It rained today! This is an event in itself. It has been a dry, dry year here, as you probably already know. I think previously it hadn't rained here for the last month, and we haven't seen real rain in at least two.
Nice as that is, the turkeys have really suffered in this hot weather. We aren't even sure if it is the weather or some other factor (hatchery, feed ration, etc), but we've lost a lot of turkeys. We are down to less than 40 of our original 150. We're trying to figure out what we're going to do next year, since this is the second bad year of turkeys in a row. Do we raise 40 broad-breasted bronze and 40 giant white turkeys? Currently we have raised just the whites, but sometimes the bronzes are a little more tolerant of less than perfect conditions. Do we just not raise turkeys at all? We have some very loyal customers who really depend on us for turkeys that we don't want to disappoint. Last year I said if we had another year like last year that we might be done with turkeys. I'm not really sure what we will do. The picture above is from 2008; our grass is not this green and our turkeys are not this big yet.
Our toddler went to Hotel Grandma this week, which means I actually got out my sewing machine!! I did a couple of non-quilting projects that I've been meaning to do for some time.
First, I added to some training pants for the little one in preparation for starting potty training soon.
I followed a tutorial from the blog "It's Our Long Story" I saw online, probably spotted on Pinterest. I changed it a little in that I didn't put the flannel on the inside of the training pants, I put it between the laminate fabric and the outside of the training pants. As Ryan mentioned, this made the training pants I purchased more attractive in addition to making them water resistant. We will have to see if they help in the whole process - I think they will.
Then I pulled out some fabric I bought on sale from my favorite quilt shop, The Quilting Connection in Ames. I had about 2 yards, and I wanted to make a similar skirt to the maternity border print skirt I made a couple months ago. I learned a few things from that one, a major issue being that it didn't have pockets! Pockets are a necessity, I have realized. I have to have somewhere to carry my cell phone since I don't always have a purse on me and I don't like leaving my cell at my desk at work. So I roughly followed a tutorial from Boulevard Designs for the skirt, but with a knit waistband for the maternity aspect. Then I used the pocket template and tutorial I found on Punkin Patterns for the pockets. In the end, I probably have my own pattern out of all of this, but I didn't take enough pictures of the process to make a tutorial. If there was demand for it, I would make another one and do so.
I wore it tonight since Ryan and I went to dinner as a date night. You have a good shot of my growing baby bump here (I'm at week 24 out of 40), and my hand looks funny because it's in my pocket. I'm starting to get to the point in pregnancy where people are more sure when they look at me that I didn't just gain a bunch of weight recently. I'm also feeling better (it took until week 20) and pregnancy is fairly tolerable right now. I posted on facebook about it but I don't think I mentioned it here: we've found out it is a boy! I'm very thrilled by this, it means it will probably be my last pregnancy if everything goes well. We can't predict the future, though...
It has been a big week for our daughter. She seems to be having anxiety that manifests itself in her pulling her hair out on one side. She tends to do it while in bed, and we think she's having anxiety about her big girl bed. So on Tuesday this week, I took her to get a haircut to even out her hair.
She did very well, she's apprehensive in this photo but actually was quite calm during the process.
During the day on Tuesday, Ryan got her a new twin mattress and brought it home. So after our haircut we went to The Evil Empire's Pella Outpost and picked out some sheets. She, of course, picked the princess sheets but I found them fairly tolerable once we got them home. They are not horribly covered in princesses, they are mostly pink and have some flowers and swirls on them.
We put it on the floor because part of her fear seemed to be in falling out of bed after we switched from the full crib to the toddler rail.
She was fairly enthusiastic about her new bed, yet has continued to mostly sleep on the floor. Sigh.
Just a quick update with something that struck me as particularly amusing. My toddler (who DOES wear sunscreen and a hat when going outside) has the beginnings of a farmer's tan. She must truly be a farmer's daughter. I tried to capture this phenomenon on my aging camera, but I admit I'm not thrilled by the results. Hopefully you can see what I'm talking about!
We put Daddy's arm in there just for a sense of perspective. Both for size and for what a REAL farmer's tan looks like. If someone doesn't think you're wearing a shirt when they're standing 200 feet away, it's not a real farmer's tan.
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:
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.
