and then...

this is what we do...

 load up the poo and...

spread it on the field.
And when I say we, I really mean my husband. He does that. I've never had the chance... We have lots of poo on a farm, but I don't need to tell you farmers that! It's really a wonderful thing!
And you thought this post was gonna be about haying! ha! Tricked ya!
 Oh and I have to show you this...

With some of the hay we left at the farm the kiddos built a little "hay fort." How's that for imagination?! They played there for hours!

And just because she's so dang cute, and getting so dang big...

Dandie.

Have a great day all!

happnins

The days are flying by and becoming a blurr. The days and evenings there are things going on, and it's been hard to sit down and read blogs I love to read and to blog myself!
All our sap stuff is taken down, washed, dried, and put away until next year. We didn't get much at all, which is a bummer, but we did have some to sell to some of our customers. So that was good.
I was able to finally go out with one of my bffs last night, who just so happens to be one of my sisters. I needed some new jeans and she wanted to go out and get some clothes too. We had a blast. Shopping with someone is so much more fun then going alone!
This week has been in the high 70's and even 80's!! Crazy weather for Maine, this time of year. Then today it's only in the 50's and very windy. We went from shorts and tank tops, not to mention flip flops!! Oh how I love flip flops! To jeans, my cowgirl boots, and a sweater. I do love all the wind and sun we have though, it's free solar power to dry my clothes on the line super fast!
I'll show you how windy it is. It blew some of the clothes on the ground. Look how pretty the sky is. I love that color!! The grass is starting to green up too!!

 Everyone love to see pictures of manure. OK, maybe not everyone. But this is one of our gardens with manure on it. Been composting and needs to be tilled into the ground. Hopefully this garden will produce better then it did last year. The soil is just not as good as out other one.

 I love earth science with the kiddos! We planted some tomatoes, cantaloupe, and peppers. They are learning the process of life, life skills, not to mention where and how their food is grown. I love to watch the seeds turn into the plants and produce fruit, or veggies! Hoping to get some watermelon too. My baby loves that stuff!! Here's hoping to a bountiful harvest this fall too!

And who doesn't need a little flower power in their lives? I love flowers and would love to someday have flower gardens around the house. But and that is a huge but the sheep need to be locked up before that will happen, again! Ah lesson learned. They like to eat flowers. My boy planted some too, but in the picture above. His plant pot flew away! We'll have to get him another one! Don't ask me what kind of flowers the kiddos planted. I have no idea. They had seeds and dirt, and they were happy to just go at it and plant!

I can't wait to get our gardens planted, but we don't plant until the end of May here. We still have some work to be done before we plant. Still too cold.

We have some red clover seeds to plant in the cow pasture this year. They will love that, if it can grow. I don't know if we'll get it done today due to all the wind. Don't want it flying away! But I'll get pics and post when we do!
Have a great day all!

these boots were made for

...farm girls!
Kinda excited!
I got some new barn boots, and I had to tell you because I knew you would be excited too! I know silly farm girl gets excited about boots?! hahaha! OK I can laugh at myself. Well these are the highly talked about BOGS. Well at least my sister talks about how she just LOVES her BOGS. I wanted some last year, but didn't end up finding any at the end of the winter that were in my size. They run small. I had to get two sizes bigger then I normally wear. Don't look at the size if you'll have a complex about big feet! Present company excluded. (ahem). They are warm, and water proof! What more do you need slopping around in cow, horse, sheep, and chicken, manure in the spring, summer, ok all year long! I have some rubber boots, but my feet freeze in them in the winter, even in my wool socks. Now they should stay warm in my BOGS! Oh and I didn't even tell you the best part. How I got them. My sister was out shopping and she calls me, and our conversation goes kinda like this,
"Hey. You want any barn boots that are BOGS?"
"Um ya."
"Well I'm here at such and such a store and they have them here, and I was wondering is $45 dollars was a good deal on them?"
"YA! That's half price!"
Giggle. "I know!! Right! So do you want me to get you some, they have sizes ....."
"Yup. I'll take the purple ones!!"
Then we chatted for a few minutes! I'll spare you the rest of our conversation.
I was at my moms today and I picked up my new boots! So here they are!

My handy wood box my man built for me behind the boots! Just an FYI!
Have a great night!

busy times

It's been a busy month of October for me. Actually since the middle to end of August it's been busy for me. With the garden produce, the canning, home school, and well life, it's been busy. I'm almost done canning for the year and am very pleased and thankful for what got done. It will be nice when I'm all done, I still have some apple jelly and apples to go. I'm gonna try to can some apples that are cut up and see how they taste. Just something different. And freeze some for pies this winter!
Both our gardens are fully harvested and resting for the winter. The fences are down and the lawn is mowed.  Matthew put some manure on one of them and the hens have been out there eating the worms and doing a great job of spreading it around for me! I'd like to get some garlic, (since, someone, ahem, who shall remain nameless tilled it up last fall) planted. We shall see.
We ended up getting 217 bales of second crop hay in this past weekend! The whole field didn't get hayed either! The weather was perfect for it, hot and sunny during the day with no humidity, a slight breeze, and cool nights without the dampness that usually comes this time of year. A bit of an Indian Summer! It's been so nice, I've even just gone out and sat in the sun for a while, just to enjoy it. We had a neighboring farmer come and mow it, we just didn't have time, Matthew has been very busy at the mill. Last year we didn't have extra hay and had to buy it this spring. We had a bit of a wet spring. Now this year we have gotten almost 1000 bales from the field we lease. The chicken manure we put on it last year really improved it! We are thankful for that!
My SIL and her kiddos came over today and we canned the last of the carrots. Just gotta tell you that we got 3 bushels of carrots from our garden this year! NEVER had that many carrots! EVER! So I thought that was cool. I split the last bushel with her, and will give some to a friend of mine. We decided to try with the last 6 quarts to cook them with honey water. We'll see how they turn out. I like to put honey on the carrots once in a while, and thought if they were canned with honey water that maybe that would give it more of a honey taste.
Maggie's due date is tomorrow. So we'll have to wait and see if she calves. I'm tempted to go sit on her. I don't think she'd like that though, and I'm not into cow riding. I'll leave that to the pros! I should get a picture of her to show you how big she is. I'll do that tomorrow if she doesn't drop that calf tonight! Would be nice to see a picture of the ole cow on the blog. Been a while. It's been nice having the last 60 or so days off from milking. I have a feeling when I start milking her again, when Matthew can't, my hands are gonna burn! I'm looking forward to it though! Ha! Now how many women look forward to hand milking a cow and having their hands burn!? She seems to like the broilers that we have and often sleeps near their tractor. Speaking of the broilers, we didn't harvest them. They were too small on Saturday, so we'll see how they do this week. I think because of the heat we've had they have grown. They tend to grow slower in the fall due to the cooler weather. But these guys sure do love to eat the fresh grass we put them on every morning. Maybe I'll snap a picture and stick them on here too! Ugly looking things that they are!
 Here are a few pictures of the haying that took place this weekend. I mean check out that sky! So beautiful!

A couple kiddos running along behind the baler. I'm so pleased at how good it looks. I told Matthew it looks good enough to eat!
Have a good night all!

this is what we do

on what seems to be the hottest days of the year. Hay!!
But due to the chicken poo we put on the starved fields we now have over 700 bales of hay in the barn!!!!! We are praying that we will get a second crop! That will be for Maggie when she freshens in October. Provided we get the second cut. We were thinking that we would need 600 with all the critters we have. Due to a rather wet spring we  had to buy hay for the horses because the grass was slow to come! What a blessing to us, to have 700 bales! We had to hire the cutting of the hay because it was so thick and our sickle bar mower wouldn't do the job. While Matthew was raking the hay both times we made hay the kiddos and I went to a party at my grandmothers and then to his family reunion! (Two different times). I get a kick out of that. I went to his family reunion without him. I like his family so it was no big deal. The kiddos went swimming in the lake and I watched them. It's a very shallow lake too.

 I ended up having to stack hay on the trailer while it was coming off a homemade loader, well I'm not a very good stacker and I ended up falling off the side. Thankfully I wasn't hurt, just a nice bruise behind my knee and a tender spot down the side of my leg. I actually landed on a bale that I had just knocked over. Then when my father in law was driving down the road with it, 5-6 bales fell off. Guess I didn't get them packed tight enough! That was my first time stacking hay on a moving trailer! Matthew said I did fine. After that load I didn't have to stack any more hay. Not because I fell, or lost a few bales, but because Matthew was done baling and he could stack it. He's a great hay stacker!
One afternoon when things were winding down Matthew let Little Matt drive the tractor!

pleased as punch at a job well done!

So until the next post take care!

chocolate chip cookies

Have you ever had so many things to do you stop and think in the midst of the chaos called life and think "Oh chocolate chip cookies would be great right now!" So you start the process of making them, with a large load of dishes in the sink to be washed, evening barn chores and dinner looming in the very near future, not to mention clothes on the line to be brought in and a bed to be made...
This afternoon Little Matt and DaLaney were playing outside when they came charging in the house and exclaimed "It smells like the ocean Mommy!" Then they proceed to tell me how they can make their whistles sound like seagulls! They even demonstrated their new found talent to me!  And maybe in a weird sort of way it did sound like a seagull?! Well to begin we live in the country, and have a vast amount of hay fields around us, and the owners of the said fields had some seaweed, lime and something else delivered to fertilize their fields, and they began spreading it today. I went outside and could smell it. It really did smell like the Maine oceans! Much better then the ummmm chicken poo we spread! Matthew commented on the smell when he got home too. He came home to find me out in the barn milking Maggie. I knew he would be home soon, and that he could take over if I needed help. We hand milk for the time being, with one cow, who needs the expense of all that "stuff"! I milked her (Maggie) this morning too. My hands were burning by the time I milked all four quarters let me tell you!! He sat in the barn and we chatted about our days, while the kids ran around outside. DaLaney wanted to help milk, so I let her, and she did a great job. I managed to squirt her in the face too!! She giggled and tried to get me back! It was nice!
We had an unexpected blessing today! The man that owns the field beside us said we could use that field to pasture the horses! That pasture is wonderfully green, thick and lush. He also gave us permission to hay it. Not sure if we will have time to hay it, but just being able to put the horses out on it will be great so we don't have to feed them winter hay!!
...back to the cookies. Yup I got them done very late, but done and they taste wonderful all warm and gooey with a tall glass of fresh cold milk!! Along with all the other various things I had to do today!!

harvest days

Life on a farm has many harvest days. The fall seems to have more because we are busy putting the gardens and fields to bed for winter. The last of the chicken manure is spread on the fields, after a minor brake down with the spreader, the boys fixed it, and now there is again the stench of chicken manure in the air. I'm afraid it will last until it rains again. One hay field is in great need of fertilizer, so hopefully next hay season we will reap a better harvest from it!
  I decided that it was too nice to stay in the house this afternoon, and with the children outside playing I decided to mow the lawn.  I like to mow the lawn, but occasionally am guilty of letting it get ahead of me and then putting up a temporary fence and letting our hay burners (aka Abby & Time Out, my beloved Quarter horses) do the heavy "mowing" for me. They love the lush green grass and I enjoy watching them eat it! A win win situation! Once in a while this year Little Matt has mowed parts of the lawn too. He loves it, and often asks to mow the lawn. After the mowing was done, Matthew was home, the cow was milked, the milk was put away, the horses put to bed, and supper finishing off in the crock pot, roast beef, carrots and potatoes with homemade bread and butter, Matthew tilled the garden with the tractor, the kids pulled the carrots out of the other garden. Now I need to can the carrots. Now, both gardens are ready for the long winter and a good rest after a wonderful and bountiful harvest that we can enjoy throughout the winter! I hope it's not too late to plant some garlic though.
We planted three kinds of squash , but only one kind, butternut, came up for some reason. We had buttercup, butternut, and blue hubbard.  We ended up with all butternut squash. Thankfully I have found a wonderful recipe for butternut squash soup, and everyone loves it! Our neighbor gave us some buttercup squash, that we are thankful for. Not really sure what happened to the seeds of the our squash, but there is always next year...
We also harvested our pie pumpkins too. Ohhh they are so good as pie, pumpkin rolls, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin.., well I think you get the idea! They did really well this year too. Not sure how many we got, I'll have to count them, last year I stopped counting after 63 pumpkins. Ate a lot, and gave some away.
 Gotta love fall harvest days!!

field work

For the most part the chicken manure we got yesterday is spread on the hay field, and tomorrow they are calling for rain, oh and a 1% chance of snow!? Snow?! I hope that was a typo! But it is Maine, and it could happen. I remember one year a few years ago we had some snow on October 10th! It made a mess of things, and didn't last long but... I'm not ready for that yet. We borrowed a neighbors tractor that didn't have a bucket on it so we didn't have ho hitch and unhitch our tractor. Our son got to put a load on the manure spreader  and he was pleased as punch. Matthew was right there making sure everything was fine, and it was. Little Matt did a great job too! He loves to drive the tractor and help in any way he can. Hopefully the rain kills the smell and speeds up the composting of it! The girls were busy playing and running around having fun.
We sold the straw today. Glad to have that gone, before the rain comes. The Amish man we sold it to does the deep, pack bedding for his cows in the winter. A great idea indeed!
I hung some laundry out on the clothes line today, was a great day for it, and no it doesn't smell! I love to hang clothes on the line, free solar power and the crisp smell of fall air. Not too much longer and I'll be using the dryer.With 6 people in our family there is always laundry to do!