Note to self

Note to self: 185 chickens fit in our livestock trailer. Not any more than that....

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!

Strawberry season & the pond

Summer is in full swing now, it's downright hot today. I learned how to use my new ice cream maker (Christmas present) and have been really happy with it! (It's a KitchenAid and is all electric, with the freezable insert) Way better than the whole ice and salt combo in the hand churn bucket. Those kind of suck. Our strawberries have been producing already, I almost have too many to know what to do with (but not quite!!). And our blueberries have little blueberries on them now! I think we'll get a total of about a dozen berries on them this year, but it's encouraging nonetheless.

We're putting test hours on one of Vermeer's skid loader prototypes this weekend, it's quite a handy little machine. So Ryan built us a "pond" at the end of all of our water drain line, which he keeps calling a scrape. Considering the thing's about 4-5 ft deep at the water line, I'm not calling it a scrape. It gets to be a pond. I was pretty impressed he built it so well and so quickly! It already is forming an ecosystem, 2 days later. We have dragonflies and other little critters in the process of moving in. We're really hoping this will help us with our water management issues, because with all of our sand and sloped hills we have water problems like crazy!

Sage Drying and Spectral Mountains

Ahhh, I love national holidays. They rock. So I'm making the most of mine. A little while back I finished another quilt and didn't post it. It is the 2007 block of the month from Creekside Quilting in Des Moines, and I rearranged it to an all over pattern. The pattern is Delectable Mountains, and so I named mine Spectral Mountains. Of course, now I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. Perhaps keep it for a toddler's bed? I did the machine quilting myself and I think the spiral quilting pattern worked well even though you can't see it well in this picture.

There are lots of flowers blooming in my garden right now, and the lilies-of-the-valley are downright intoxicating. I think I'm getting a little high just sitting here breathing their scent. Ryan is working on planning our fences in this picture, he's trying to figure out what we're going to put in and how we're going to get it in this year. Fences will be a big deal for us and will make life a lot easier.

Challenge question: what is the pretty little purple flower in the arrangement? Hint one: It's not a plant we grow for the flower. Hint two: It has to do with my other activity today...

My sage plant in the garden survived the winter (I had no idea it was a perinnial!) and is now happily going nuts. So I harvested a bunch of it and am starting to dry it. All of it you see on the towels are drying a little before I hang them because I washed all of them off. Anyone want some dried sage...?

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!!!

Morels & Sign Hanging

It's May in Iowa, which means Morel mushroom season! I hadn't actually eaten one before yesterday, but now we know we have them on our land. Not very many (not enough to sell or anything), but gratifying nonetheless. They're pretty good, kind of creamy. I breaded them in flour and fried them in butter, which will make almost anything worth eating. 

Incidentally, Morel season coincides with tick season.... I'm up to two so far, even with bug spray. 

We also got our sign hung up today! I painted it last summer, but now we finally got it mounted to our shop building. Ryan has been making great progress on cleaning buildings, etc., and is doing a really bang-up job of turning this farm around. It's hard to believe we've been here only a year. Ryan also decided to start his own blog, found here: http://www.beginningiowafarmer.blogspot.com/

He wants to update it more frequently than I do mine, and he will probably succeed at that. So go check it out!

Ditch burning & new sheep

Ditch burning actually appears to be a very common thing in South Central Iowa. So this is a more intentional burn we did in our ditch, and is more like what it is supposed to look like! It has been just astounding how much burning people do down here, there was never so much up by Ames. It seems like every ditch and pasture down here gets a fresh burn. It's nice though, because burning can be very good for the native grasses. 

We also got three new ewes, who are between 5 and 8 years old. Ryan was really worried that the 5 younger, stronger ewes (shown in the foreground) would take over all of the older ewes' feed. Instead, the older ewes push the younger ones around! We are weaning them off of the winter ration (hay and a little cracked corn) as our grass greens up. We will start moving them around the pasture soon, I can't wait! We are also supposed to get chickens this week, we hope they come Wednesday instead of tomorrow. We're just not ready for them yet!