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!!