Forward!

The long-awaited post has arrived; we sold our farm. I waited until it actually closed to post this so I wouldn't curse it somehow, but I deposited the check of funds leftover from the sale today and all the paperwork is signed. The new owner is actually letting us rent our place back from him until December 1st, so we get some time to move slowly. We'll live in my parent's house in Ames while we build our new home.

I'll start posting views of the new place as we build, so here is our "blank slate" as it stands right now. We're basically looking where the front door will be, and we are facing East. Some more pictures taken from the same spot, from north to south:

I know it doesn't look like much right now, but starting next Friday I think we'll have a hole! Then we'll fill the hole with a house. Yes, we are building a house over the winter in Iowa. It's crazy, but I think we've already proved there is a lot of crazy going on here. I think we can get the shell of the house in place before winter really sets in, which means we can make progress over the winter. 
We also have a ton of work to do on fencing, wiring, water, etc. so we had a work day two weeks ago. Wonderful friends helped build fence:

And wire the building:

There is still a long way to go, but it felt good to get so much done. 

We're reaching the point in our farming season where we are taking birds to the locker, getting ready for winter, etc. This is a picture from (chicken) locker day, showing our turkeys and cows hanging out. I actually took it because Ryan is always asking me if I've seen cows, so I was sending him a picture that I had eyes on some cows. Recently they've been challenging fences like crazy, and one bull in particular seems to have lost all respect for electric fence. 

On the quilting front, I did a couple of mug rugs for a United Way fundraiser at work, which turned out well. Mug rugs are kind of fun because they're not very big (these are about 7 inches by 12 inches or so) and they sew up quickly. 

I also finished the quilt top for the one I've been working on, that in my last post I flipped the "sea" on. I got the borders on it during my quilt retreat last weekend.

It's 84 inches by 108 inches, and the border is intended to be the night version of the inside. This picture shows the colors closer than the last one I posted. 

The kids continue to do well, H still likes school and is a hair's breadth from being able to read. Here she is working on a puzzle.

And Z is definitely a toddler, with all the world-exploration tendencies that come with it. Here he checks out the chickens while they were still in the brooder a couple of weeks ago. 

 With that, I'm excited and relieved to finally be moving Forward.

Roosters and Angel Quilt

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!

Bad Summer Night Poetry

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.

With spring comes activity & 181 fluffballs

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.

Summer cactus & baby turkeys

It's high summer now for sure, and very hot and humid out today. Our prickly-pear cactus is going just crazy right now! Perhaps this year will be the year I actually make something from the fruit. I've been intimidated that it has thousands of tiny invisible spines (the visible ones you can deal with) and so last year I just went out to look at the fruit but didn't pick it. Everything online says you should use tongs, wear oven mitts, blah blah blah etc. But in the meantime we have this crazy beautiful cactus in the yard! Ryan says they are actually a native plant in Iowa--who knew?

We got our first batch of turkeys last Thursday, of course they are adorable. So they are 3 days old and love shiny objects (hence the video). They are also very active in the brooder and it's just amazing how different their personalities are from the chickens.

Ryan has been working his tail off, the chickens go in to be processed on Monday. He's also been selling everything that's not nailed down on Craig's List to pretty good effect to try to pump money into the business. It's amazing how much random stuff there is around here! It's almost equally amazing that people will pay for it....

Well, we're definitely in the height of "food" season. We have strawberries (although most got eaten by the layer chickens), mulberries, lettuce, herbs, and the garden is starting to come into its own. It's a good time of year when we can watch everything grow!

New Layers & Irises

It's now well into spring, thank goodness! We got some more laying hens, and they are so very cute! The layers are always so much more alert and interested in their world than the broilers. We got Wyandotte, black sex-linked, and red sex-linked. The sex-linked are interesting because that means that the male and female chicks are different colors so you can tell the day they are born.

Our irises are also just starting to bloom! Here is one of our first that isn't just a basic yellow. The previous owners of our house really loved irises and so we have them in

almost every color of the rainbow. I maybe would have gone for lilacs, but I admit that I love the irises and they make a great cut flower.

My favorite garden news is that our blueberries are blooming! Not only did they survive the winter, but they are blooming!! It's hard to see in the picture, but the blooms are small and white and kind of balloon-shaped. I'm so excited. I really didn't know if they would even make it through the winter and here they are blooming. We're still a long way from edible blueberries, but my fingers are crossed!!!