Farm apparel

It doesn’t matter what you are wearing…as long as you have your boots on you can go and collect eggs at our farm. Linus and Sally sometimes have a love/hate relationship with the chickens…they love to watch them and collect the eggs, but they are scared to get pecked.

The hens have been doing a great job laying and we are getting a couple dozen or more a day. If you’d like to be on the delivery route feel free to check out our store under the Our Products section of our web site. From there you can order and pay securely via pay pal. Once we extract some more honey and the harvest vegetables I will list those in the store too. Thank you so much for your patronage!

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A late harvest

Last year was the first year we’ve grown brussel sprouts. After reading some local blogs, I learned that they are late in maturing…well, ours are super late. Is this the last harvest of 2011 or the first of 2012? 🙂 Andy went and picked them yesterday and Lucy took pictures for him. Candy, our dog, was out helping too.

A self portrait

Andy let the chickens out to romp in the first snow of the season. They didn’t know what to think of this stuff.

For dinner tonight, Andy cooked up the sprouts by rendering some bacon fat off of three pieces of bacon, put a little butter in, added our very tiny sprouts, browned them, and cooked them in 1/2 cup water with some chicken stock and some garlic until the water was gone. They were delicious. Sally was hesitant to try them, but after the first one she was popping them like candy.

Tough lesson as a country kid

These were the words I just typed to my husband as we were discussing the events of today. On Mondays I work as an analyst with the State of Ohio and the kids spend the day with their grandparents. Andy let me know about an hour ago that Linus’s beloved little kitty had been hit by a car.

The saddest part is that the cat survived but was so mangled that Andy had to put him out of his misery. It’s times like this I am thankful for a husband to do that type of thing. I cried when I thought of how I’m going to break the news to my sweet little guy, who loved to carry the kitty around and wanted to make him a house. I still (sadly) remember losing many cats to the traffic on the country road in front of our house, which is now even more traveled and perilous.

We’ve worked really hard with the kids to not turn the production animals into pets, but cats and dogs are different. They provide companionship, safety, and teach the kids how to treat animals gently and with respect. Please pray for us when we tell Linus later today.

 

Farm work fun!

Lucy had her first (new) school friend over for a playdate on Saturday. I’ll call her Patty for this post. Patty and Lucy spent most of their time playing outdoors- swinging and traversing the monkey bars, checking on the chickens and feeding the turkeys, and picking leftover field corn from the lonely row remaining for animal feed. Andy joked that starting next year our kids and Patty wouldn’t be able to do that, what with the new child labor laws. Knowing that my husband can be quite the jokester, I did some investigating and found an informative fact sheet concerning this. Thankfully, Patty is safe to come back and “play” work on our farm anytime. However, if you are employing kids on your farm that aren’t part of your family, please read up on the new laws.

Kids picking corn

Names for my kiddos

It was thoughtfully suggested to come up with more creative names for my kiddos. I hesitate to use their real names here because they are minors and I still have some stranger danger fears. As usual, the inspiration for their names came to me while I was running my favorite four mile loop at the farm. I have a 6 year old girl, a 4 year old boy and a 2 year old girl…so although these name don’t line up quite like that I’ve decided on the names Lucy, Linus and Sally for the kids, respectfully. Lucy, as my oldest is a little bossy, Linus, as my boy still loves his blanket, and Sally, as the baby is very much the baby of the family. And of course, these come from the classic Peanuts gang. Let me know what you think!