Concrete, Grading, and Field Day

House changes are definitely more subtle now, the latest is getting the grading done around the house and putting in our concrete. It's very nice to have the use of our front door now and it's also helping a lot with the mud.

Here H is modeling one of our retaining walls, which was part of the grading work.

Here Z enjoys the freshly poured concrete ramp out front.

We've also been working on the trim in our house, here is trim with the quarter round we installed on it. 

We also are at the beginning of our production season, so here Ryan is rolling up some polyline in front of our chicken tractors. 

I was helping gather posts for him.

Z and H were out there "helping" too.

The other major event around here is that yesterday we hosted a Practical Farmers of Iowa field day on high tensile fence building. We had a little over twenty attendees come to learn about building fence and eat lunch at our new farm!

As you would expect, it was exciting and stressful and fun, and Ryan did a great job of teaching and facilitating discussion.

Ryan even managed to shock himself on a line during the workshop that shouldn't have been live. We met some people nearby, even a couple miles away, which was a great way to make connections in a new place.

The kids are doing well, here Z works with play-doh at the daycare he attends about one day every couple of weeks.

Here H found a farm kitty at the farm where we buy our feed, which was a highlight of her day. 

Lastly, we have found some pictures of Ryan from when he was just slightly younger than Z. See the resemblance?

Birthday, New skirt, & Mother's Day

My little lady turned 2 on the 2nd, and she is definitely a toddler. Ryan stayed home and decided that she needed a birthday cake, so he made her one. So cute!

He is not the baker in our family, but I love that he decided she needed a birthday cake and so with the help of the internet he figured it out. He even made it from scratch!


We recently had a visit by a colony of bees on the move, who auditioned our silver maple for a spot for a hive (or maybe they were just resting on their way elsewhere).

They didn't stick around, much to my chagrin. I would have liked to watch them through the year. It was amazing how much noise they made! I found myself wondering if they had abandoned a colony somewhere and were not actually wild bees at all. 


So sticking with tradition, I hosted a Mother's Day gathering at our house. Beforehand, I made myself a Mother's Day present: a maternity skirt!

I'm pretty sure everyone knows by now, but I am due with our 2nd child in mid-November! I never did have a maternity skirt with Hazel, and there are enough semi-formal occasions that I just wanted one. Especially since I'm wearing maternity wear much earlier with this one! I found this fabric on sale (it's just 2 yards of a light cotton) and love it. Then the top is some ribbed jersey knit that stretches. I should be able to wear it through most of pregnancy, although I'll say the knit is really hard to work with! I'm used to cotton, which behaves much better.


So we also celebrated Hazel's birthday at Mother's Day, as we have every year since she was born. I'm guessing this next child will get similar treatment with Thanksgiving!

This time I made the cake: chocolate with pink frosting. I asked Hazel if she wanted pink frosting, and she enthusiastically agreed that was a great idea!

Barn Raising & Cubicle Quilt

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. 

A Special Guest & It's still wet out here

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.