Wow time flies

So sorry. I haven't been here for a very long time. It would seem that life has gotten in the way of things. But isn't that the story for us all.....
So no excuses...... Lets play catch up. The homesteading thing has been put on a very slow back burner as life took the usual path of loops and hurdles.


Our heritage chickens and meat birds.

    Since the last post we have raised turkeys, (which we consider to be descendants of velociraptors)

Velociraptors

The new pigs that made it to slaughter time.

The first organic pigs that we started and the neighbours dog nicely ate.





 

Rhubarb harvest time.
 

 We still haven't moved to our family hobby farm; instead we bought a small house with a smallish yard (keep in mind if it doesn't have a 100 acres it is small in my world.) So small yard, it is definitely small, large compared to most; but still under an acre. I can't find enough space to garden properly. So I have been experimenting with different gardening techniques. I will post some more of those and some awesome links later.

Please tell me that's the last of the fencing.

We still go to the family farm in the summer every year. 3 months of intense wood harvesting from dead pine and cleanup of the farm, compliments of mother natures temper tantrums. I definitely know my way around a chainsaw and tractor.

   Last year my folks were involved in a vehicle accident that has left my cowboy father in a bad state. He can walk around and putt now, but very carefully. It has made for some very trying times. A cowboy who can not do much is very easily frustrated. Considering he has always been a hard working man that would give the shirt off his back to help others and now he has to be very careful just putting his socks on. It has not been an easy time. Glad he is still with us.

 

We have had an engagement with our oldest, a new baby on the way for our 2nd oldest, and our youngest is in her 2nd year of homeschooling. That has been a change on so many different levels.

We have lost some very close family and friends compliments to life and its end and we have made some new wonderful friends and extended family.

 

  Lately I have done some craft trade tables with a friend.
Won't be doing that again. (Oh my....) But it was a learning experience.
  One year I helped out a friend and spent a good chunk of my time illustrating for two children's books he wrote. That was fun and quite the learning curve. I love the stories. Yet, I remember when they showed up at my place upset that the publisher had printed the 2nd book prior to review and washed out the colors of the illustrations. Oh well, everyone who has had a chance to read these to their children find that the kids just want them to read them over and over and over. Yeah! https://www.santadreams.com
 They make great Christmas presents.
Or you can just let them look at the book and listen to the audio CD.........
    I loved the Christmas Wrapping Song they did. Check it out!

    Or if you have a dancer.... (I am glad I am not involved in dancing even though my youngest loved to do hip hop and she had a wonderful teacher for her extra curricular activities for homeschooling.) But if she was doing dance one of my dear friends makes beautiful tutus. I wouldn't get them anywhere else. She calls her product "flutterbies".  More on that soon.

  Wow...... just thinking of all the wonderful things people that you know do or can do is awesome. So that's it for today.

Oh and of course designing a new garden in my small yard, working on the family hobby farm, renovating my house, my yard, my life. Oh and did I tell you I am painting more often. I am getting the typical ka ka for not selling enough of my art work. Another day.....I will try to be more regular with my posts than once every 5 years. Bad me! Definitely need to prioritize my hours in my day. But then again...... Don't we all?

    .

My little cowgirls and excitement we really don't need

The girls were receiving lessons from papa, a talented man who has spent much of his life being a cowboy.  There isn’t much that he doesn’t know about breaking a horse. Everything I learned - I learned from my pa.  It is wonderful to see the grandkids taking so much time to listen and hear what he is telling them.  He has so many wonderful stories of growing up that hopefully one day I will get them all written down.

Back to the girls.... Not only was Patches being trained, so are the girls. Just a few minutes after this picture was taken, a neighbour dog spooked the horse.   My 5 year old on it, and yeah every mothers heart stops. (Especially when mom is still on crutches.)  Needless to say the crutches went down, and I hobbled slowly to the centre of the corral.  But it was well handled. Yet, I am not saying my heart had started working and it didn’t for a few more minutes.   

The little one stayed on while the horse bucked, my oldest held onto the horse and calmed him down. Papa reached for the little one and the horse.  All I could do was watch with the fear of my daughter (the city girl) getting thrown off the horse and being caught either between it and the corral or under his feet.  She held on.  Thankfully she held on.  Grandpa then calmly asked her if she wanted to stay on or get off.  We all held our breath waiting for the answer.  My dad looked at me and then back at her.  All three of us knew what it would mean on so many different levels if she wanted off.  She would not have confidence, she would possibly develop a fear, and the horse would have learned that he could buck and the rider would get off. A very bad habit any horse or child could form.

Her answer, ‘Nope I want to stay on!’ All three of us let out the air we were holding and relief hit hard. So please take her for one more ride around the corral and that is it for today. This they did and once she was in my arms my heart then started to beat again.

Bears, Cougars, Dogs Oh My

Shortly after this we watched a cinnamon bear go running by the house.  It was a little bear looking for new territory.  He didn’t hurt anyone in the neighbourhood or bother anything. But unfortunately the local game warden put him down.  Yeah, I definitely don’t understand this one. The bear that wasn’t causing any problems and runs away from everyone gets put down. Yet the big black bear that chases livestock, rips apart the garbage in the neighbourhood and creates havoc was allowed to roam free.  I think there was a problem with some peoples’ way of thinking or figuring things out.  So now we have this black bear that is chasing the livestock and trying to cause havoc, joined by the cougar who is ticked off because a guide decided to shoot its mate early in the spring because it was within 5 miles of a residential area (note to foolish guide – they have been in the residential area and surrounding for the past 50 years) and never bothered anything prior to this one losing its mate.  

Now the rest of the summer is spent with no sleeping nights as I am constantly up intercepting and calming down the horses and steers after they have been chased by the black bear, the cougar and the neighbour dog. Yes, the same one that spooked the horse. Yet the neighbour seems to think it is up to me to teach his dog to stay home, hmmm.   To the point on the last time I took his dog home and asked him to keep it there he decided it was okay to get physically pushy with me, just a little harmless woman. Yeah, guess for those of you who know me you can stop laughing now. Because – yes, he got a surprise.  My dad was sitting in the passenger side of my truck, I am still hobbling around (let us not mention I am still supposed to be on crutches, I know and a year a half later I still know - thank you). Oh dear neighbour don’t bully me, I don’t take kindly to abusive men who try threatening little harmless unarmed females. So please bring it on..... You first. (grin)

The neighbour was then gently informed (ha ha) that I would not assist him with teaching his dog to stay home and if the dog was to chase my child, my livestock, etc on our property again then the necessary course of action would happen and I would not bother to be so courteous. Since I didn’t back down he was very confused and grumbled ‘So be it’... Guess he had spoken.

We didn’t see the dog for about 3 weeks. It was much easier just dealing with the bear and cougar during the night and fencing and haying during the day. A vacation from the vacation would be great.  Somebody please notify me when it starts. Oh and will that notification be by email, snail mail or phone call?

In between all of this wonderful drama, my soon to be sixteen year old son learns a lesson.  My son has been doing online summer courses for school.  Ugh, did I tell you that dial up is evil and ridiculously expensive because it is so evil and wants to see if you age and die before it downloads that file you need.  Or hangs up and makes you start all over after rebooting your computer.  Yeah for those of you who have had to deal with the nightmare of dial up I toast you for surviving. When we weren’t dealing with this we were driving to the coast so my son could write his provincials. Then back up to the farm for more work. A long trip that was very tiring. But hey he did it. Hopefully soon he will get why education is important and not stupid.  But we won’t talk about the school system. That is a completely different rant.

We get back to the farm and we are fencing once again. 33+ acres of fencing, mind you as my father informed my son a year later of the accurate measurement of fencing laid out was over 70+ acres. This took 2 and ½ months to complete. We had to manually clear, manually pound posts (some would call it the old fashioned way), manually roll out the wire, and so forth. So if you ever want a how to fencing lesson please let me know. I am sure we can oblige. Heck, I can probably come up with hands on demonstration if you really like.

So we are finally at the half way point of the fencing and here comes my dad on the tractor.  ‘So you guys ready to go to work?’ he asks.  Considering it is now noon and we have been working for most of the day already, it was a very early morning. ‘I thought we were working’ I answer. He tells us that if we want to get hay in we need to go do it now.  My son is an eager beaver for a change in the day events schedule. So - why not mom.

Oh, so you think that getting hay is easy do you... Even moms can be hard ______ and can kick butt on manual labour.  Considering that I have gotten hay before, I know the drill and just how heavy those large bales are.  My son on the other hand has not and does not know.  So off we go to get hay. We moved over 19000 pounds of hay in 8 hours.  This does not mean we used a tractor, we manually loaded it by hand into the back of the truck, then drove to the farm, then manually unloaded it and sent it up the hay elevator where then it needed to be stacked.  We called it quits at 9:30pm that night.  Hay was done, and it had been a 16 hour day.

The next morning my son couldn’t move his fingers, his hands were in a lot of pain.  Papa told him he guessed we should have the day off and rest, and he probably should have gotten out the hay bale hooks?

 My answer to my son was - so are you going to underestimate your mom again anytime soon? Needless to say, the answer remains a no.

Check back soon to see more of the ongoing trials and tribulations.  Heck I haven’t even gotten to Christmas of last year yet and the start of the traumatic spring.

So we are going to homestead, maybe or eventually

So we decided to get the family hobby farm that I grew up on back up and running.  My parents have kept chickens for eggs over the years since us kids grew up and left home; our hobbies and pets with us.

The 1^st year, grandpa took me to see some paints (horses for those of you who haven’t heard the term before) that an associate of his was selling. Hmmmm. Bad move papa. I went to look at two and bought 3, 2 paints and a sorrel. The paints were beautiful wild stallions, age of 2 and the sorrel was a year older and gilded.  Merry Christmas kids you now have some horses which we are moving to grandma and papas in the spring. With the understanding that they are yours but not until papa and I completely break them - or them me.

Then we decided we wanted chickens in the freezer and beef. So ordering we go - for the chickens, (meat birds they call them) - yuck. Definitely not the same breeds I grew up with.  Which, I still remember as a nightly chore chasing them around and putting them into the hen house for the night. The breed that we get now aren’t much better than the store bought stuff, which I won’t eat either unless I absolutely have to.

Now it is time to get the beef from our neighbours and my old 4H leader. (Don’t ask me to grade your pet or your meat- I won’t do it. I definitely had enough of that at the time.) Thankfully they dropped off the two steers as we don’t own a trailer and I didn’t want them to put a hoof through the propane tank in the back of papa’s pickup.  We would not have had a pretty picture, for either papa or the fly by beef.

With the catch that a rescued heifer was to stay the summer with the steers on our grazing field. This was to assist her in trying to catch up with the much needed growth, health and to prevent her from coming into contact with a bull once she was ready.  This was to save her since she was too small to be used for breeding.  Her name became Polly, compliments of our 4 year old at the time.  The two steers became known as Steak and Roast.  I believe the names speak for themselves on where they were going in the late fall.

In the meantime papa has rotortillered the old garden so we can get our first year harvest.  Well, the outcome of getting dirty, doing a lot of bent over and planting ended up with zilch. Oh, did I forget to mention the shovel rides my oldest daughter was giving to my youngest while I was companion planting the garden.  No the shovel rides did not cause the zero harvest result. It was those pesky marmots/gophers that have decided to move in since us kids and pets have moved out.  This is a problem that needs to be rectified or should I say vindicated.

So now we have come to summer time, time to go up to the farm and break the horses, fence in 3o+ acres so the animals have more grazing and running area.  Yeah............. the night before we are scheduled to leave.  I am on a ladder- harvesting cherries from the trees in our yard, which makes great organic wine. Yummy umm.  My husband is at work, my son and niece are down below me, my oldest daughter and youngest are going in and out of the house.  And well the ladder goes down, I go down, land on my ankle completely bent over and snap, tear, crunch.  Breathe, pain, scream........

My oldest is phoning my husband, he said if your mom is screaming call 911 - Now! It’s broke! High pain tolerance can be a very good thing in some things, but not in others.  

So a few days later we head to the farm, did I mention that I am now on crutches and can’t drive my standard 4x4 Bronco.  I am not a happy passenger. And I am sick from the pain killers they have me on. Oh joy-not. Awake, zonk out, awake, zonk out, pain – awake. Pull over –QUICK!

 Well you get the point.

So now I am not breaking horses, need to get a farrier (to do their hooves), yes - horses loooove pedicures. But a bit worried this is their first time...... Yet, we still need to fence in 33+ acres and get hay. And I am on crutches. Did I mention my husband is up replacing the roof on the house for my parents. Yeah, to get things put back into order it is going to be a very long few years.

Hm mm, I wonder how this is going to go...

More to come check back soon.