End-of-summer gardens, creatures, and outings

It has been a fairly dry summer at the farm, much to Ryan's chagrin. Pretty much every storm that has come through has petered out right at our farm and then fired back up once it's past us. For example, last night there was heavy flooding about 10 miles east of us in Des Moines, but we got 0.3" of rain, which is amazing! Farmers really do live and die by rainfall amounts, we pretty much never miss the weather on the 10:00 evening news! There have been some truly lovely sunsets, though.

There have also been a couple of nice rainbows.

We had a turkey that didn't get out of some of the rain a couple of weeks ago, and a cold wet turkey is not likely to survive. So we brought it into the garage to warm up and dry off. This is almost the only thing my hair dryer ever does!

The turkey made a full recovery once we had her dried off and we were able to take her back to the flock.

I also told you I would update you on my garden, so I took a picture of my garden this morning. "Horribly neglected" is somehow insufficient as a description...

The yellow cherry tomatoes decided to go nuts, and I did a bad job of harvesting my radishes (they are off to the left of the picture, out of sight). It's still a more successful garden than any I've ever had, so I will continue to get better at this garden thing. 

My morning glories did grow well up my back porch, this is the first year that some of the variegated variety have shown up!

I took a picture of a very large garden spider hanging out by our pumpkins (which are not in the garden)--she's a beauty, but didn't feel like posing for me.

Also in critter news we adopted a puppy. This is our fifth attempt at a dog since starting a farm (with varying types of failure), but is our first attempt at a puppy. She's a border collie mix, we think mixed with rat terrier since she is not shaggy enough to be pure border collie. She's very smart, but also very puppy-like and we've been working on house training and getting her to not herd the children around. 

We took the kids to Living History Farms a couple of weeks ago, where they got to see some of how people used to farm. They aren't quite old enough to really make the connections and see how things are the same and how they are different from those farms to ours. 

At the fair this year the kids were old enough to start playing more, including the tunnel of squash (?) that they put up near the agriculture building. Here they are running out of the tunnel:

I'm biased, but I think those are pretty good pictures of both of them!

H and I just got back from our annual trip to Clearwater Camp's family camp, where we had a great time! The weather was just perfect.

We did some fishing, here I caught H right at the moment she had touched the fish and is currently saying "Eww!"

And we also tried archery for the first time, with some help from a counselor.

'Til next year, beautiful North Woods!

Hawk, Quiet Book, Grow Chart, etc

A couple of weeks ago, Ryan came in from chores with a "You'll never guess what I caught in the raccoon trap." After many guesses, I was unable to come up with this guy:

Yes, that is an angry hawk. We were using a dead chicken as bait, and apparently this guy walked right in. It is illegal to shoot these in Iowa (possibly in the U.S.?), so we took him up to Ames with us and let him go. Hopefully 50 miles away is far enough that he won't find his way back! 

I've also been getting back to crafting and quilting some, so for a recent trip to California to visit my dad I made Hazel a Quiet Book. Some of these pages are more applicable when she's older, but I thought I'd take a shot at it nonetheless.

This page is for weaving

This one is for tying shoes and fastening overalls

This one is for counting beads (her current favorite page) and lacing

The back of the lacing page and braiding

Shape matching (her second favorite page) and a maze. The small pocket on the jeans holds the shapes when they aren't matched up. It's hard to see the maze, but there is path stitched in two pieces of fabric that a glass bead can travel through.

Close up of the maze so you can see the path.

I used almost all materials that I had on hand (I bought a lace for the lacing page, that's it), and the cover is from a leg of Ryan's jeans. The tan pages are also old jeans of his, actually. When I buy that man jeans, I'm really just choosing fabric for future projects. I've also made a slip cover from them and a couple of quilts. 

But back to recent quilt completion. I bought a Goodnight Moon panel online a few months ago because I couldn't resist it. I love that book! All I did with it was quilt it, no piecing or applique or anything. 

Yes, that is a green paint stain on my carpet that I forgot to photograph around. Toddler.

Close up of quilting.

I also finished Hazel's grow chart. This is custom fabric I designed on Spoonflower, and I really feel the quilting added something to it (but that's hard to see from this pic). 

Lastly, I made some tutus for my nieces for Christmas, so of course Hazel needed one. Here Nermal has found the tutu and is happily nested in it.

Lastly, some kidlet pictures. Here Hazel is decorating our Christmas tree with Daddy. Again, Ryan pulled a seedy looking cedar tree out of the pasture. When he first pulled it in, it was 12 feet tall and we decided it was a little big for us. So we hacked the bottom off it until we had something more like 7 or 8 feet tall. 

And Zane before we gave him a haircut. Yes, we cut off his hair at about 4.5 weeks because it was already threatening to become a mullet!

Since we had our first snow of the season today, Hazel had to try on Mommy's boots. Is it just me, or does this really make her look like a manga or anime character?

I think it makes her look like the main character from Final Fantasy 9. She even currently has the right hair!

Garage and the Bees

Today Ryan gave me a lovely gift: My garage back! Huzzah!! Do you remember our power outage? Holy cow, I just went to look for that post and learned that outage was on February 13th! That was over 21 weeks ago! Anyway, that outage fried our garage door opener. So we had several weeks where the garage door didn't open, and for some odd reason it because the repository for every form of random junk on the farm. It wasn't clean to start with, and being filled with more junk did not help. So then we had several more weeks where it was unusable as a garage because a car would not fit into it. But finally today, Ryan got it all cleaned out. I'd like to say I helped, but at 22 weeks pregnant I'm largely useless.

And then here it is with a car in it:

And here's the pile of junk we're hoping to get rid of. Anyone want a push lawnmower that needs a tuneup?

On a totally separate note, we have a nest of wild honeybees that has moved into one of our soft maples. I don't think I already blogged about them (sorry if I did) because I didn't think they'd stay. But they've made a home in the maple tree limb and they all come out when it's warm. 

I really have to get a better camera to get a picture of these guys. It just looks like a dark spot in the middle of this picture. I'm having deja vu, so perhaps I did blog about these before...


So now a picture of the cows grazing peacefully. The extreme heat of this summer has been very hard on the turkeys, and we've been losing quite a few. Luckily we haven't lost as many as some farmer friends of ours, but we've certainly been losing them at a steady rate. Turkeys like heat, but shouldn't be born TOO warm. 

And a few pictures of my toddler, who's grasp of language gets better every day. 
Drawing with sidewalk chalk:

Pretending to be Mommy:

Cuddling on the couch:

Tiling & Pulling the Well Head

We bought our farm in December 2007. About two months later in February, the well pit collapsed and we lost water to the house in the middle of winter. We were still living in Ames, so we decided to sort of let the plumber cobble something together until April, when we hooked up the rural water lines. 
But, you see, we never did anything about that collapsed well pit. We pulled the tank and sump pump out, but there's about 12 inches of sand in the bottom of the thing and really the world had other concerns. Fast forward to today, and we had two VERY wet years in 2008 and 2009 (remember massive flooding in Iowa?) which resulted in water problems in our yard starting in 2010 (see this post). We had the county engineering office out at the end of last year to figure out how to fill our well so we could get the water table to behave itself again, and they told us we needed to tile all over the yard because without a sump pump working in that pit full time, our water table was always going to be high and would interfere with the septic system. So this weekend, we borrowed a mini excavator from Vermeer (still my favorite job perk!!) and put in over 300 feet of tiling.

Ryan spent the most time in the cab of the machine. You can't see Ryan's co-worker Doug, but he came out too and he plans tiling projects as part of his job. He spent his time in the pit mostly, got filthy, and was worth his weight in gold. Thanks Doug!

My stepdad also came down, here he is finding our power lines from the pole to the house (no, Iowa One Call won't find those for you because they're private after the pole) with a spade. Michael, how did you get the cruddy job???

Of course, the chickens were convinced all this dirt work was so they could find more bugs. They were pretty thrilled by the prospect.

Here is our "yard" after excavation. If you can see the little red flags behind the well pit, they are the power lines.

Here's most of the dig. 

Hazel loved watching Daddy and her "Bapa" all day from our porch balcony. She had a perfect view and was totally safe, so it worked great. Yes, I know she has something on her lip in this picture and no, I have no idea what it is. Food of some sort, perhaps?
My job while the men were doing this was mostly to cook. I turned a flank steak into fajitas and stuffed flank steak for lunch and dinner on Saturday, and we had skirt steak as kebabs for dinner on Sunday. I made waffles Sunday and Monday, and a pasta salad for a Sunday lunch cookout. Michael was a huge help with dishes!

So after Michael filled in most of the trenches with the Mini Ex while Ryan chored, today we had to pull the well head out. When the county told us to "pull out the well head," somehow I pictured something different than what happened. 
But first things first, we had to relocate the bull frog who had made his home for the past 3 years in our well pit. We know it was 3 years, because that's when we first saw him in there. He started out as a little frogling about 4 inches long.

Can you find him in this picture?
Ryan took him down to our mini-pond at the bottom of the draw in our property.

Then we had to pull the cap off the well. That was not easy at all. Ryan had to grind the heads of the bolts off, and even then it was some crowbar and hammer work. I will add here that a Google search of "how to remove a well head" was super unhelpful. No pictures, no nothing. Silly internet.

Ryan also collapsed the pit some, without obstructing the well itself that is in the bottom right of this picture.
So then we wrapped the power cord that descended into the dark oblivion around the backhoe bucket, and pulled up. I'm afraid I have no pictures of this, because I was too busy trying to tie knots in electrical wire to make sure it stayed attached to the backhoe.
The part that surprised me was that I thought "remove the well head" meant we would have to pull something out about 10 feet long and we would leave lots of stuff in the ground that the county would fill. No. Remove the well head means you pull and pull and pull and however deep your well is you end up with that much PVC pipe. Slimy PVC pipe.

Those of you who have been to our farm realize how far from the pit this is, and we had the line doubled up about a third of the way down. 
So finally, you get a thing at the end of the pipe. I assume this is the pump, but I somehow didn't think it was at the bottom of the well. Stupid me, I really should have! The number one rule of all pumps of any kind: Pumps Don't Suck. They push.

So apparently this is what a well pump looks like. Ryan was able to pull it out the last bit of the way, but he said it was very heavy. 

And voila! An empty well casing. Ready for the county engineer's approval. Hopefully he says, "Yep, looks good!" and fills it up with drilling mud and all the water issues in our yard go away.


I can dream.