sheep are snacking on my front yard.

I think Ryan might be ready to just shoot the lot of 'em!

Weaning

2011-05-31T19:37:00.000-05:00

So Ryan has been trying to sort sheep in our new animal handling system. See below.

However, as he himself said in reaction to this picture, "What you can't see here is the swearing."

He's not kidding.

Luckily my daughter can't hear him either.

But she likes to watch him.

She actually watched him mow the lawn for 45 minutes without moving. Pretty good for a year-old child.
But back to my story.

Ryan got the sheep sorted out (mostly) and into different areas of the farm (also mostly). In the "keep" herd were a couple of lambs who are big enough to be weaned, but their mamas haven't forced the issue yet. We usually let them make that decision, but not today.
So in his infinite wisdom, Ryan put the "keep" herd next to our house.
Right next to our house.
As in, one wall of the fence is practically the wall to our house.

Did I mention it was super hot out last night so I had the windows open? Those crazy lambs cried all night long.

Word to the wise: freshly weaned lambs do not belong 10 feet from the open window of a house on a summer night.

Gardening & Heavenly Scent

2011-05-15T21:53:00.001-05:00

My quest to actually have and maintain a decent garden this year continues!

So my square foot gardens are going OK, some stuff is even growing. About 80% of my transplants died, so we purchased some more at Theisen's today. The spinach toward the center of the view is from seed, though!

This is the same one of the gardens, I picked it because it looks the best of the four I have planted! Top right has some snap peas, the nice stuff toward the middle is the spinach, top left is zucchini and brussels sprouts, and bottom left is broccoli. I think it's going OK so far!

It is also my absolute favorite time of year for flowers. It has not been a great year for lilacs and the ones I do have are actually fairly dismal. Some day I'll buck it up and order some truly awesome varieties online.

I do have a few and they are blooming now! Mixed with the lilies-of-the-valley, I wish I could just bottle this scent and keep it forever. Yes, I know they make perfumes that try. But they all fail.

I also love putting arrangements in those old-fashioned glass coca-cola bottles. They are just the right size and I think they make charming vases.

Another Banner & Blooming Peach Trees

2011-04-30T11:27:00.000-05:00

On Palm Sunday Ryan came home from church council and told me that our church didn't have an Easter banner. So after I got over my disbelief we didn't have an Easter banner, I went through my fabric stash.

This one is just raw-edge applique for the butterflies and letters, and and I didn't have enough purple to make the background purple so I made the butterflies purple. I think it turned out OK for something I whipped up in a week or so.

I quilted the background with Easter lilies.

I'm also super excited that our peach trees are blooming!!!

Why does this matter so much? Well, we had peaches our first year here. They are white and sweet and scrumptious and are planted right at the edge of their approved agricultural zone. By that I mean a bad winter renders them perfectly healthy, but peachless. So the winter of 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 were bad. I even blogged about it here. They were full of ice and record low temperatures. But the winter of 2010-2011 was pretty normal! Therefore the peach trees are blooming and I'm hopeful. This may be a year with peaches!

Book Review: Precious Norman Honor by A.L. Stumo

2011-04-20T21:55:00.000-05:00

Supporting local can extend to more than just food. So when a friend of mine asked me to review her debut novel, I jumped at the chance! So this is my book review for Precious Norman Honor by A.L. Stumo from Pella, IA.
-----------
While I am not generally a historical fiction reader, I do love young adult novels. Precious Norman Honor takes a slightly different slant on historical fiction by emphasizing the historical before the fiction. Although I thought this would make for a flat, boring novel (not being a history buff myself), I found the opposite was true. Not knowing very much about Medieval castle sieges, I loved realizing that the castle citizens valued even the weeds in the garden for nutritional value while I cheered Maud on in her attempts to see outside her rapidly shrinking world. Stumo does an excellent job of developing relatable characters and throws in some truly unexpected plot surprises. While our heroine Maud does not seem to suffer the most, she sees the suffering of her friends (such as her best friend Rowena) and family through the eyes of a 12-year-old. As I reader, I felt her pain and that of those she observed acutely.
Stumo also shows her literary background with strong imagery threads through the story. Fish are a subtle extended metaphor, and my favorite use of this device is when Maud narrates, "My questions were as numerous as the fish in the Severn River" and later notes, "I sighed as I realized these questions would swim downstream and not be answered." I always appreciate this level of attention to detail in a novel, and Stumo did not disappoint. I would recommend this book for anyone of any age, history buff or no. I am eagerly awaiting her next novel and hope she writes many more to come.
Precious Norman Honor (paperback)
Precious Norman Honor (Kindle)

Other historical fiction young adult books I've enjoyed
The Golden Goblet
Switching Well (sorry this one appears to be out of print; I still highly recommend it!)

Little I-Spy & Home Improvement

2011-04-12T22:57:00.000-05:00

I finished a little I-Spy quilt for a friend last week, she's leaving for Colorado soon and I wanted to give her a going away present. It's just a little one, but I adore I-spy quilts.

Something about them just appeals to me. I tend to make mine nature-themed.

I've also discovered that I have spring cleaning fever. It makes me want to fix things. So starting on about the first of the month, I installed a bannister in our staircase, which previously lacked one.

The baby gate on the landing is actually not for the baby. It's for the dumb pets who like to nap upstairs, then wake up and jump down from whatever perch they are on and wake the baby up. So maybe it is kind of for the baby...

A couple of months ago, I drew up some plans on engineering paper for a spice rack to fit above my oven (yes, I know, you shouldn't store spices above the oven. But that's where I like them and so that's where they go in my house). But my carpentry skills are limited, so I commissioned a friend to make it for me. He got it done last Friday, and I just love it!! Other than fitting my space, I designed it to fit the short little Tone's spices. Has anyone else noticed that you just can't get a good spice rack for those suckers? Everything is too tall and ends up wasting space! Or, you're supposed to transfer the spices from the Tone's spice containers and put them into pretty glass containers that only have certain spices labeled. It's all very silly. So now the chaos that was my tiny spice rack and spice cupboard is beautiful once again. Thanks Paul!

Last, but not least, we hung a magnetic knife rack this last weekend. Just ignore the dirty dishes starting to stack up under it, that's not the point.

Anyway, I had been meaning to do something like this for some time, but last week Hazel got tall enough and smart enough to get into the knife drawer. I looked over and she had the handle of the wicked looking shark-shaped bread knife in her hot little hands. Yeah, that was not cool. So now the knives are out of her reach! On another plus side, they are way easier for me to get to and some of the knives that never got used are getting used again.

I am, as usual, thrilled spring seems to finally be here. It's sunny and beautiful, and snow is predicted on Friday. Yeah, we live in Iowa.

Farmer's wife

2011-04-03T22:18:00.000-05:00

Yesterday around midnight I posted on Facebook the following status:
I am officially a farmer's wife. I have now been crapped on by a chicken while trying to get a weak newborn lamb to nurse.

One of my friends responded that she wasn't sure what the bar was for the title of "Farmer's Wife," but that one seemed like a good one. This made me reflect on the question: when did I really feel like a farmer's wife? So here is my list, in the order I thought of them, of times I felt like a farmer's wife.

1. My first Thanksgiving, cooking a turkey we raised for 14 people
There's just something about cooking the Thanksgiving turkey and hosting everyone at my house that always makes me feel like a matriarch, in the nicest possible way.

2. Building a storage tower for my quilting projects out of milk crates
I can't take a picture of this one for you because my daughter is asleep upstairs where this is. But trust me, I built it from milk crates and ny-ties, and it's classy.

3. Helping a ewe give birth
My regular blog readers know about this one. It was an . . . interesting . . . evening. I won't repost the picture here because it's kinda gooey.

4. The day I went into labor and got to the hospital an hour late because a ewe was also in labor
Yep, this one is true. I called Ryan who was out in the pasture from the passenger seat and said, "I need you in here NOW!"

5. The afternoon I came home from work early because the cows were out
I blogged about this one too. There's a trend here.

6. When I patched my husband's Carhartts
I used a pair of jeans he wore out. Then he promptly ripped the Carhartts again, right above the patch.

Also, I should have a sub-bullet here for the PFI patch. Ryan's Carhartts aren't complete without it.

7. When I bought my rubber boots
I bet you can guess which ones are mine. I decided that even though I'd need rubber boots, they didn't have to be totally ugly.

As I wrote this list, I realized I already blogged about quite a few of these. When I was pregnant, one of Ryan's friends told him that you don't become a dad right when the baby is born. You pretend to be a dad for a while and one day you wake up and realize you are one.

I think this is the same way.

Weathervane the winner

2011-03-27T23:58:00.000-05:00

We actually had a tie for 1st place in the barn quilt voting, between Prairie Queen and Weathervane. So after much soul-searching and questioning the workings of the universe (by which I mean asking Ryan about his favorite), I'm going with #6 Weathervane.

As for the giveaway, Random.org picked comment #6, which is Slovenka (Who also voted for #6. Lots of 6's in play today)! So send me an email with your address and I'll get working on your Weathervane table topper. Thanks to all of you who left comments, I'll try to get a full blog post up soon.

Garden planted and Giveaway!

2011-03-20T22:51:00.000-05:00

Today is the first day of spring, and it is the first time I can remember that the official first day of spring actually feels like it should be the first day of spring. As such, I planted the first round of the garden yesterday! I know it doesn't look like much, but I cleaned out the square foot gardens and planted all the seeds that are "when the soil can be worked." This includes spinach, lettuce, broccoli, carrots, and a few other things. We will see how it turns out!

Ok, so now I'm doing my first blog giveaway!

Background: for Valentine's Day, Ryan has painted a 4 ft by 4 ft piece of plywood white for me to serve as a barn quilt! I've wanted one of these since the day I found out they existed, so I'm excited about it. But I'm not sure what design to put on it. (As a side note, there isn't a good article on barn quilts on Wikipedia. I think that's more evidence that they need female editors on that site! Perhaps I should write them one...) Yes, these quilt squares are usually 8 ft square, but we don't have a good place to put something that big on our farm so we'll put the smaller one on the shed by the road.

So now the giveaway. I want to know what you all think I should put on my barn quilt square. I will make a quilted table-topper kind of like these:

but it will have the design you voted for on it (note, not the winning design, but the one the winner liked best!) To vote, comment on this blog with which design you like best. Then I will use random.org to select a winner. Are you ready for the options? Here we go!

They are numbered from left to right and here are the names of the blocks. Remember that these barn quilts are fairly common, so while I do like turkey tracks and have it up here because it symbolizes our farm; it is possible that there are a few other farms with turkey tracks out there. So just keep that kind of thing in mind. The names of the blocks:

1. Castles in Spain

2. Evening star with pinwheel

3. Prairie Queen

4. This & That

5. Turkey Tracks

6. Weather Vane

So please vote, I want to know what you think! You can send me an email with your vote if you prefer, but know that I won't enter you in the giveaway that way.

Oh, and I'll close the voting at 8 pm central time next Sunday, March 27th. See you in a week with the verdict!

Hazel's Legacy & Church Banner

2011-02-28T22:05:00.000-06:00

I looked back at my quilting scrapbook, and apparently February and March are usually very productive months for me! And not just because of the annual quilt retreat (this last weekend was my third year going to the Pella Area Quilt Guild retreat). Of the 28 quilts I have completed (I'm not counting little projects), 12 were completed in February or March.

So I finished the quilt from Great-Grandma Hazel, and I named it Hazel's Legacy. I blogged about receiving the box of fabric here. I admit it really grew on me.

It's a nice couch throw size and Ryan fully intends to put it on Hazel's bed when we convert it to a toddler bed. It was amazing to work with fabrics from about 6 different decades in one quilt. I'm convinced that the red and blue flower fabric in the detail view is a feed sack from the 30's.

I also pieced the back out of the large scraps that were in the box. The pink block cracks me up because like the front it is hand-pieced, and there is only one. It has about 30 different little diamonds and triangles, and it is obvious that Hazel finished the one block and said, "Ok, that's it! We're going to something a little less complicated..."

When we moved out here we decided that part of being adults, being part of a community, and living in the country was joining a church. So this is actually a picture of our church, and I just love how rural and close-knit it is. This is one of those city/country things in my opinion; when you live in the middle of nowhere you need a group of people like those in our church. So on that note I decided that I would make a banner for our church, and I finished it about a week ago.

I made this using a product called "Scrap Grid" by Scrap Therapy. It's a grid on the back of some fusible interfacing that helps you put together all your little 2" squares easily. It was OK, but the maroon colored print on the grid comes off as you sew, so now my sewing machine has a pink smear on it leading up to the needle. I think in the future I'll just mark up misty-fuse or something with a sharpie to get a grid.

So back on topic, I quilted this one with Flame Stitch kind of radiating from the center. The phrase on it was a suggestion from the lady at our church in charge of banners, that way it could be used for every church season including Lent.

Here's to another very productive February, a short but full month!

Weeknight Chicken

2011-02-21T22:12:00.001-06:00

Hello all! I kind of like these recipe things. So if you don't, I apologize. Today's recipe actually uses something that we raise: chicken! This is a great recipe for our cut up chicken. It is from the most recent Cook's Country Magazine, a magazine I continually highly recommend. Here's what you need:
1 c low-sodium chicken broth
1 1/2 tsp cornstarch
1 c white wine
4 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed (but not minced)
2 tsp minced fresh thyme
3 lbs bone-in, skin-on chicken pieces
salt & pepper
1 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 Tbsp unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Whisk 2 Tbsp broth & cornstarch in small bowl until smooth, reserve. Combine remaining broth, wine, garlic, and thyme in large measuring cup.

Yeah, it doesn't look pretty but it's yummy. In this case I didn't have any white wine but I cook with vermouth and sherry all the time and I had some of that, so this recipe is half a cup of each. It worked great!

Pat chicken dry with paper towels & season with 1/2 tsp salt & 1/4 tsp pepper. Heat oil in large oven-safe skillet over medium-high heat until just smoking. Cook chicken, skin side down, until well browned, 6-10 minutes (don't stir or move in this time). Flip and cook until lightly browned on second side, about two minutes.

Slowly pour broth mixture into skillet and bring to a boil. Try not to get the crispy deliciousness on the tops of the chicken wet with the broth.

Transfer skillet to oven and roast until white meat registers 160 degrees and dark meat registers 175 degrees, 12 to 18 minutes.

Transfer chicken to platter and tent with aluminum foil. Discard garlic.

Pour pan juices into liquid measuring cup; skim & discard fat. In this case I used one of our chickens, so I just kind of blotted at the top of the cup with a paper towel and called it good (skimming the fat off the top of liquids is not something I'm very good at). Return 1 1/2 cups defatted pan juices to now-empty skillet and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.

Reduce heat to medium low & simmer until sauce is reduced to 1 cup, 5-7 minutes.

Add reserved cornstarch mixture and simmer until sauce is slightly thickened, about 2 minutes. Off heat, whisk in butter. Season with salt & pepper. By the way, all of this is also an excellent way to build any pan sauce. If someone requests it in the comments, I'll share with you how I build pan sauce for steak (which is really good)!
Serve, passing sauce at the table.
Yum!

Braided Spiral & Baby Shower quilts

2011-02-08T22:03:00.000-06:00

Quilts! Plural! It's been a productive couple of days. First, I finished my braided spiral quilt, which I hope will someday go on Hazel's "big girl" bed. It's 60" x 80" so it's the biggest quilt I've made since my wedding quilt.

This fabric came from my mom's first cruise to Alaska in August 2008. I started it before I went on that same cruise with her in August 2009. So now in February 2011 it's done! It's machine quilted, and the lullaby Ryan and I sing to Hazel every night is quilted in the dark braid.

I used the patterns wave chain and curvy key from Leah Day's Freemotion Quilting Project. I absolutely love that blog for inspiration for freemotion quilting!! Since a friend of mine (Thanks Erin!) introduced me to it, my machine quilting has improved tenfold.

This is the label on the back, with the words to Hazel's lullaby. It's a song from my childhood camp, composed by some of my fellow campers.

This is the back, I pieced it as I've been piecing quite a few of my quilt backs. I just like it when the back has a little bit of a surprise. It also saves me money not buying super wide backs to make it all one piece!

My second quilt that I finished is from Hazel's baby shower last year. The shower was on February 20th, 2010 and I finished it on February 7, 2011 so under a year is pretty darn good!

This quilt is made up of 5" charm square blocks that attendees to the shower signed and added good wishes to. Then I put them together and quilted them.

I used heart flow between the signed blocks and left turn, right turn to quilt the border.

Next up: Grandma Hazel's quilt.

If anyone who reads this pokes around on that freemotion quilting website (or just plain has input), I'd love some thoughts on how to quilt this one. It's very imprecisely pieced so I was going to cover it with an all over quilting pattern.

Thoughts anyone? Curvy quilting? Straight? Both? Shapes? I'm currently a bit stumped!

Love,

A productive quilter itching for the next project

The Lambs are Growing & Scotch Barley Soup

2011-02-05T21:34:00.000-06:00

The lambs are doing what lambs do well, and growing. Ditto 9-month-old Hazel.

Hazel is no longer terrified of them, and we even got her to get close to them. She still wants me really close to her when she's near them, though.

The little ewe is in the background, she has Barbados coloring with a Katahdin build. The little ram that I pulled out is in the foreground and has Katahdin coloring but a Barbados build.

On another note, today I'm doing a recipe for Scotch Barley Soup! I found this recipe online and have modified it a little, supposedly it is from the Rose & Crown Pub at the UK Epcot. I just know that it is the absolute best recipe for ground mutton that I have found. Most recipes just don't stand up to that strong flavor, and taste too "mutton-y". If you've ever had mutton, you know what I'm talking about. It's not an easy weeknight style meal though since it has to simmer for an hour or so. It's a weekend afternoon thing for me.

Anyway, I realize that most people don't exactly have ground lamb or ground mutton on hand, but I'm also posting this so I can point customers to it in the future! It's very possible that ground beef would work in this soup, post a comment if you try it and let us know if it works!!

Also, I think this recipe would be just fine lactose-free by changing the butter to oil and changing the milk & cream in the last step to broth.

Ingredients:

1 c pearl barley

1/4 c butter (4 Tbsp)

1 c combination of leeks, onions, green onions (I use whatever is in my fridge or is seasonal)

1 c diced carrots

1 c diced celery

1 c diced white turnips (this is 2-3 depending on how big they are)

1 lb ground lamb or ground mutton

2-3 Tbsp flour

64-128 oz chicken broth (more broth=thinner soup. I usually just use about 64 oz--2 cartons--plus whatever is open in my fridge and needs to be used up)

salt & pepper

2-3 Tbsp cornstarch

3/4 c milk

3/4 c cream

Soak the barley in boiling water for 10 minutes while you work with the other ingredients.

Chop the veggies into bite-sizes pieces. I thought I'd mention here that if you get turnips from the grocery store instead of the farmer's market, it comes with a wax coating so you have to skin the turnip with your knife.

Saute the leeks/onions/white part of green onions in butter in Dutch oven for 5 minutes. Add the carrots, celery, turnips & cook for 10 minutes. Throw in the green parts of the green onions now if you're using them.

Add meat to veggies & cook until lightly browned. Sprinkle flour over meat to absorb fat. Drain barley and rinse with cold water.

Add barley and 1 c broth to meat & veggies. Cover and let steam over low heat 10 minutes. Add remaining broth and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 1-1.5 hrs or until barley is tender.

Take soup off heat. Blend cornstarch, cream, and milk and then stir into soup.

Add salt & pepper to taste.

And you're done! This soup freezes really well, but usually Ryan and I just eat it as leftovers for a few days. Between the two of us, it lasts for about 4 meals each total (including the fresh soup).

Adorable Appreciation & Omelettes

2011-01-25T22:01:00.000-06:00

One of our customers calls us periodically to come pick up eggs, and she came out to the farm yesterday. Not only did she brave our 2 miles of icy gravel roads, she brought us an adorable thank-you.

I guess my point here is that if there's someone in your life that you appreciate, don't forget to thank them! It means a lot.

So I also thought I'd post a recipe for something we actually raise here on the farm: omelettes! No, we don't raise omelettes (that would be cool), but we have some super tasty eggs. Tasty enough that people will brave 2 miles of icy roads for 5 dozen of them. But anyway, back to the recipe!

I know an omelette is a simple food, but it's what we had for dinner, is delicious, is super fast, and is easy. It's also great for a lot of the random leftovers in the fridge! The ingredients are:

eggs (I like 2-3. I make mine with 2 and Ryan's with 3)
milk (just a splash)
salt & pepper
butter
fillings (mine are green onions, provolone cheese, and summer sausage)

First, throw a splash of milk in a bowl. You might even be able to skip this, but I always add it. I'm talking about maybe 1 tablespoon or so.

Add the eggs, salt, and pepper. If you're using green onions or something else that is spice-like, add it now. Paprika works well here, or really anything.

Whisk well. You actually want it both well-combined and to add a touch of air into it to make the omelette fluffy.

Butter a medium nonstick skillet over low-med heat (yes, this picture is terrible. I apparently can't take pictures with my left hand while buttering a skillet with my right). You could probably use oil here if you want to.

Pour in the egg mixture and cover. This will need to cook for about 2 minutes.

Your omelette is ready for fillings when it looks like this: just set around the edges, and a little soupy in the middle.

Add your fillings. This is a good place for last night's taco meat, that tiny bit of cheddar in your fridge drawer, etc. Put it in half of the pan and run your spatula all the way around the edge of the omelette to loosen from the pan. Then slide the spatula under the half without the filling and flip it on top of the filling.

If you make a mess of this the first couple of times, that's ok! It will still taste good. Enjoy!

Smaller Hands

2011-01-22T21:32:00.002-06:00

So I got one of those Phone calls this evening as I was eating the freshly prepared dinner and waiting for Ryan to come in from choring.
He tells me he's having trouble with lambing and he's got a ewe who's exhausted and there's one lamb's leg in the process of being born.
I feel for the poor gal.
Anyway, Ryan's hands are too big to assist this poor ewe, so I put Hazel in her crib with some toys and I head out there to assist. This lamb has just one hind leg out and the other leg is still all folded up. I get the other leg out there and we discover that the lamb is still alive! (We didn't expect that). So I have now delivered my first lamb.
Warning, the picture is... a little gooey....

We brought them in to give their exhausted mother a chance to recuperate, so now I have two bleating lambs in my living room.

Hazel is terrified of them. It could be a long night.

Pride & It's Cold Outside!

2011-01-20T21:15:00.000-06:00

Thanks to everyone who sent me a personal note of affirmation. I really appreciate those! There was one common thread in what people said to me; all of them told me how proud of us they are.

How proud they are of what we do.

How proud that we're out here sticking it out.

And they're right. What we do is worthy of pride. So that's the answer to "Why do we farm?" The answer is "We farm because we are proud of what we do."

Incidentally, I looked up pride on Merriam Webster and it reminded me that a group of lions are a pride. Perhaps our family is a group of lions.

As a follow up to the last post, I wanted to show you what Ryan did to his farmagon. He got his drafting supplies out from college and redrew it. Note also the location of honor it has in our house.

So I'm also writing this on what will probably be the coldest day of the year. Because of that, we need a "how Ryan gets ready to do chores" post!

Step one: Put on long johns. No picture for this one because, well, because.

Step two: After donning jeans (See this post item 1) and a sweatshirt, put on your coat liner and tell your wife with the camera she's being silly.

Step 3: Put on a puffy vest, having chosen the "least stupid-looking" vest of the three that came out of Grandpa's closet.

Step 4: The Carhartts. Yes, these are deeply important. They are not just insulated overalls with a tear in them I've repaired twice. They are an important part of farmerhood. Yes, I made that word up. But it's true. It's one of those things that makes one a FARMER instead of just a farmer.

I'll note that they're navy blue because the traditional Carhartt color, s#!& brown (for a reason.. think about it) was just plain too ugly for this former city boy. I'm with him on this one.

Step 5: Put on the coat shell and the boots. All told, about a 20 minute process.

It actually just occurred to me that we didn't purchase hardly anything this man is wearing other than the jeans. God bless mothers, mother-in-laws, grandmas, and grandpas.

I take that back. I bought him the wool socks. And he bought the hat.

It's so people can see him during deer season.

Conference Season Again & Farmagons

2011-01-07T22:34:00.000-06:00

It's farm conference season again, and today was the one for Practical Farmers of Iowa. This is normally my favorite conference and is an affirmation of why we do what we do.
This is fair warning that I'm really going to treat my blog as a diary today.

I don't feel that way after going today. Yes, it was fun. Yes, it was great networking. But I usually come home after one of these things and say, "Ok, what we do is hard, but it's worth it and there's a whole bunch of people rooting for us and doing this journey too." And farming is hard. Really hard. I almost never see my husband. I seldom sit on the couch with him after our daughter's in bed and watch a movie or even just discuss the day.

I still feel like farming is worth it and people are there to help us, but the positive energy is just missing. Ryan works so so very hard all the time, and I feel like it's wearing him out. There's not always enough "we" on this team, and that's how I feel after today. Not because he's not doing his part, but because I don't do enough to help him manage his workload. Yes, I make the money. But I could do that if he didn't farm and he could put his energy into our family instead of a bunch of sheep that just die (we lost two lambs this morning and another one tonight).

We did a planning exercise in a session today. It started with us figuring out what we valued most from a whole long list of options. We had to pick our top 20, then our top 7, then the top 3, then the top 1. We both agreed that family was our number one value. Then we drew "Farmagons" where we made a picture of our farm in 5 years. Here's Ryan's Farmagon.

I have to say I just love his drawing of a cow in the bottom right; it's recognizably a Belted Galloway. The map on the left part of the farmagon is one he's been sketching on every scrap piece of paper in our house for the last 6 months. But this was insightful to me because around the sides of the farmagon you see notes about his capital expense goals for the next five years (one year per side). All of everything is in 2011 and a little bit of 2012. I think this is where we're getting burnout because there's no pacing. It's all crammed up to NOW with this ethereal expectation that some of it will drift into LATER.

Here's my farmagon (we did this exercise without looking at one another's work):

This was surprising to me because it makes my worldview seem so small. I didn't include any pastures or even very much truly "farm-related" in my vision, except that our shop is a functional retail space (the cars I drew are customer cars, not ours). This makes some level of sense because marketing is my bailiwick and while Ryan farms I watch our daughter, but it still makes me feel sad. I can't even articulate well why it makes me sad. Guilt that I'm not more involved in production? Feeling like my best contribution to this vision is having babies? The only capital expenses I could even think of were big expenses to the house and when we'd have babies. Maybe I'd feel better about this if I didn't feel like it just demands more from my partner.

I hate to quit things. I feel like if we quit people would whisper behind our backs "Oh, those Marquardts just couldn't hack it farming." Ryan's grandfather will have been right not to work with us. We will let down our customers who have begun to rely on us for their meats and eggs.
But are these really reasons to keep going?
Why do we farm?

I'd certainly welcome comments from any readers who stuck with me this far.

Winter Sunset & Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

2011-01-05T22:12:00.001-06:00

I love winter sunsets. We had a particularly beautiful one this evening, all soft and blended and bright. Have you ever noticed that some sunsets blend from red at the sun to yellow by the sky and then they somehow magically turn to blue sky without ever going green? This sunset was the other kind where it is yellow at the sun and then red and purple to blue. It's the kind of sunset I used to paint when I was a 10-year-old messing around with acrylics. I never did figure out how to blend from yellow to blue by using just the right shade of brown without it looking green.

So tonight after dinner I got a hankering to bake. Since this is a blog about food and about me (and I like to cook), I decided to share this one. I realize there is nothing local or sustainable about this recipe (although you can use steel cut oats grown locally instead of the Quaker oats, which I did), but it's yummy and well loved. It's also lower fat because it doesn't use as much butter. If you love this kind of post let me know, but if you don't want to read about this stuff let me know too and I'll find something else to post about.

A couple of weeks ago Ryan thought he saw dark chocolate chips on sale. He was excited and bought them.

They aren't dark chocolate chips. They're cinnamon and they're very strong. Not for the faint of heart. So I mentioned that I could use a few up in my oatmeal raisin cookie recipe and they really did work pretty well! I skipped the cinnamon called for in the recipe and instead melted some of the chips (about 1 Tbsp?) into the oatmeal. Then I threw in about 1/4 c of chips at the end in the place of some of the raisins. I also substituted craisins for about half of the whole raisins in the recipe (again, in the cupboard to be used up). This recipe comes from my absolute favorite magazine Cook's Country, February 2009.

1 c raisins, 1/2 c chopped fine & 1/2 c left whole
3/4 c water
6 Tbsp butter
1 3/4 c old fashioned oats (Quaker quick oats or steel cut oats or a mix work fine)
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 c flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 c light brown sugar
1 large egg
2 tsp vanilla extract

Heat oven to 350 degrees, line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Combine chopped raisins and water in saucepan and bring to boil over medium-high heat.

Reduce heat & simmer until water has evaporated & raisins are plump, about 15 minutes, let cool. Wipe out saucepan (or get another skillet) and melt butter over medium heat. Cook oats, stirring constantly, until just golden, about 5 minutes. Stir in cinnamon & cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds, let cool.

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in bowl. In large bowl, whisk sugar, egg, and vanilla until smooth. Stir in whole & plumped raisins, oat mixture, and flour mixture until just combined.

Roll 2 Tbsp dough into 1 1/2" balls and place 2 inches apart on prepared baking sheets. Gently press balls with measuring cup until 1/2" thick.

Bake cookies until edges are light golden & centers are just set, 13 to 16 minutes, switching & rotating baking sheets halfway through baking. Cool 10 minutes on sheets, then transfer to wire rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Yum!

End of 2010 and our Farm Christmas Tree

2010-12-31T18:38:00.000-06:00

I wasn't going to put up a Christmas tree. Hazel's too young to understand it, and she and I went to visit her great-grandparents over Christmas anyway. But some time toward the beginning of the month, Ryan decided we needed a tree. So what do you think he did?

If you know him, you guessed it. He went out to the scrubby timber behind our house, and found us a gangly female cedar tree. I have to say, the minute I saw it I loved it.

It's scrawny.

It's gangly.

It has about 2 ornaments per branch.

It was free.

And it's great.

We may never spend $40 or even $25 on a Christmas tree again!

Just add this to that list of things that are kind of fun about owning 40 acres with scrubby unkempt timber in the middle of nowhere. Weeds become Christmas trees.

Happy New Year everyone!

Local, Organic food is too expensive...right?

2010-12-09T22:40:00.000-06:00

Fair warning: I'm in the mood to rant again. I just saw one of the Iowa Minute commercials sponsored by Farm Bureau on the evening news about food pantries and the affordability of food. I really dislike those commercials. But anyway, it talks about people who are unemployed using food pantries more and how Iowan conventional farmers are growing cheaper food for the world.
Putting that whole argument aside, I just wanted to say something about how the food this farm grows is so expensive. It's true, we know that we cost more than the grocery store. I also know that we calculate a reasonable profit margin without any labor rate. But here's the real point I'm trying to make:

Local food can be available for barter.

I know there are people using our local food pantry, and we donate our small eggs to our local pantry for those people. However, I think people who were willing to come barter with their local farmers for food would be surprised how flexible we are. If you're an out of work accountant, offer to help us with our books. If you're an unemployed welder, I'm sure we can find something for you to weld around here! Even just offering babysitting at the going rate in exchange for that value in product could probably be arranged. I know I am blessed to still have my in-town job and certainly hope that continues to be the case. And I'm grateful for our core customers, who understand why we charge what we charge for food. I just want to say sometimes the out-of-the-norm thinking can benefit everyone involved.

Maw, the Cows are Out

2010-12-04T22:27:00.000-06:00

City people don't get calls like I get at work in the middle of the afternoon. When you live in a city, your husband calls you at work and says things like

"Can you pick up some milk on the way home?" or
"I think a light burnt out in the kitchen today" or even (if you're really lucky)
"What do you want for dinner tonight?"

But no, I live in the country. And my husband is full-time stay-at-home-dad as well as full-time farmer. I get calls like this.

"The truck died. I'm 3.5 hours away from you and have a full trailer full of just-processed frozen chickens."

or
"I never did get around to chainsawing today because there are 3 fire trucks here from my unplanned prairie burn"

2008 Unplanned prairie burn

or this last Friday at 3:30 pm
"Everything got out. Cows and sheep, and I can't get them back in. I need more manpower!"

At that last one, echoing in my ears I heard with a nice hillbilly drawl, "Maw, the cows're out."

This isn't our land, by the way. This is our neighbor's land.

Did I mention it was freezing cold out?

This is what they did to the portable netting when they got out:

They snapped the support post. Sigh.

I keep thinking that after a few years, I won't get these phone calls at work anymore, but I'm beginning to think they are just part of the deal.

I'm still glad he calls me when he needs help.

What makes a Country Man?

2010-11-20T16:43:00.000-06:00

I was listening to a country music radio station today (yes, I do that sometimes) and the song Country Man by Luke Bryan came on. One of the lyrics lines says "I can wrestle hogs & gators with my two bare hands," and it got me to thinking. I know a few country men, and none of them wrestle hogs or gators. I've had the privilege of watching Ryan turn into a country man in the last couple of years, and so I have my own definitions. Ryan went from this:

To this:

in three years. Now, it's subtle I know. But there are some major differences in these two men. These pictures were taken at the same time of year. So here's what would make a Country Man if I were the type to write song lyrics about being a Country Man (but I'm not).

A Country Man...
1. Wears jeans. Always. To almost everything, except church. A country man is uncomfortable in anything else.
2. Comes back from a trip to Target in the middle of a weekday grumpy because there are "too many people."
3. Can't be picked out of the crowd at a farm estate auction.
4. Walks funny on concrete. (This is the one that always strikes me when we go somewhere like the state fair. Ryan walks on concrete like he expects it to roll under him like his pasture, and then it's like his feet are surprised when it's totally completely flat.)
5. Swears at his livestock at the top of his lungs. Ryan's proficient at this one.
6. Leaves little bits of grass and seeds all over the house as they fall off his jeans. See #1.
7. Has firm shoulders. mmm, mmm, but I like this one. Oh, sorry. I'll move on.
8. Can back his livestock trailer into its parking spot. Not just the skill level in getting it into a specific spot, but the fact that it has one.
9. Has a pair of shoes just for going out into public in.
10. Could carry around a tape recorder with the message "Sorry I'm late, chores took me longer than expected" ready to go for every occasion.

I admit, I do love my country man.

Lullaby quilt & the Stuff that makes a Marriage

2010-11-13T22:24:00.000-06:00

The turkeys are all done now, and just in time! We had a nasty rainy couple of days and wind from the northeast (our least sheltered direction). A fellow farmer friend of ours lost a bunch of her turkeys last night, and Ryan commented that we got done on the right day. Now it's just a few short days to Thanksgiving and we can settle into winter.

I finally finished another quilt, this one is a blue version of a green one I made for my niece about a year ago. I hand quilted this one with an all over design that is the sheet music for Brahms' Lullaby.

I do like the design idea, but again I continue to quilt complicated all over designs on top of non-wholecloth quilts. I should just save those designs for less complicated patterned quilts. Someday I'll learn.

So tonight I went to do a load of laundry and our dryer was making a funny noise. It was heating, but not spinning. Ryan immediately surmised it had lost a belt (Mr. Fixit) and we googled it for confirmation. So we pulled out our "tools" in the house together, and took the top off the dryer.

This is a wrench set Ryan used to have in his very first car. Even though we have all kinds of tools from Ryan's grandfather, this is what he grabbed.

So as we're pulling wads of lint out of the dryer, Ryan comments that this is what it's like to be an old married couple. We spend Saturday night pulling lint, both ours and someone else's (we bought the dryer used for about $50), out of a dead dryer.

I told him these are the things that make a marriage. And they are.

Meanwhile, Nermal enjoyed playing with the broken dryer belt.

He's helping.

Keep to the forest, stay out of the trees

2010-10-22T22:29:00.000-05:00

Ryan's working on fencing still, and in this case it involves clearing some trees. I think he's learned a few things from the last time he tried to burn a pile of timber, so this time he hooked up the hose first. And he watched the fires.

Of course, he still had a few going at once. I saw three.

When he came inside later he told me there were seven.

Ryan also went to visit his grandmother last week (she lives about an hour's drive away), and she gave him her mother-in-law's leftover quilting fabric.

This is Ryan's great grandmother, Hazel's namesake. There's actually an almost-finished quilt here. It's even a pattern I thought about making some day. I think I'm going to finish it. Here's the thing: all of this fabric is amazingly ugly. Deliciously ugly, even.

As I unpacked it I was talking to my mom and telling her how ugly the fabric was. So she asked me why I want to finish this quilt. I never knew this woman. But she was important enough in my husband's world that I named my daughter after her. And she's the only quilter in either of our families (in the direct lines anyway); I feel a connection to her. So I laid out the quilt to take a look at it.

Then Ryan, beer in hand after coming in from burning the piles, mentioned that the quilt isn't so bad as a whole. He told me not to focus on the individual, ugly fabrics; focus on the overall picture. I also admit it's already growing on me. Even the individual fabrics don't seem as ugly to me as when I first unpacked them.

Someday if I leave a half-finished quilt behind, even an ugly one, I hope my great granddaughter-in-law picks it up and finishes it.

Mother Nature is Naked

2010-10-10T21:09:00.001-05:00

Warning: this post is likely to be preachy! I'm in that kind of a mood...

Mother Nature is naked. I love the fall, but I do kind of hate this time of year because it's harvest season. I just think that all that dark bare earth seems wrong. Last Wednesday they combined the soybean field across the road, and this is what our living room light looked like that same evening:

All those little black spots are the Asian Ladybeetles. As I think I've mentioned before on this blog, the little bastards were created to control some other soybean pest and now are a pest themselves. Stupid bugs. They've invaded our farm now and nothing eats them. Nothing! I'm sure they taste terrible because they do smell terrible.

Anyway, our farm is still very green, and it seems like a shame to strip the earth every fall of her protective cover. How much topsoil do we lose this way!? I know, the scientists have calculated it, but it still seems to me like they shouldn't have to get out there with rulers to realize that stripping the earth bare is a bad idea.

For anyone who is interested, we have had about 2 weeks without any rain, but our yard is still a swamp. It's a new ecosystem! Last week, I actually saw a woodpecker land on the stalk of one of our swamp plants and peck at it for bugs. That's how big the things are! I didn't have my camera anywhere nearby, so I didn't get a picture. You'll just have to trust me on this one...

Quilt Step Three & Applesauce

2010-09-26T21:06:00.001-05:00

This is the third step in a quilt design for me: drawing it on graph paper to scale. Although I admit, I have been known to whip out a 2D CAD program during my lunch break and design quilts that way too. For the fellow geeks out there: yes, this is engineering paper. I design most of my quilts on engineering paper. I think it's mostly because I'm comfortable with it and I have some left over from my college days.

So yes, when I tell people that quilting is like engineering, this is one of my reasons! My scale drawing helps me figure out how to lay out and cut my fabric when it comes time to do so.

Part of eating locally is definitely storing food. Whether that be freezing, canning, drying, whatever. So I have a friend who has an apple tree (or 6!), and we also have an apple tree that is old enough to give fruit. We have several others as well that are getting there that Ryan planted, but our orchard is not really up to full swing yet. So one thing we've taught ourselves to make is applesauce. Now, I say "taught ourselves" because we do some things more of a "cheater" way due to our lack of patience and our lack of a food mill.
Step one is to core and cut the apples into largish pieces. We don't peel them because we don't mind the taste of the peels and that is where all the nutrition is!

Step two is to throw the apple pieces into the food processor and chop fairly finely.

The raw chopped apples

Step three is to put the apples in a saucepan with a little water or apple juice and some lemon juice (a couple tablespoons of each of these). Then you simmer it until the apples are soft, it takes about 15-20 minutes.

Raw apples in the saucepan

Step four is to add some sugar (I used brown sugar, about 2 Tbsp or so) and about 1/2 tsp of cinnamon (obviously the cinnamon is optional). If I'm feeling like it, I'll thrown in some ginger and/or nutmeg too. Then I simmer it 2-3 more minutes to get it all combined.

The completed applesauce: Ugly but yummy!

Voila, applesauce! Sometimes I can this, (like 2 years ago I did) but this year I just filled quart-sized ziploc bags and stacked them up in the freezer. We did about 6 rounds in the saucepan and got about 5 bags as well as another 3 cups or so for the fridge for the next few days' eating. If you wanted to, the warm applesauce could be pulsed in the food processor to make it finer. This is how you're supposed to do it, but I don't like dealing with all that hot, sticky applesauce.

The applesauce assembly line in process

Quilt design step 2 & tree frogs

2010-09-12T17:29:00.000-05:00

I'm kind of obsessed with our clothesline.

It's true!

I was taking diapers off the line today and pondering this fact. The truth is that the clothesline makes such a good metaphor for how my life is now. Do I put all my laundry on it? No. Is it hard to motivate myself to get out there and stick stuff on the line instead of into the dryer 3 steps away? Yes. But my cooking is like that too. I try to source local foods, but I don't succeed 100% and I fight the urge to cook out of a box. So like the clothesline, I forgive myself and move on. Ryan holds me accountable for both of these, and I think that makes the difference.

Summer is fading, but we still get little web-footed friends everywhere. Here is a tree frog climbing on my kitchen window.

Ryan also rescued one from our sun room yesterday. Our sun room floor is covered in pet hair, and as I walked by the door I saw Ryan with a little glass dish full of water. I asked him, "Did you just give that tree frog a little bath?"
He replied, "It was covered with cat hair. I just wish washing the dog was this easy!"

I also worked on step 2 of designing a new quilt today. This quilt has color-fade fabrics, so the placement is very key for the design. I pulled out my colored pencils and started sketching alternatives.

I asked Ryan if he had a preference. Can you guess which one he liked? Which one pops out to you? I'm betting you guessed it: he likes the one in the top right corner. I admit that on paper it really pops, but I may yet change my mind on this one.

Livestock & Deadstock and the Birth of a Quilt

2010-09-09T21:31:00.001-05:00

"If you're going to have livestock, you're going to have deadstock." Those proverbial words were spoken by our previous landlord when we were renting a farmhouse and few acres.

It was funny at the time, but of course, he's right.

I think Ryan is planning on posting our full tally for the season so far, but I just know he called me at work to tell me another ewe died. He called her Awesome II (he's great at ewe names, by the way) and is fairly disheartened about it. We're also down to about 60 of our original 260 turkeys. They simply refuse to stop dying, mostly of cold and/or wet.

On a happier and more cheerful note, I thought I'd post a picture of the "first step" of most of my quilts.

In this case, I actually have fabric to go along with the doodle. Usually I don't even have that. But the only difference between this sketch and 90% of my other quilts in the beginning stages is that this one is not drawn on engineering paper...

A Special Guest & It's still wet out here

2010-08-13T17:14:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time. This happened to us on July 30th, when we took Hazel to her first Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) field day.

Hazel's first PFI field day

So while we were standing around with some of the PFI staff, one of them mentioned that Temple Grandin was flying in a day early for her field day on Tuesday and they didn't know what do with her on Monday. Of course, I joked that she was welcome to visit our farm. Next thing I knew, she was coming to see our farm on Monday and I was feeding her dinner! Ryan's mother was reading her book at the time and came down, and so did a fellow farmer of ours who found out about it. We ended up having 8 people for dinner and a lovely time. Moral of the story: go to PFI field days!

Ryan, Temple, Janice, & Hazel

Have I mentioned before it's been a wet year here?

Oh, I have? Well, it has. Very wet. We're just now starting to make the news, but I took some pictures even before Ames went under.

Our yard. The "creek" was a path once

We have springs forming in our lawn.

By our old well housing

Note the flowing water. And the sand.

Looking at the compost pile

If the picture looks "foggy," it's because the lens of the camera is fogging up due to the heat and humidity. Makes for a really quality picture doesn't it?

Our whole yard

This is the whole yard from the front porch. Again with the fogginess. Spot the cat says hello too.

When I was looking through pictures the other day, I found one from 2008.

Yard in 2008

Yeah, remember 2008? Our other record flooding year? Someday, perhaps it will look this way again. In the meantime, watch out for the cattails.

Hard day's night & My new favorite fabric website

2010-08-01T19:17:00.000-05:00

Don't get pregnant and try to keep a garden. Remind me of this the next time I get pregnant!

But seriously, I'll probably do it again anyway.

Back to business. This is what I did today. Here is the before picture with lovely model included:

Note the scale: most of those weeds are taller than I am.

And here is the after picture (no model this time, since I took the picture):

You can see our steps! You can see our sliding door! I even hauled off all the piles to the compost pile. I considered leaving Ryan to do that, but decided to have mercy on him.

So for those of you who have followed my blog for a while, you now know why I don't have any lily pictures on here for this year. It's because they were choked out by vines and other crud until now.

I have also discovered my new fantasy website, called Spoonflower. You can design and print your own fabric! Yay! It's really expensive, but you can get an 8" x 8" test swatch for $5, and this is PERFECT for my I Spy quilts. These are quilts where you play the I Spy game with children using the quilt, and I've been gathering fabrics for one that has a different plant or animal block for every letter of the alphabet. The only problem is that "X", "Q", and "N" are really hard to find fabric for!

Can you believe N is hard? I know! But think of animals and plants that start with N. You've got nuthatches, newts, nighthawks, and none of these have fabrics dedicated to them. So I have now created fabric using photoshop for a nuthatch and an x-ray fish, and will have to make one with quail on it.

5-a-day, odd bugs, and sustainability synergy

2010-07-18T17:07:00.002-05:00

I have now finished my first quilt since Hazel was born, I call it "5-a-day." I created it for my quilt guild Block-of-the-Month and it is all paper-pieced blocks. I do like how it turned out, I've been wanting to use the Farmer's Market style fabrics ever since they came out. I actually have the pattern started for this and am working on finishing writing it up and getting it in digital format to distribute. I don't know if it would sell, but I'll try. I also tried using a different free motion filler in the background of each block, as you can see by my tomato close-up here.

It's a long way from perfect, but I'm satisfied.

When I created the "peas" block, I expected it to be a hard block with lots of different pieces, but it ended up being fairly easy. It surprised me which blocks were harder or easier to design and sew.

We've also recently been invaded by some strange little bugs. They don't seem aggressive, nor do they bite, but they like wet places. This is the first year I've seen these little suckers and I just can't identify them. Can anyone help? For those of you who are not so much a fan of bug pictures, sorry!

I just want to say one more thing about sustainability synergy. We use cloth diapers with Hazel during the day and a disposable at night (so that she's not waking up because her diaper's wet). But I find it interesting that cloth diapers dry much better and easier on the clothesline than they do in the dryer. They always take 2 rounds through the dryer, and it doesn't get out stains. On the line it only takes them a little while in the sun to dry and the sun bleaches out the stains. This is not the only "sustainability" thing that is this way, but they always fascinate me when I find them.

On a follow-up note, we had a big storm last night and the leaning tower of Reasnor stands no more. It will have to be re-erected.

Breezy Blues & the Leaning Tower of Reasnor

2010-07-03T13:10:00.002-05:00

My best friend from college called me almost 2 years ago to tell me she got engaged (it was inevitable, and we all knew it was coming, but I was excited nonetheless!). So I immediately decided I was going to make them a quilt for their wedding. I called her and asked her what she wanted for a quilt. She talked to her fiance and said "Pinwheels and Blues." So after I spent a couple of weeks doodling ideas while in boring meetings, I came up with this pattern. I did hand quilt it, and I finished this quilt in March of '09 because I was so excited to work on it. Ah well, better to be done early than late! It is a throw sized quilt, and I paper pieced all of the pinwheels so I wouldn't lose the points.

Did I mention it's been a wet year? I think I may have...

Ryan did not take this picture on an angle. I'm going to rename our wren house "the Leaning Tower of Reasnor." Apparently the entire base is rotten, which is sad because the wrens were actually using it! Although I do love how the prior owners felt they needed a sum total of 3 posts just to hold this thing up.

Then again, maybe they were right.

Porch Toad & Loading Chickens

2010-06-10T22:27:00.004-05:00

I almost stepped on this little guy on the way out my front door this evening, and was actually carrying the camera. So I'm sharing him with you. We live in a little valley, so we have water management issues. Lots of them. Like we have a swamp around our compost pile. That means we have frogs, toads, snakes, and all kinds of bugs. Everything has to lay low a lot of the time, though, because chickens hate snakes more than anything else and will go out of their way to kill them. Yet another thing you learn when you raise chickens: they will eat almost anything...

Tonight was loading time for our first batch of chickens of the season. We know a farmer who grabs 5 at a time, I'd love to actually see that because even in the dark they are squirmy little creatures. Ryan can only get 4 at a time, and of course I max out at 2. Curse small hands with short stubby fingers! We load them at dusk/night because they are MUCH more docile then, and we don't have to chase them all over their shelter nearly as much. That was something we learned our first year.

Last year I made a short post that 180 chickens is the max that fit on a trailer. I'm sticking with that; although the 180 chickens fit much better today than they did last year. We're hoping that's not because they will dress out small. Small chickens suck and don't make us much money.

On a side note, I apologize for anyone who follows me by a feed. I went through and put labels on all my blogs, so I suspect it will say there are lots of new/edited posts today. However, I thought it was useful to actually use the labels if only for my own organization!

Mulberry bread & mowing the lawn

2010-06-06T13:03:00.003-05:00

We have a friend who comes and works on our farm in exchange for eggs, chickens, turkeys, etc. He is my very favorite person most days because he keeps Ryan working and motivated! Anyway, he has a myriad of food allergies that make it very hard to cook lunch for him. He is lactose intolerant and also allergic to soy, tomatoes, fish, and pesticide residue. This means honey and sugar are also out because of the residue unless they are organic and even then they are to be used sparingly. So here is what I made for him as a special treat: mulberry bread!

It may be the ugliest thing I ever baked. It looked like a purple-black miasma of goo when I was done with it, but it was surprisingly edible. I followed my A-to-Z bread recipe, which a similar recipe can be found here. I cut out all the sugar, though, and wouldn't advise that for anyone making this recipe. I thought the mulberries would add some sweetness, but the bread badly needed some sweetener when it was done. Ryan put honey on it and ate it anyway, but the man is a human vacuum so that doesn't surprise me.

One of my favorite reasons for living out in the country is that I don't have to mow the lawn all the time. There are no city ordinances or neighbors or anything. So I can let my lawn start to look like this:

This is particularly handy when we have 3 (not one, not two, but three) mowers on this farm and only the non-power-assist-push-mower-that-kicks-my-butt works.

But eventually Ryan decides that he cares how our lawn looks, so here it is after I mowed it with the mower deck all the way up:

This was made possible by Ryan's wonderful grandmother who took pity on our poor lawn and let us have her riding mower. Yay for the people in our lives who help us!!!

Hazel, Oatmeal, & fabric organization

2010-05-21T10:44:00.001-05:00

As most of my readers probably know, my short hiatus the last couple of weeks was because I had a little girl, Hazel. This picture is of my personal favorite facial expression of hers because I think she looks like she is trying to solve the world's problems. It's especially ironic that this picture was taken on the changing table. But this is not a baby blog, so I will not be putting lots of pictures of Hazel on it. It is a quilting and farm life blog with some thoughts on sustainability thrown in for spice.

Speaking of sustainability, I am increasingly convinced that oatmeal is really a Super Food.

This is my breakfast every morning, and we buy our oatmeal from Paul's Grains in Marshalltown. Between one annual checkup and the next I started eating oatmeal every morning and my cholesterol dropped 40 points. That was amazing, but seemed like a reasonable thing to expect. But now that I've been looking at baby articles, etc, I'm learning that oatmeal also boosts breastmilk production. Really? That's crazy! I'm finding myself wondering what else this stuff does. Is there a drawback? As a side note, people say they don't have time to make oatmeal before work. You're right, neither do I. But we've found we can make a big batch on the weekend and then store it in a container in the fridge, dishing it out like leftovers and heating it in the microwave. It works great!

Lastly, on the quilting front I haven't gotten much done recently (I wonder why...) but one main goal I had for my maternity leave was to reorganize the space that I have now that my craft room has become the baby's room. So while my good friend Leah was visiting me yesterday, she helped me figure out how to get all my fabric into my new smaller space. She even sat and folded it with me (how great a friend is that)?! So now the three foot pile of fabric has been cleared from my table and I'm one step closer to getting back in the quilting groove.

Morel season again

2010-04-28T21:10:00.001-05:00

It's morel mushroom season again! So far, they're still the only mushroom Ryan will eat. Here is how I cook morels, which is incidentally also how I bread chicken, or pork chops, or anything I feel needs breading.

First, you have to clean these wrinkly little morsels of goodness. Get inside 'em, there be bugs in there!

Then, I cut them in half. Otherwise the yummy breading won't cover everything.

Next, they go in a mix of flour, salt, and pepper. They get a good coating, but then I shake them off best I can.

Their second coating is some of our farm fresh eggs, beaten.

Then last they go back into a mix of flour, salt, and pepper. I like to have some of the flour be spelt or whole wheat (but not all of it! The gluten in all purpose flour is needed to help keep the breading together!)

Now they go into my saute pan in a mix of olive oil & butter. I mix the two because the olive oil raises the smoke point of the pan, but the butter adds yummy flavor. Cook on low-med until golden brown and delicious!

I almost put some garnish in the bowl for this picture, but I believe cooking should look like it actually does by those of us who aren't pros. So these may not look like much, but I promise they are creamy and delish.

With spring comes activity & 181 fluffballs

2010-04-18T10:47:00.001-05:00

It is definitely spring around here. My favorite tree the flowering crabapple is blooming, some day perhaps I'll have a dozen of those or so in my yard.

Some of my most recent heritage bulbs are coming up, including this cute little pink hyacinth called "Double Hollyhock" also from Old House Gardens.

Ryan has been in a flurry of activity with the spring, too. Here he is treating boards with linseed oil to help them last. He also re-mulched our swampy rhubarb patch and filled in some holes in the rhubarb where chickens had beaten up rhubarb plants. Perhaps those plants were buggy and they were doing us a favor... The one thing I have learned here is that chickens love mulch. Love it. It is a nest, it is a food source, it is a place of dust baths. Mulch seldom lasts well around our farm, but we do it anyway. Why? Because it is cheap (free!) because I work at Vermeer, maker of many brush chippers; and because it is a chemical-free way to keep weeds down. Not to mention, if chickens are tearing up my mulch they are ignoring my strawberries. Layer chickens are smarter than the broiler chickens, but they do still only have the capacity to focus on one thing at a time. They are just not born multitaskers.

This week we also received our first 181 little yellow fluffballs. The question I keep getting here is: Why 181? Well, we ordered 175. But in the interest of customer satisfaction, the hatchery always throws in a random number of extra chicks in case some don't survive shipping. In our case, I don't think we've ever lost many (if any) in transit, but this way if we do the hatchery hasn't upset us by shorting us chicks. So now we have 181, and they will be this cute for about a week before they start growing and get a lot less cute.

Dinner Bell

2010-03-28T21:53:00.001-05:00

I think it's the city kid in me. I think it's very important that a "real" farm has a dinner bell. It's silly, but it's important to me! So bless Ryan, he's been looking for a decent bell since the day we bought this place. He finally found one and today he installed it. So now when dinner is ready I can be a "real farm wife" and summon my husband by dinner bell!

Successful slipcover & deer on the move

2010-03-21T22:27:00.001-05:00

Today I tackled a project I've been meaning to do for almost a year. I swear, no one goes through jeans like Ryan. About once a year I make a throw sized quilt out of all the jeans he wears out, but this year I made a slipcover for our cheap IKEA sofa! We got this sofa about and year ago and it was inexpensive and great; but it only came in white. White. Like white is going to survive in this house with 3 pets and a baby on the way. So we've been using one of those throws I made out of Ryan's jeans tossed over it to somewhat protect it, but it always fell off and wasn't big enough for the whole love seat. But in prep for the baby coming, I have to move all my sewing stuff including the massive pile of Ryan's jeans. This means I can either find a new way to store them in a smaller space, or just get the project done! Is the result perfect? No. Are the corners square and the seams straight? No. But did I successfully make a custom slipcover without even the internet to help and no pattern? Yes! So there.

In other news, the deer have been very active in the yard and we have had a couple within tossing distance of the house twice in the last two days. This morning they seemed oddly alarmed and antsy, and we couldn't figure out why until Ryan spotted Nermal bounding toward the deer. That's right: our little tabby cat has decided that he is a carnivore and the deer are herbivores and therefore it is his prerogative and duty to chase them. I wonder what his plans are if he catches one...

Hay Feeding

2010-03-18T19:49:00.001-05:00

I have recently been inspired by this blog: Pioneer Woman and so I'm going to post a little bit more like she does and see how that goes. No promises about maintaining this, just an experiment. If you like it, let me know!

Ryan currently is feeding hay from the bales he had made last fall, but we're still low tech around here. So here is how to feed a small flock of sheep with a bale of hay:

Unroll your bale a little and grab a pitchfork. We searched auctions for months for a decent pitchfork, but I think we ended up just paying the $60 for this one new. It's surprisingly hard to find a pitchfork at auction in decent shape.

Move some hay onto a tarp, basically whatever you can tote around.

Pause to contemplate life while the ram and cows behind you try to figure out how to get some of this fresh hay.

Haul your tarp down the hill. The ram still wants some, so smile at him as you walk on by.

Wrestle the tarp in through the sheep pen gate. Today, only one got out so we're doing pretty good! Luckily the lazy photographer could reroute her back into the corral.

Slide the tarp out from under the hay. This one's tricky because the sheep like to stand on the tarp. So the old "pulling the tablecloth off the table while it's set" trick comes in useful.

Stand back and admire your handiwork again. That and think about how the pastures are almost ready to be done with the whole hauling hay thing and the ewes will soon have fresh grass to eat.

So now it's time to go feed the ram and cows before they bust down the fence in search of hay.

Productive quilting retreat

2010-03-04T22:23:00.002-06:00

Last weekend I had a quilting retreat and had a very productive weekend! First, I finished the 14 place mats that I started in August from some fabric my mom bought for the purpose. People kept asking me if I really needed 14 place mats, but the answer is yes! We usually host at least that many for thanksgiving and occasionally host over a dozen for other events (like Easter or Mother's Day). I really like to host gatherings, although it always works better in the months when our sun room (poorly insulated and not on the main house's central air system) is neither freezing nor a sauna.

I also finished a baby quilt that I started at the retreat a year ago, although it really seems like a baby boy's quilt and we're expecting a baby girl. I haven't decided what to do with it yet, perhaps it will just join the stack for the next baby shower I land at or relative who has a baby.

The farm is running OK, but Ryan is working on everything double time so he gets stuff done before the baby is due at the end of April. He's been chain-sawing daily to clear room for the fencing that has to be done, and he's making great progress. We had some "feeder rage" last Friday and lost an ewe and one of our ram lambs; we think the big ram killed them. The little ewe we lost was no big deal, but the ram lamb was a real loss because we were hoping to finish him out for sale this summer. We will still have one lamb now, but that will be it.

The relentless winter & taxes

2010-02-14T22:27:00.002-06:00

I think I'm going to remember this winter as The Relentless Winter. For those of you not living nearby us, we have a record number of days in a row with more than 5" of snow on the ground, and every time we turn around it's either more snow or ice.

On this note, we bought a new truck. We are now the proud owners of not one, not two, but three trucks. We bought another one mostly because I just don't like the way the Ford drives. It's the

truck on the left (anyone want to buy a '94 Ford with 4 wheel drive????). The truck in the middle is Ryan's grandfather's truck and is 2 wheel drive (translation: it doesn't make it up the driveway easily between November and March). The truck on the right is the "new" one and is the first truck I've driven that I like to drive! I can actually understand the whole chick-in-a-truck thing with this one.

On another note, we got our taxes almost done yesterday (I say almost because we're missing a form because companies don't have to mail them until Feb 15th this year). This picture is what it looks like when Ryan balances the business books, and it looks this way for at least a week or two. Last year he made it until August before they fell apart, which is better than 2008 when he only made it to July. Considering a vast majority of our business is done after October, we have a way to go before we keep up with things as they come. The final books say the business lost money this year, but we're just on year three so we're optimistic. If you don't count buying the cows, sheep, or water system; we came out ahead by a tiny bit. When we start selling sheep this year they will finally start paying for themselves and we are continuing toward the goal of making money at our five year mark. Bit by bit, we will make it!!

The Fox and Kate's quilt

2010-01-17T13:17:00.001-06:00

Maya has been earning her keep recently (along with my mother's golden retriever who is visiting for the week) by going ballistic at random times for no apparent reason. Today we figured out why the two of them were barking their heads off in the sun room: we have a couple of red foxes hanging around the farm. This picture is blurry because it was cropped and taken from a ways away and from inside the house. I'm surprised at how big it is, it probably stands taller than Maya. As long as it stays outside of our "bubble" that is the farm, I'm not inclined to shoot it or trap it or anything. Maybe it's the city girl in me, but I just view it as part of the ecosystem. It's probably the same one we spotted during a walk last spring that we suspect ate one of our ducks. Although we're OK with the whole duck thing because if the duck wandered off that far, perhaps it deserved it....

The tree in the foreground is our peach tree, I really hope we didn't get cold enough this winter to kill our peach blossom buds like last year! I think our low temp for the year so far has been -20 deg F or so, which should still be OK.

On a quilting note, I'm posting a picture of this quilt I finished for a friend a long time ago. I saw the fabric and thought of her, but didn't send it because I was waiting for a BIG EVENT in her life to happen that would warrant that kind of a gift. But I realized that was stupid and it was just sitting, wrapped, on a shelf in my closet for the last year and a half when it should be out and enjoyed by someone! After all, I did finish the darn thing. So I sent it to her and now I'm posting the picture.

Stay warm everyone, at least this last week has had 30 deg+ days and hasn't been nearly so miserable as the week before. We've had some snow melt, so perhaps we're ready for the next round whenever it comes!

My increasingly ambitious project

2010-01-09T23:32:00.001-06:00

I started this quilt in the summer of 2007, and it has become my increasingly ambitious project. It started life as a twin sized quilt, which is just the inner section of fans and the first border of ribbons. Then I decided that it was going to be a queen sized quilt because I was going to keep it and we have a queen guest bed. So I added the second set of borders and now it's about 92" x 96". I've finally finished the applique on this sucker and it's time to start quilting it. So even though I don't usually post quilts until they are done, this one will probably be done far enough in the future that we're calling this a sufficient milestone.

I laid it out to make sure I hadn't missed any spots and of course our cat Nermal woke from his slumber because he sensed that somewhere a gigantic bit of cloth that had a ton of work in it just waiting for him to come shed on. My dearest husband started playing with the cat until I told him that if Nermal sunk his claws into this quilt that I would hold him responsible...

"Eve" Lambs

2009-12-31T11:33:00.000-06:00

We bought our most recent ewes about 4.5 months ago in August, which brought our flock up to 12 ewes. We also got a ram a couple of months ago and put him in with the ewes at the end of November. Well, it turns out the gestation period of sheep is about 145 days, which comes out to a little over 4.5 months. So surprise surprise we have lambs! We are up to three now. We had a little ewe lamb surprise the heck out of Ryan on Christmas Eve and today (New Year's Eve) we have two more little ram lambs. The ewe looks like she was sired by the previous owner's Barbados ram, which is good because Ryan did want more of that breed's blood in our little flock. She's the cream colored lamb with brown and black spots around her edges.

The two ram lambs look like they take more after their mother, so perhaps they were sired by a Katahdin ram? We really don't know! I guess the word to the wise here is that if you buy new ewes, they could already be knocked up....

Christmas gifts & California

2009-12-22T18:46:00.001-06:00

Well, our neighbors are taking care of the farm for a few days while we are visiting my dad in California. I have to say it's nice to get a couple of days away from heavy snow and difficult driving. Ryan flies back tomorrow so I hope he doesn't have too much trouble with the forecast, which currently promises to be dismal. The joys of living in Iowa.

I finished some Christmas gifts, which are the first thing I quilted since August. I hope I can pick quilting up again a little better, I have really fallen off the horse there. These were for my grandmothers, it is always so hard to shop for them and I think they like getting something I make. 'Tis the season for homemade gifts! I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and that no one gets stuck in a snow-filled ditch!

Hiatus over & egg carton extravaganza

2009-12-02T19:45:00.001-06:00

First, I have to apologize for my long hiatus. I'm so sorry! I have been absent because I'm now about 5 months pregnant and have discovered I am NOT one of those lucky women who feel like a million bucks when they're expecting (they're out there, I know a few!). So instead I have been a huge lump for the last few months and Ryan has been picking up the pieces. On a related note, Ryan HAS kept his blog up very well; it can be found here: http://beginningiowafarmer.blogspot.com/

Now, on to farm business. The growing season is done for us, but the egg layers have really kicked it into high gear recently! We are practically drowning in eggs; although we are continuing to find people who want to buy them. So we ran out of egg cartons and had to order some more. If you ever wanted to know what $150 in egg cartons looks like, this is it. I came home to this ginormous box in my living room and had to share the way the egg cartons seem to come in "columns" within it!

Anyway, it is not my intention to become one of those non-blogging bloggers, so I am hoping to get back to something resembling my bi-monthly-ish update frequency. Wish me luck!!

Mother Nature Network 40 farmers under 40

2009-09-24T19:35:00.001-05:00

Sorry about the hiatus, although this will be a short post. We were chosen for the second round of Mother Nature Network's "40 farmers under 40". We're number 32 and 33, but that's ok. :-)

Click here for article

Excelsior & Green Beans

2009-08-02T14:02:00.001-05:00

Green bean season (and wax bean season, that's the yellow ones) is in full swing, and Ryan's love of planting them has really led to a lot of them! I've frozen about 6 or 7 quart-sized ziploc bags of them, and of course we've eaten some. I haven't canned any because I haven't gotten over the whole pressure-canner hump. Mine needs a new gasket and a new gauge and I just haven't gotten to doing that. I need to though....

My heritage lilies continue to amaze me, this one is Excelsior. It's like a stargazer on steroids and smells awesome! I think it's my new favorite lily. The weather this year continues to be beautiful, we just finished a record cool July with an average temp of 68 degrees or so. Makes the Iowa summer that much more pleasant!

Dust Bath and Citronella Lily

2009-07-23T18:09:00.001-05:00

Well, I promised I would post a picture of "Citronella," my beautiful heritage lily and here it is. It is absolutely catalog perfect and I'm so grateful to Old House Gardens for growing it for me!

On farm news, it is a simply beautiful day. Fluffy white clouds, deep blue sky, soft green leaves, it's like a postcard out here. The chickens are running around, thrilled Ryan has weeded the rhubarb patch. They are happily digging through the freshly turned dirt for all the tasty little bugs in it. One of our turkey hens found a patch of dirt and took herself a little dirt bath in the sun (See video). I pointed it out to Ryan and he said, "I was trying to grow grass there...." as he watched her forlornly! I told him she looked happy as she made little cooing noises.

Baby shower quilt

2009-07-19T19:00:00.002-05:00

I finished another quilt, this one for my sister-in-law's baby shower. I quilted like a fiend this week, trying to get the hand quilting in the center done. I got it done, but I didn't quite get the binding done by the time of the baby shower this afternoon. Ah well, I guess that means I'll get to take the quilt to my guild meeting in a couple weeks and then it will go to my first niece. It is about 50" by 60", so it should be useable as a crib quilt if she so chooses.

I also made some gifts for the shower prize winners, which are some table mats. They seemed to go over well, but the strong preference was for "the blue ones". Future note to self: just make blue ones!