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.
Between foxes attacking layers, opossums eating eggs, and raccoons preying on broilers, we decided it was time for a dog. So we adopted an 8-month-old rat/fox terrier mix from our local Animal Rescue League and picked him up on Tuesday. He came from another farm that had too many animals, and has lived outside all his life, so he is perfect for what we need.
We decided to name him Solo. Originally we meant it because he's going to be kind of on his own, but it could be short for Han Solo or there is an obscure Marvel Superhero named Solo who fights terrorism. I love that: our predators are so very like terrorists!!
He spent the last couple of nights near the broiler pen, and the predation on our young broilers has gone down. Now we just have to teach him not to chase layer chickens...
When we bought our house a few years ago, lining the secondary driveway was a very rustic, picturesque farm fence. It really was for decoration and to help find the driveway because it's very steep and not well defined. The only decent picture of it I could find is in the background of Ryan trimming a maple tree in the yard.
Notice it leans, and we had always intended to replace it someday. Well, last night Ryan came home after dark and backed the two-wheel drive pickup down the driveway. We knew it was inevitable someday, but he did a truly excellent job of nailing that fence.
I love that there is one lonely post still standing as if to say "Hey guys! Look! I'm still holding down the fort!"
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!
On a recent spring morning, the spiderwebs and dew looked to me like fairies had made their nests among our stumps and fences. I tried to take a picture of it, but some things are just hard to capture with a point-and-shoot camera.
We also have many Great Horned Owls around the house and hear them hooting frequently. Hazel has the book Owl Moon, which is a Caldecott winner and she loves it. However, when we had an owl land close to actually see it and hear it well, the reality of an owl was deeply terrifying.
You can see him in the middle of this picture, just barely. This picture was taken from our back steps, and Hazel is clinging to me with a death grip that defies description. Though only two, she could probably hang on to a galloping horse with her bare hands! I tried to get her to enjoy the owl, but she was having none of it.
Lastly, for Easter I decided to make Hazel an Easter dress. I followed a tutorial from a blog called Sewing in No Man's Land, but I have to say I'm not super thrilled with the pattern.
It turned out OK, but wrestling Hazel into it was a feat and a half. She is a fairly slender two-year-old, but perhaps it was the fabric choice or something.
The under, ruffle skirt turned out well, but the overdress will not be worn again. Here Hazel is feeding chickens after church some leftover popcorn from a visit to Theisen's (a local farm supply store that has a free popcorn machine).
A few for the chickens...
And a few for Hazel. She doesn't seem to mind that it's stale.
Our ram, Hades, is kind of an ornery old cuss. He's pretty convinced he's cattle, not sheep. This weekend Ryan moved him from being in with his ladies to being with the cows and bull.
Here, the cows are running in fear. It's a stampede!
Note that this ram is smaller even than the calves. But like I said, he is ornery. He and the bull are sparring occasionally, but Hades is winning.
Hades will do anything it takes to be the undisputed King of the Farm.
We also worked on pruning the peach tree on Friday night. It hasn't been well pruned in years, we were trying to allow it to recover from some ice damage two years ago. Here is the peach tree before pruning:
I did lots of research about pruning peach trees, and apparently they do better with fairly severe pruning. So Ryan and I worked on it for some time and yet still didn't really get it all done.
Some branches had gotten a bit large and overgrown.
It's hard to see the lopers in that last picture, but you can certainly see Ryan trying to cut the branch off! Here are pictures of the peach tree after the pruning:
I feel like my camera is inadequate to capture how much we did cut off, but we really did cut quite a bit. When I was a girl, my mom used to cut branches off our apple tree about this time of year and put them in a vase. The buds still bloom, and are a bright cheerful greeting for spring. Since I had so many branches trimmed anyway, I made a big arrangement.
I will post a picture of it when it blooms fully!
And now for our Hazel pictures of the day. Ryan has some oats right now for our lactating ewes, and he's been filling containers of it for Hazel to throw to the chickens.
She loves this newest activity!
We had a bit of a surprise snow today, it seems our winter just decided to come a little late. As I type this, however, the evening weatherman is telling me it will be almost 70 degrees by Tuesday. Iowa weather is so strange.
I snapped this photo of Ryan coming in from evening chores, sometimes it seems like my life is just perpetually waiting for him to get in from chores! I tried to get a picture of the black and white cows against the white snow, but they were over the hill and not very easy to photograph from the house.
The green bucket is the feed bucket for feeding the layer hens (with the red feed scoop sticking out the top), and the blue bucket holds today's eggs. We didn't have a lot of luck with the traditional wire egg basket, they tend to break eggs. Plastic is much more forgiving in this case!
I try to make quilts for our guild to give to charity, it is one of the directives of the guild that we create quilts for people in need. So I recently finished a disappearing 9-patch made of some garage sale scraps.
It's a variety of calicos, which are oddly coming back into fashion. What goes around, comes around, I guess.
I used the opportunity to practice making feathers, and I know I improved through the practice. It's about a throw-sized quilt, and I'm not sure where it will go. But I hope whoever gets it likes it!
Last weekend was the semi-annual quilting retreat, where I finished my oldest UFO (UnFinished Object). I started this quilt in 2006 at my very first quilt retreat. I quilted it on my Bernina Activa 130, no longarm machine here!
It's a monster, at 109" square. But it's finally done! It has a lot of techniques that were my first time trying them. This was my first attempt at half square triangles, machine applique, trapunto, and hand applique.
It has 4 Iowa flowers as its theme: Wild Rose, Black-Eyed Susan, Virginia Bluebell, and Iris.
Here's the black-eyed susan trapunto and a sample of the machine quilting. Lots and lots and lots of little loops. Did I mention lots? I quilted this thing for 3 days straight, about 15 hours a day, and I had started quilting it at last fall's retreat. I'm so glad it's done!!! I was calling out when I finished bobbins (and my fellow retreaters were great for cheering for each one to keep me going), and we estimated this thing took about 20 bobbins to quilt.
The center medallion is a picture of the bridge in Madison county where Ryan and I were married. Here's the other hand applique themes:
I am proud of this quilt, but I also know my skills were not as good when I made it as they are now. It was never intended to be as big as it turned out, it just happened that way. As you can see, it's too big for my queen sized bed and is really intended for a king. So I'm glad to get it off my plate because I feel I can go start more new projects!
