Ten

Double digits.

Our middle child. (What will that come to mean in the future?)

The loudest child at home, but very very quiet anywhere else.

The "horse person" in the family. She's teaching us about them.

Straight A's so far at school this year.

Goofy funny.

Loves to draw, read, play sports.

The toughest kid I know - through all of the procedures and surgeries she went (and still goes) through with her ear, there have rarely been tears.

Taking after her mom at the piano :)

We are the luckiest family in the world to have her in ours.

A quick hello from COS

Travelling again, for work this time. Just had to try out this airport wireless thing with my new laptop :) This has been quite the year of travel for me. Ready to stay home for (quite) a while. It's definitely fall and I'm feeling like a squirrel, scurrying about getting ready for winter. There are still tomatoes to be canned, and chicken coop to be cleaned, and windows to be washed.

Colorado Springs is beautiful and I stayed at nice resort with an amazing view of the mountains. But in a couple of hours I'll be back in the midwest, where I belong.

Time to board!

Barn still life

Some pictures I took in my brother's barn recently

Hope comes in litters of 9

I feel like there's so much to catch y'all up on. Here's one of those things. A couple of Saturday's ago Olivia came in from feeding pigs and said, "Um, we have baby pigs?"

You might remember the disasterous farrowings we had last spring. We kept 2 of those 3 gilts and gave them another chance. And I'm so happy to report that things went so much better this time. We weren't quite expecting the first litter yet, but this is the gilt that didn't raise a litter. So she was ready to go, so to speak, whereas the other gilt had to dry up first. She should be farrowing within the next week or so. Evidently Oliver got his job done quite expeditiously.

So she farrowed, with nighttime temps in the 40's, no heat lamp, no creep area. On top of it, she had a bum foot which made it hard for her to get up and down. And yet she only layed on 1 pig (the litter was originally 10). And the rest of the pigs have thrived beautifully.

The piglets are at that fun age now, where they're small enough to fit through holes in the gate and explore the farm. The chickens like to hang out with them in their pen.


Of course every new mom deserves a spa day once in a while. A mud bath hits the spot.

Hawk (5), Ike (4)

Ike and his flock

The electric poultry netting we use is on its last legs. We've used it for 4 years now, 8 batches of broilers. Some of the wire has come undone, leaving gaps in the fence. That's not usually a problem as long as the fence is hot, but we've got a fault somewhere in the electric fencing that surrounds the pasture. Matt's walked the entire fence but hasn't found anything yet. Now it's time to check all of the insulators for a faulty one.

So the poultry netting isn't getting any juice, and last week the chickens discovered a couple of these gaps in the fence and staged an escape. It was Wednesday, one of the days that the CG magazine crew was here. We were sitting around, I think waiting on the food stylist to whip up the next watermelon recipe for photographing, when I noticed chickens meandering about the pasture. Matt rounded them up and re-penned them, but a little while later I noticed a couple had escaped again. And when I went out to feed them I came upon a hawk noshing on free-range chicken.

I went around and tied up the broken parts of fence the best I could. All of the chickens stayed in the pen the next day and I thought we were in the clear. We've never had a hawk problem, and I figured we only did this time because they were outside the fence. But on Friday afternoon I discovered a headless chicken inside the pen. On Saturday there were two!

And the war was on.

Sunday morning when I went out to feed them I took Ike, our Great Pyrenees with me. And there was the hawk having his breakfast right there in the pen. Score 5 for the hawk.

Pyr's are livestock guard dogs (LGD's), but we've never tried Ike in that capacity. He's pretty spoiled. I'm really the only thing he usually guards, working from home as I do. It's a cushy job. (His, not mine. Well, maybe mine, too.) So suddenly taking him out and putting him in the chicken pen was a little like a reality TV show where a rich, spoiled little frat boy is forced to go on a 2-week cattle drive. (I can't believe I just admitted I watched that one.)

I gave him a pep talk. "Okay Ike, this is it, this is what you were bred for. Dig deep. Tune into your instincts. Channel your sheep-guarding ancestors in the Pyrenees mountains, fighting off bears and coyotes to protect their flocks. Guard the chickens, Ike, guard the chickens."

And then I left. And he just stood and stared at me with big eyes, like when you leave your kid at school for the first time and he really doesn't want to be there. It was a look that said, "Where are you going?! Don't leave me here! TAKE ME WITH YOU!!"

He's been out there 4 days now, and no more chicken deaths. A neighbor even saw the hawk a couple of days ago, sitting in a tree right near the chicken pen. (And bless the neighbor, he did his best to scare it off for us.) The chickens don't mind Ike. He goes in their shed and lays down, and they down around him. He drinks out of their waterers. But I wouldn't say that he's embraced his new role yet, more like resigned himself to it.

What is that chicken in the middle looking at?


Ike in the shed, checking out the super flexible chicken

Our late summer garden

will probably never look this nice again. Matt spent an entire day weeding and prettying up the entire garden for the photo shoot. He thought he might never stand up straight again.

Some more melon-y goodness for your viewing pleasure:

Playing favorites

Last week Tuesday night we saw overnight temperatures in the mid-30's. I chanced it and didn't cover anything, but Thursday night when a low of 27 was predicted I drug out the bedsheets. All of the container plants I could manage got drug into the garage. The rest were draped with bath towels and blankets. Madeline's edible landscape project got covered with black fabric I use for a photo shoot backdrop. I'm just not ready to give up having all of those fresh herbs right by the front door, and the gem marigolds are still really pretty.

Certain things got harvested. All of the melons. The bell peppers, the jalapenos. Any tomato that had even started to blush.

And then it was time to cover what we could in the garden. But there aren't enough sheets to cover our entire garden - so what to cover? It was time to pick favorites.

The Amish pasta tomatoes got top priority, because I'm needing a whole lot more of their slow roasted goodness for my freezer yet. Chile peppers similarly ranked high, once again for their roasting value. The celery got a sheet. It's the first time we've grown celery, but we haven't yet harvested any. And then I started doling out the few remaining sheets to the best looking tomato plants. It was a good thing, because that frost came just as predicted.

Today's high? According to my car, it was 90 degrees at 5:00 this afternoon. From Carharts to shorts again in 2 days. Gotta love Iowa weather.

It's a wrap

So the Big Melon Project is almost wrapped up. Your last "clue" is...look for us in the pages of Country Gardens Magazine! It won't be for about a year, but of course I'll be mentioning it here when our issue is on the newsstands. The CG crew was here for a few days this week for a photo shoot. It was a fun experience, very interesting to see how much goes into a single magazine article.

And now, to get back in the saddle. Hoping to have a little more time to blog again.

At long last...

I'm typing to you from my new laptop. I don't have access to my pictures from it yet, so just text for tonight. But I can tell you I am thoroughly enjoying it, as one does when one has saved up their pennies whilst banging their head on the desk in frustration as one coddled the old computer along way longer than one should have for as long as I have. That really awful sentence just doesn't come close to describing it. But hopefully you get the gist. I am happy to have it, and happy I didn't succumb to a credit card or payment plan just to have it sooner.

I want to direct your attention to a new blog on the scene, Newton Boer Goats by my cousin's wife. She's mainly showcasing her photography skills while contemplating a career in that direction, but as a young couple getting started in farming and raising meat goats she's got a lot of good blogging material to pull from.

Sadly, though, my time for blogging will be sparse as the Big Melon Project comes to fruition. (Ha) I realize I've only mentioned the Big Melon Project in passing without many hints as to what I'm talking about. I'm still not going to give you the deets yet, but here's a pretty generous hint. It involves an editor, a "creative design director", a photographer, and a food stylist. And I am in full panic mode at this point. Will the melons be ripe enough? Over ripe? Are there enough of them? Is our garden photogenic enough? Did these people know what they were doing when they asked to work with us?

Today Madeline and I picked, scalded, skinned, cored, seeded and pureed enough tomatoes to can 8 quarts of spaghetti sauce. 8 quarts doesn't sound like that much, but anyone who's done it knows just how many tomatoes it takes to make 8 quarts of puree. And we didn't actually get the sauce canned, just the tomato puree done. All the while my mind raced with the things yet to be done for the Big Melon Project. And so this post over at Casaubon's Book was very timely for me today:

"So when people ask me "how do I do it?" The only possible answer is - I don't. My life doesn't look like what you are thinking. That is, the reason I put up that food was because yesterday, I blew off the book, 50 unanswered emails and 3 foot weeds in my garden to do food preservation. Today, I'm blowing off the still uncanned raspberry sauce, the weeds, and the book to write this post, and then homeschool the kids. Every time I am doing something, I'm letting something else lapse, usually something that probably shouldn't. Right at the moment, I'm praying that the couple who are renovating our garage into a goat barn won't have to pee at all, so that they don't see my bathroom. The house has been sacked. I have no idea what we are eating for lunch - we have tomatoes, eggplant and beer. I don't think good Mommies feed their children beer for lunch, so I guess we'll be having eggplant ;-).

The reason I can do what I do is that I have a committed (probably ready to be committed) husband who can do much of his work from home, because I'm always more than willing to neglect the housework, and because I work from home. But mostly, because I'm comfortable with chaos."

Go and read the whole post here. I'll be practicing my deep breathing and embracing the chaos.

Found

by the girls, in the corncrib when they were converting it into a "clubhouse".

I think I'll be invoking eminent domain and sniping this treasure for myself.