Life on the Farm

*Note:  I originally wrote this post waaaay back in April of this year.  However, when I tried to publish it online, I received an error message and have been unable to post anything in the last 4 months.  Thankfully, I finally fixed my technical issues today, so I am officially back in the blogging business!  So even though this post is terribly out of date, I decided to go ahead and share it with y’all anyway.*

Hey, y’all.  Remember me?  I know it’s been months since I lasted posted anything on this blog, and I feel just awful about that.  I could spend a lot of time apologizing and giving excuses and filling you in on the last 4 months, but I won’t.  Let’s just talk about the present, shall we?

Thanks to the arrival of my favorite season, spring, our family has been spending a lot of time out of doors lately.  We have all been enjoying the warmer temperatures and longer days.  I just don’t know how people who live “up north” deal with all the cold.  I need heat!

So what have we been busying ourselves doing?  Well, like all good country folk, we’ve been hard at work gardening and farming.  And by “we” I mean mostly the Tool Man and occasionally the monkeys and rarely me.

The last couple of years we have taken a break from gardening.  The Tool Man was just too busy to keep it up.  But with a new job and schedule this year, he was eager to dig in once again and exercise his green thumbs.  In an effort not to overwork ourselves, we decided to keep our garden small and simple.  We planted six short rows of our favorite vegetables – one row of potatoes, one row of tomatoes, one row of squash, one row of peppers (for pepper jelly and salsa!), one row of zucchini, and one row of snap beans.

When it’s time to hoe or weed, the monkeys magically disappear, but when it’s planting time they are super excited to work in the garden.  They love digging their fingers (and toes) into the soft dirt. 

Even little Tacy Mae was eager to get some dirt between her tiny toes.

You might can tell from our wardrobes that these pictures were taken a couple of months ago.  It’s just taken me that long to write this post.  Our garden actually looks nothing like these pictures any more.  It’s now lush and green with huge squash plants and head-high snap bean vines.  We’ve also harvested our potatoes and have planted a couple of watermelons and cantaloupes.

We’ve had several new animal additions to our farm this year.  I’ve been begging the Tool Man for a goat for years now, and he finally gave in.  Back in January we bought this little pygmy goat when he was just 2 weeks old.  My super creative monkeys decided to name him “Goatie.”  How original is that?!  We just love Goatie.  I guess you could say he is a free-range goat.  He can push through his gate, so he comes and goes as he pleases.  Honestly, it’s a bit like having another dog running around the yard.

Of course we have several new feathered faces strutting around our yard this spring.  In addition to a dozen more chicks, our coop now houses 1 turkey, 2 rouen ducks, and 3 geese.  Whew!  That’s a lot of birds, but we sure do love having them around. 

The only negative to having all the birds is that the ducks and geese were wreaking havoc on our garden.  They mowed down an entire row of peppers and zucchinis, so we were forced to build a fence around our garden to keep out our feathered friends.

Thanks for hanging in there during my absence.  Hopefully I will get back into a regular blogging schedule soon.  I do miss sharing memories with y’all.

Lindsey