SNOW?!

Yesterday I got up and looked out the window, and ther was snow all over the place. Now we do get snow in Indiana, but come on!, my blackberry bushes are starting to bud out!!!I am posting this photo of the white stuff.

You can see my goat looking at the camera. She looked as if she could not believe it either. Today I have a fire going in the house, and I have one going here in the ham shack/shop. I've been working on getting my ham radio station setup and usable. I need to do some wire hanging and rope throwing to get the wire I have up off the ground. However I have made a few contacts, though my loop is is only a few feet off the ground. I'd like to get it up about 32 feet. I am listening to the inter coastal radio net (14.300 usb) at the moment, and I checked in so I know that the rig is working. My ham side kick just came in and so I got a photo of him pretending to make a contact.

He is a REAL HAM!
Well I better get to work on playing with my radio.
Latter to all you in Blog land    es73 om

Later today-

Owen eats some spagheti.
He liked it alot!

Warming up to the weather.

Today was our service day. We spend all afternoon out in the field. We had a pretty good day. Did some walking and spent some time with the kids. It was warm and we worked up quite a sweat. Owen can get heavy after a while. He is the Chunky Monkey. We finished off the day by watching Baby goats being born on Youtube. Nyle is interested in the process. Our goat is due May 1. Yesterday I gave her a CD/T shot. It's good for all kinds of stuff that goats have problems. The "T" is for tetanus, which I guess goats are subject  to when birthing. By giving it to the doe a few weeks before she kids she will pass the immunity on to her kids. Otherwise I would be having to give all kinds of shots to the kids when the came out. SO I went ahead and gave her the shot. Easy as pie. I had a man call me form Bloomfield that will help me dis-bud the kids. If you want to know more about that procedure, just search about it on youtube. It does not look fun, but it needs to be done if they will be around children, and these will.
Well, I do not have any thing much to add to this boring update.

 Everything is great!
Cheers!

A King Is Born!

The weather was really nice today. I have been "under the weather" for about a week. Me and both boys have had this head and chest cold thing. It made it nearly impossible to lay down and breath. I have been sleeping sitting up for the last 5-6 days. Nyle is back to almost 100% and Owen and me we are at like 95%. It was touch and go there for a little while as to whether or not I was taking Owen to the E.R. But he was pretty tuff with his cold.
So now we are all better. Just before I got sick, I went and loaded a big load of horse manure on the Chevy. It was a decent sized load. But I took sick before I could get it shoveled off and it sit in the garage for about a week. But today Nyle and I got it shoveled off the truck. Well, I did most of the shoveling. As it turns out, Nyle was a king, and so shoveling horse manure was not in his list of kingly things to doo.
Check out the video below of Nyle stating his kingly presence. He made this statement without any in put from me. HE simply stated it the first time and I asked if we could get his statement on video, and the king kindly obliged his lowly subjects request. Check it out...

So I guess as you can see Nyle is a king!

We got our raised beds filled up and got some of the good stuff out on our Black Berries and Raspberry bushes too. I hope they grow tall and sweet. They did pretty good last year on this diet. Here is a shot of the thrown together raised beds I put together out of scrounged, scrap lumber.

Note the king has his glasses on. We out down some news paper first and then filled up the box. I  don't know yet what I am going to plant there, but it will be something to eat. The king wants garlic to be planted there. I mentioned to him the he did not like garlic. He retorted that he did in did like garlic,,, garlic bread!
So I may lant some garlic  for the king.
 we also have some more chicky chicks. I got 9 Barred Plymouth Rock. I really like the looks of them, and so far I have not had one die. But that can still easily happen.
 Gurddy the goat is doing well. She is eating more, and getting big! Maybe she has 2 babies in there, I hope.
Well I will update more as more happens, and this time of year a lot is happening on the farm.
That's the news for today. Peace.

Sappin' Is Done

Well, the update is that yesterday I pulled all the taps out of the trees and washed everything up for next year. This was a fair year for making syrup. We made over a gallon. That will last us most of the year. We lost a few batches to over cooking. Burnt them on the big cooker at night.  We have decided not to cook over night any more. We will just start anew in the morning from now on.
 I've started a worm farm as noted in another post. The worms seem to be OK, but some like to crawl up on the lid and on the sides, and that makes me nervous. I have read where they will climb out and leave if the conditions aren't right. There are some who have posted that it is normal for a few renegades to be adventurous. I suppose that is who they spread through out the earth. As far as I can tell the worm farm is in good condition. If anything, I may have too much food in there, or maybe not enough paper. I think it will be all right. I think I am just a nervous farmer .
 I have been building raised beds from scavenged lumber out of trash dumpster that were pallets in the "before life". I need to go get some dirt today and fill one of the beds I just built. It is about 2x8 feet, so it should not take much dirt to fill it. I do not know yet what I will put in there, maybe lettuce, or spinach, or carrots, or a combo of all 3.
 My little seed starter that we made from a turkey roasting pan from WalMart is working very nicely. Most of the seedlings are all ready up, and hardly a week has passed.I've got a few seeds that I hope were tomatoes from last year, but I am not 100% sure of that. I guess we will see soon.
Nyle has been sick with fever and cough and sore throat. Owen seem a little cranky today too. It is that time of the year.
Well that's it for now got to go. Oh, one more thing, I am thinking about getting a few chicks to raise  again. Jen will love that!

Worms for life.

Hello once again from the far flung corner of Greene county Indiana. The big news of late is that the weather has been warming very nicely. My green thumb is itching. So today I did something about it. I built a group of raised bed/boxes out of scrap lumber. The lumber was garnered from a trash dumpster. I think it was an old pallet in it previous life. I have resurrected it and gave it a new designation. The really nice thing is that it was totally free. I can only afford free and "I'll pay you to haul this away for me", at the moment. And so I built the boxes. They were about 2x2 feet and 1.5 feet tall. But I can keep building vertically. This is critical as I intend to raise potatoes in a few of them. In fact, I planted about 12 potatoes today in them. I am also working on another raised bed box from a left over shipping crate that my wood splitter came in. That will be about 8x4 feet and about 2 feet tall. I may plant onions or lettuce, or maybe some cabbage. Yesterday, or more true to the facts, last night- We planted tomato seeds in peet pots and placed them in a turkey roasting pan I bought a Wally World. The pan comes with a translucent top that made a perfect miniature greenhouse for seedlings. We also planted cabbage, broccoli, and romaine lettuce seeds. Not only that, today I received a shipment of red worms for vermicoposting. I built a worm farm out of a couple plastic toats. For more info just Google worm farming and the how to's will be all over  your screen. So all of this has taken place in like the last 4 days. On top of that we have been really gathering the sap and making maple syrup like crazy. I think we now have over a gallon of syrup made this year. Me and the boys ate pancakes and had some of the good stuff on top of them, this morning. On the things to do list is to put some window washer fluid in the tires of the Cub Cadet. This will give it a lot more weight on the rear wheels and thus, a lot more traction. I would really like to get a small turning plow to pull behind it so that I could raise a big crop of corn. That is one thing I just can't seem to grow enough of. It takes a lot of room to grow a lot of corn. And so, it takes a lot of work- Unless you have a small tractor with a turning plow to help. I've got plane and iron to make a sleeve hitch for it. It's just a time factor. I keep running out of farm time.
 I trimmed the goats hooves this morning. I think I did all right for it being the first time and all. She didn't mind it too much. And neither did I, it was an OK thing I guess. So tomorrow I have a list of possibilities to do and get done. All in all, today was a good day on the farm. Nyle,Owen, and I stayed outside and "worked" most of the day. We had fun in the sun shine. I just wish Owen would quit eating the sand out of the sandbox! Crazy kid loves to get a big mouthful of sand the very first second he gets in the sandbox. Maybe he is gasin' up his gizzard or something. All I know I've tried to stop him, but he is as stubborn as a Billy goat when it come to eating sand. So every few minutes I went over and wiped the sand out of his mouth. He did not enjoy that, but seemed to enjoy eating the sand very much. I hope he grows out of that soon, it makes his diapers very heavy, and then they set up like concrete.
 Well that's all the news from Greene Acres.
Peace.