This and That catching up!

Wow time really does fly when you're having fun, or even working your backside off*wink* I still have to get pictures of certain things around the farm, it's just finding the time to do it that's the problem.  Seems as if the days are not long enough to get everything that NEEDS to be done, done and it's now complicated by the fact that we have been invaded by millions upon millions of mosquitoes. So you either douse yourself in Deep Woods Off every hour or so or you work in the heat of the day, when they are in hiding from the heat.*sigh*  Trying to keep up with the weeds this year has proven to be a real chore, with all the rainfall we received in May and beginning of June we have a bumper to bumper crop of weeds, some of which we've NEVER seen before. LOL!!!   Also now we're seeing evidence of a bumper hatching of grasshoppers, just praying the stay out in the fields and don't migrate into the garden areas. This years garden has been such a struggle already and with storm after storm and the worry of hail damage, adding  in a grasshopper invasion might just break the proverbial camel's back. 

Here are some pictures of how high the river has been and the fact that we've lost 10 to 15 ft of land along our bank and one corner even took out a line of fencing, which we temporarily fenced until high water is done taking away our land, then the whole fence line will have to be moved in and restrung. We're just glad we didn't flood, our neighbors to the East and South of us did, our banks are  high enough to have kept the raging waters at bay, praise the Lord!  The high waters are gradually receding but will continue to be above normal until possibly Oct. 
Here are some pictures of the rive, our animals and some of the happening around here.

 Cortney and Mike hard at work changing fluids, spark plugs, spark plug wires, checking belts and hoses on Cortney's car. Yes, Cortney's car, she saved and saved and bought her own car. I don't think I posted that she passed the driving portion of her driver's test on June 11th scoring a 100%. Her car is a 1990 Ford Taurus sedan and we are so proud of her!

 The river, well we've been dealing with high, extremely high snow pack runoff since beginning of June. If you look( click photo to enlarge) at the right side of the picture( that's our bank), as far up the river as that white building, you'll see that there is still 2-3 ft of back, well when the river is at normal levels that bank is 15 to 18 feet tall, so gives you an idea of how high the water is right now.

 I the shaded portion of this photo we used to have 10-15 ft of bank with a willow tree, chokecherry bushes, wild roses, etc.....   The picture below shows it from another angle that portion of the bank missing was further out than the bushes at the base of the tree( below).

 You can see the T- post in the foreground, well about two feet to the right( toward the river) was our fence line corner posts, not anymore!*sigh*

 Cortney my nephew and niece( here visiting from AK) and myself pulled these three Railroad Ties up out of the rushing waters. I felt good about saving them to reuse when we re fence this entire line of fencing. Right now we temporarily fence that corner off with T-posts so the cows don't get in the river.

 Two days prior to this photo of the bridge, just to the east of our farm, the water was lapping the bottom of the upper portion of the arches.  It sounded like a freight train and it was scary.

 The farmers across the river from our farm have corrals close to the river, as you can see they are flooded, as was the county road to the ranches/ farms behind us due to flooding and washing away of the roadway.

One blessing of the 9" of rain we received in May was a bountiful harvest in our hay pasture.  We typically get around 2 ton of hay from one cutting and then we graze it the remainder of the Summer, Fall and Winter. We baled it this weekend( Sat.) and took off 5 bales over 4 ton of hay! We are so............. excited!!!!!!  This weekend we baled the 4+ ton of hay, loaded it and put it in the barn loft, along with an additional 2-1/2 ton we purchased from a friend. I feel good that it's all up safe and dry in the barn. Now all we need is 1-1/2 ton of alfalfa hay and that is plentiful this year, so we shouldn't have any problems getting the needed amount.

Cortney celebrated her 20th B-day on July 3rd and she wanted to share a very special blessing she received from a fellow blogger friend; Sandra over at Thistle Cove Farms( you can find her link on our side wall)  Isn't that a beautiful wrap and it matches so many dresses Cortney has, it's going to be a well worn piece of clothing.  Thank you Sandra, for being so thoughtful. :o)

 The garden and all the weeds( hoping you can't see how many*wink*

 Raspberries starting, can't wait for them to ripen :o)

 Hoss, says Good Morning. He's enjoying the coolness of the morning .

 Another view, so you can see how big he's gotten and such a baby yet. He enjoys his morning hip and butt rubbing( right between his hind legs, as hard and fast as you can rub, he loves it!

 Button in her own little world, getting ready to chew her cud.

 Some of the apple trees we planted 7 yrs ago are simply loaded with apples this year! I'm so excited to try these new varieties( one is a Wolf River, another a Liberty and another Duchess of Oldenburg)

 Here's Angel, doesn't she look great! her twins are gone and she's dried off and putting on some much needed weight.  We had to worm her twice before we noticed her gaining weight and holding onto it. She's so shiny and slicked out now. We really enjoy her, she's such a sweet little goat and she loves to be around people.

 Ginger is looking good too, she's all slick and shiny too and is now giving us almost a gallon of milk a day. :o)  She's not as friendly of a goat, but is beginning to show that she enjoys our company and bleats when she sees us now.

 Here is Pistol, Ginger's wether. He's going to his new home, hopefully this week. We will miss him, he's very sweet. If only he'd been born a girl! *sigh*

 Turkey poults and their two mamas. We had 9 survive and feel blessed as we have all of them sold already!

It's hard to get a good picture of all of them as the toms and hens are constantly on protective detail, LOL!!!!!

Well, hope that catches you up a bit and we'll try to get more photos posted on day to day projects, we have several in the works.

We're returing from the land of neverending grey and rainy days (photo heavy)

Yes folks, we've had grey and rainy days for so long now that  when we woke this morning to this we were ever so blessed!

Welcome back Montana blue skies!

                             Our tomatoes are ready to be planted in the greenhouse

                       This temperature was at 6:30am, it's supposed to be almost 70F today!

 The garden seems so behind and we're actually very thankful that everything seems to be germinating and doing well, especially after a week or more of truly being under water. In a weeks time we received over 10" of rainfall. There has been major flooding all around us and the river we are on is extremely high and we've not even begun the snow pack melt  It's been in the news HERE, many of the towns flooded are within 10( Joliet flooding) to as far as 100 miles(Hardin) from our location.  Tomorrow and Friday are supposed to be wet again, this won't help. It seems as if we are now to get a few dry days followed by a few wet days. Flooding is a concern as is being able to get the remainder of our garden planted*sigh*

                    Raspberries are doing well, but the strawberries are yellow, and don't look good at all.

 This is lettuce it's been planted since mid May and this is all the taller that it is. For a week or more it was submerged under 4-5" of water, so we're just glad to see that it survived!

 Garlic is looking good as are the weeds! LOL!!!!

 Thankfully we've been able to support our CSA members with salad crops from the greenhouse, while it's been wet and cold outdoors it's been a pleasure to work in the greenhouse!

 Tomatoes are scheduled to be planed in the greenhouse tomorrow and the eggplants are waiting their transplant as well, we however did manage to get our peppers planted. Our second crop of radishes will be ready for harvest this week for our CSA members. The green onions are about done, they are getting to big and almost a woody texture, so we'll sub in herbs and other crops such as Rhubarb and Asparagus!

 A shot of some Late Flat Dutch Cabbage we have in the greenhouse, as well as some of the "HOT peppers.

 Chives are doing well with the moisture levels

 Raspberries coming along, now we need to work on cleaning and thinning them out a bit. :o)

                         Our Freedom Ranger meat chicks, we've only lost one and they are ready to be butchered, maybe this coming weekend, if the weather is nice. It will be nice to have fresh chicken in the freezer again, all we have right now are stew hens.

 Take a look at this BIG Roo! I'm betting he'll dress out 6+ lbs and the blessed thing is that he's able to walk, run and even flit about, not crippled like some meat breeds would be at this point.  We've found a breed and we're sticking with them.

 The tulips are just now beginning to open, Irises are a few weeks out yet I'm betting.

 This is NOT supposed to be a water garden, the soil is so saturated it won't drain off, we'll have to drain it by hand this afternoon. Poor chives are still growing, amazing!

 Lilacs all around our area are thick and beautiful this year, as are all of the fruit trees in bloom! Praying for a good apple crop this season, we're running seriously low in our pantry.

 Poppies about to bloom, it will be nice to have some color and it's right outside one of our bedroom windows

 Worked on cleaning up herb beds and flower gardens yesterday and here is proof, LOL!!!!

 The fire pit it full, now to have a fire and roast some Marshmallows :o)

When it was raining I made good use of my time indoors and mended a pile of clothes I had, including 6 pair of Mike's jeans which I patched in several places. Working with metal roofing and construction is hard on clothes.  Anyway I felt good about getting some much needed projects done.

We have 12 poult turkeys and all are doing fantastic( even in the cold rainy weather). I'll get photos of them ASAP!  Ginger and Angel( our goats) are doing great and their kids will hopefully be going to their new homes this weekend.  Ginger is giving us 2-3 qt. of milk a day and we're still sharing it with her wether, although he is self weaning and eating more hay and grazing more. :o)

It's going to be a busy few weeks so our posts will be limited, sorry, but we have to get thing planted and catch up around the yard and gardens. I miss not having more time to visit your blogs and to even reply to your comments, but as I always say; "Life Happens" and we take it a day at a time here on The Never Done Farm!  :o)

Blessings to each of you this week, we're praying for sunshine filled days and more energy to get more things done! LOL!!!

An early morning, more so than normal.

 I took this photo at 6:25 am this morning( click on the photo to see it better), the colors in person were so much more vivid than shows up in this photo*sigh*

This was taken just 4 minutes after the first one. I must have moved as the photo is a bit blurred, oops.

This morning Mike had to be to work by 7am, which is approx. a 45 minute drive. They are working on a job that is an additional 45 minutes to an hour away and want to arrive on site by 8am.  So we bump the alarm back to 4:30 am, so we'd have plenty of time for breakfast, getting ready and doing the morning feeding.

Our temperatures are supposed to be into the low to mid 50's by tomorrow and stay in and around that range until late Friday, when another cold front moves in again. Even then the daytime highs are well into the 30's F but evening temps. will drop into the teens. 

We've felt spoiled, especially since this is January and typically our coldest winter month and yet we've only had to kept small fires going in the wood stove, just enough keep the chill off.  For the last week or more we've have been letting the fire go out in the evening. YEAH, sleeping through almost the whole night( except for the midnight calling*sigh* of my IBB, LOL!)  When we turned in last evening our inside temps was 76F( actually it was far to warm for my tastes) and when we got up, I checked and it was 62F, not bad, not bad at all.  Now the next few days a Chinook wind is blowing in the warm up, funny though how those winds feel like they are coming from Antarctica!  Our house will not stay as warm at night if those winds blow, but as long as we keep the temp. up during the day, we'll fair just fine.

Cortney has to work today and tomorrow and we have 12 dozen ( a mix of different cookies) to make for our ambulance service's annual refresher course. All First Responders, EMT or higher, in the state of Montana are required to have so many hours of Continuing Ed. and it is mandatory that part of these hours be a "refresher course" and "CPR certification".  So we know where Mike will be all weekend!

We all are looking forward to February's arrival, we have many events scheduled. The first of which is the; "Sheep Shearing Day" on the 12th! I will get pictures this year, I promise. This has become an annual tradition for us( of course Cortney just loves helping.  It's also fun to see people we've met through this event, that we only see at this event!  Then if our weather stays nice we'll be working on getting our cold tolerant crops planted in the green house as well as our seeds started indoors in our mini greenhouse, mid part of February. We're also hoping to have people signed up for our CSA, by no later than the 24th. That way we can ask what crops they'd be most interested in for their baskets. I think we plant a pretty well rounded garden selection already and just yesterday I mailed in our seed order, only adding a few new OP herbs, Okra, Eggplant and some OP spinach seed. 

Okay  that all the news from here. Praying the remainder of your week is filled with many blessings, much laughter and some rest too.

Fhoto Friday ( heavy laden with photos), a little of this and that

This morning started off with making some steamed veggies for the poultry. This is not only good for their health, it also is a supplement to our feed bill and uses up culled veggies from the root cellar !  The zucchini have kept very well ( from a late Aug. 2010 harvest) but you can see that that they are beginning to yellow and soften. As per, making the best of what you have, we weekly check the root cellar, and cull anything that is beginning to breakdown. It is either used in one of our meals, it's dehydrated or fed to the animals.

 Now I was experimenting and while I didn't get pictures of the carrots themselves( sorry), these are carrots from our 2009 garden, yep it's been well over a year since they were harvested( Sept. 2009) from our garden. I've been experimenting with the best ways to store root crops and my findings are; they keep very well in totes filled with dirt. I tried straw last season, only to find that the carrots and beets began to mildew because our root cellar has high humidity and the straw absorbed the moisture, thus making the root crops mildew. The mildew was caught early enough that we suffered very little loss. I also topped some and stored them in ziploc bags( sealed) in the refrigerator, the shredded carrots( below) are examples of how well they kept. Now they were sprouting roots and new tops, but were still firm and very sweet.  I steamed the carrots, it seems the poultry appreciate them more if steamed, yes I know they are spoiled( rotten,LOL!)

Then it was off to get the small coop cleaned while we have a break in the weather. Cortney dons on Mike's respirator( you don't want to breath the dust, you can pick up Hanta Virus from mouse droppings and we certainly have mice*wink*)

                    The litter has been nicely stirred by the chickens for almost 8 months and has broken down and composted well.

 This was originally sawdust shavings and now is broken down nicely and ready to be added to the compost heap. I also added a thin layer to the raspberries as well as a bit in the green house beds( not to much though)

 This is now how it looks now( below) and how it looked 7-8 months ago. See what good composters the chickens are*wink*

 Our chickens are divided into two flocks at the moment( due to space) Everyone appears to be wintering well.

 This is our larger flock and with exception to the Black Austrolope rooster( who's decided to molt right NOW!), everyone, even our oldest( pet hen, who BTW is almost 9 yrs old) as well as our pet tom, "Snowball" who is almost 8 yrs old are looking very healthy.

 The 9 yr. old hen is the hen on the lowest roost,on the right hand side, doesn't she look good and you know what, she lays once or twice a week, still.

 Here is Snowball, he's looking good as well and his estimated weight is close to 50lbs !

Here are the turkeys, our Narraganset hens and tom, a Bourbon Red tom and a Bronze hen(Lucy and she is 5 yrs old and a wonderful mama) We're praying for better hatches this year. We're also actively looking for a Bourbon Red hen for our tom.

Now to the green house, it's probably 20+ degrees warmer in the greenhouse than outside. So this is when it's time to get all the prepping done, so planting of cold tolerant crops can take place early next month.

 You can see I've already applied some well composted manure and on top of that a light layering of the composted chicken house litter. The pots are covering some of my herbs, such as stevia, rosemary creeping thyme and root beer hyssop.

 The Rosemary is winter well, it is from seed that I started last Spring and I have hopes that it will take off as soon as the cold temps. head out.

 Shows the two composted manures added to the beds, soon to be worked into the soil.

 Potting benches are waiting to be used. I still have to sanitize all of my starter pots by washing in warm water with a little bleach added and letting them dry in the sunshine.

 This is Bee balm, saved for seed, it's still beautiful and the smell is out of this world( wish you could smell it)

Now the frosting, so to speak, a little gypsum and wood ash.  Before you know it we'll have pictures to share of our salad greens :o)

 Mike's been off work most of this week. The ground is frozen and the next job they have involves planting 6x6's. Praying it warms up enough to thaw it enough for their auger to bust through. Anyway we've enjoyed him being home and he's finished many odds and ends projects. One of those is to switch out the F-11 loader from one tractor to the other. I wasn't able to photo the transfer, as I was busy helping by driving one of the tractors. It was a blessing the switch went relatively smooth. The one tractor's motor is tired and needs to be overhauled but in the meantime we need use of the bucket, thus the reason for the transfer.

 All lined up and bolted onto the rear axle

 Now Mike has to manufacture a bracket to finish the mounting to the front frame work.

The tractor( yes we are a International Harvester; "Farmall" farm, because we can afford red and NOT green tractors, LOL!!!) in the background is the tractor in need of being rebuilt.  The transfer was successfully completed. :o) Now he can push the manure pile up to complete the composting, as well as make room for more fresh manure.

The hay is holding up well, we used approx. 2 ton thus far and the Button and Hoss seem to really enjoy it.

 Button knows I put their  mid morning hay( usually just loose hay swept down from the hay loft) out and she is waiting to be let out.

 Here is "Hoss", now 8 months old. He is still on the bottle, but is being weaned off at this time, with hopes of weaning being complete by mid to end of Feb. We are supplementing him with some calf manna( all natural)  While he's not a prime Angus specimen, he's crooked in the hindend, it doesn't matter to us.

 He's growing nicely and we can handle him, he is halter broke, and he is NOT a pet like Button. His time here is limited.

Button enjoying her mid morning snack, Hoss is busy licking on the mineral supplement  before Button finishes her hay, LOL!!!! 

All of these photos were taken today, before noon. Our weather is warmer, warm enough that we did NOT stoke the wood stove during the night, last night and when we got up at 5:30am this morning the inside temps was still 65F., down from 74F.  A bit of a temperature drop has occurred outside in the last few hours and our inside temps has dropped to 60F, so I started a small fire in the wood cook stove to warm the house back up a bit.

Now that Mike has the loader on and working, he has come in to share that it is to slick to push the manure pile up today. We need new tired for this tractor, we do have a better set to switch out to but new tires are out of the question right now as they cost approx. $900 each! Makes me wonder how the farmers afford tires for their HUGE tractors. Mike said the tires for those tractors run approx. $1,500 to $2,000+ each. and some have four tires on each axle< double gulp> LOL!!!  

Mike says he may be able to come up with chains, but is worried that this will do damage to our pastures, so.... we'll wait.

Blessings for your weekend :o)