Dirt + water + manure = MUD

So, I started the weekend off right with some good clean, 'er dirty work. 

Like I said, dirt, plus water, plus manure = mud.  It's an eventuality when you have animals... unless you have a sacrifice area.  We need to create a sacrifice area, no, not an area to slaughter the cows, an area where you don't grow grass, you just spread ground cover so the livestock can be there without creating mud.  So, the only solution I could think of to try is "hog fuel".  I had a unit of it delivered this morning and spread it out as much as I could stand.  That's a good work out on the abs!  So, this is after... 

I should have taken a close up picture, maybe later.  I will say, the cows thought the new pile was a little "mattress" just for them.  It was cute.  

One of our cows looked like he was turning into the Grinch with all of the alfalfa stuck to his head.  They sure love that stuff!   

Road runner?  or Lakenvelder chicken?  Nope, just a Lakenvelder.  :)  

Hope you had a bountiful productive weekend too!

Lime Time

I borrowed our wonderful neighbors' quad today and spread lime of two of our pastures.  We're not even close to being done though.  The soil sample recommendation was 3 tons  per pasture, but I started out small.  It was nice to get something done around the place though.   :)

Harvest Party

Part of the Young family.  Missing the two oldest girls. :) 

Sara, Anniston & Alexa  

Our wonderful friends Travis and Sarah (craft master and brew master extraordinaire!)

Derek and Madalyn

My sweetie Christian. 

We had a great Harvest Party again this year! Filled with good times, family, great food and fun!  Our wonderful neighbors brought over their horse and give the kids rides, we had a ton of great food.  I ordered a cake from Bittersweet Bakery again,Travis made home crafted beer and cream soda,  mom brought her wonderful German chocolate cake, Matt and Elaine brought their beef brisket and pork shoulder and Mike was the grill master and everyone brought wonderful side dishes and desserts to share.  We all had a great time and I'm so glad we had the party again. :)

The Ugly Part of Farm Life

Sometimes life on the farm is not pretty, or quaint or simple.  Sometimes it's downright disturbing, dirty and stressful.  One of our poor steers has what I thought was a very severe case of warts.  The vet said it's not the worst case he's seen.  He didn't even flinch when he saw them.

We were able to borrow some fence panels from a good friend and pen him p to treat him.  Dr. Holechek gave him the wart vaccine and I was able to spray Betadine and Red Cote on it.  He said within 30 to 60 days the warts should shrink.  We'll have to give him two more injections before this is all over.  It's just a huge relief to at least feel like we've done everything we can at this point.  

Hope you had a better Thursday.  :)  

Corn off the cob

I got a great recipe and tips for how to freeze corn from Jason's aunt Kay.  I only had 20 ears, but it yielded 12 bags.  It tastes great and I didn't have to add sugar.  I love knowing exactly what's in my food!

When I got home from a recent visit to Salt Lake City I discovered I actually had a harvest!  Check it out!  Onions, tomatoes, basil and even carrots! 

 I hope you're enjoying the final days of summer!

Sweet Reward

Actually, I don't know that I can call this a reward, because I think you have to earn a reward.

 I can't really say I earned this potato harvest, although I did work hard planting them and weeding them at the beginning of the summer.  They've pretty much been on their own (with the help of Rachael watering) since July.  There's just been so much going on. But whatever you want to call it, I was very happy to find this tonight when we harvested the potatoes.

The weeds are also doing fabulous by the way... in case you wanted to know. :)  

Aside from that, I also canned tuna this weekend.  Actually I should say we, because Jason helped me a little bit.  I bought 137 lbs., thinking that it would yield 65 lbs.  I don't know why I thought that because tuna are almost all muscle, but I just remembered wrong.  So, instead of canning the 6 cases I thought I would have, I have 12 cases!  And after canning for 24 hours, I've had my fill for awhile! :)  

Off the Farm

Don't worry, the blog is still called Farm dAzE, but this week we spent quite a bit of time off the farm.  Monday night we went boating with Mike, who showed us around the Willamette and then we had dinner at Newport Seafood Grille downtown on the water.  He grew up boating with his family on the Willamette so he knows it like the back of his hand!

Tuesday night we went boating w/ our friends Brandon and Emily and Herb and Lauren came along with us.

 It was great to see them after so long.  Jason is turning out to be quite the boat captain.  I didn't know how it would go with his limited (if any) experience.  He really did great though, even Brandon thinks so, and he's been boating since he was a kid.

Then Thursday evening was the Street of Dreams black tie event for work.

It's always interesting to see how the other half live, but I'm perfectly happy with my home and acreage. :)

Sweet Summer Tiiime!

If you're a country music fan, then my misspelling probably isn't lost on you.  These pictures just remind me of the Kenny Chesney song, "Summertime".

I hear it looping through my head as I choose the pictures for this blog post.  This week has been extremely busy, filled with 12 hour days and some farm work. Jason mowed the back pasture and got the cows moved before we left on Friday.   Unfortunately I don't have any updated pictures of the garden, but I'll try to nab some tomorrow.  Thanks to my faithful helper Rachael (watering for me), my tomatoes are finally growing and doing well.  Well, Rachael and the 95 degree days that is.

So, this weekend was the Fields Family Reunion.  That would be (Jason's) dad's mom's family, from Thorpe , Washington.  Every year, the second weekend in August they have a big family reunion.  There are about 75 people that go.  We realized, after looking at the photo albums that Don and Lil kept, that it's been 11 years since Jason and I have been there.  Kevin was in the military when we went, so it's been 22 years for him.  They are all really nice people and Clarke and Don Williamson (Pearl's sons) were very welcoming and happy to see us there. Then there's Don and Lil's daughters, Kim and Cheryl and their husbands who were really nice and they're just a year older than Jason and Kevin.   I'm sure we'll be going back next year.  :) Elie and Kyle were totally smitten with their little Daschunds, Oscar and Leila.

Oscar has a funny habit of hunting for rocks in the creek.  I'm not sure if you can see it here, but the rock is about the size of his head!

  I think the highlight for me was playing in the creek with Elie.  I don't have any pictures of my trip down the "slide"  but I have some great ones of Elie.  I even earned the title of "best aunt ever" for going down the creek with her.  It was a blast!  :)

That picture just makes me so happy!  Hope you had a wonderful weekend and escaped the heat! 

Another Great Visit

This weekend is off to a great start.  We had dinner w/ Patti and Ken and showed them around the garden Friday night.  Patti made a wonderful dinner of Tilapia, mango salad and yams.

Today we went to breakfast at Mother's downtown with Travis and Sarah and the boys.  I had the BEST biscuits and gravy and I even mooched a piece of crunchy French toast from Ry.  It was sooo good.  Then we went to the BrewFest and Saturday market with Travis and Sarah and the boys. Sarah and I took the boys to Saturday Market while the (big) boys were at the BrewFest.  We had a great time.  The boys had snow cones, then played in the fountain for a little bit.  It was so hot it was a pleasure to cool my feet off in the water for awhile.  It was 95 degrees, so we were zapped by the time we got done this afternoon.  Jason and I came home and crashed for a couple of hours.

Then tonight we had another fabulous dinner w/ Patti and Ken!  Beef tenderloin, with fresh peas (from the garden)

 with bacon, swiss chard w/ onions and cannelini beans, and marinated cucumber and tomato salad.  I'm only going into so much detail because I don't think I've ever had such healthy food and enjoyed it so much.  Usually when I like something that much I feel guilty about it! :)  Not this time, I went back for more and didn't think a thing of it.  :)  Jason also made some peach ice cream with the Sweet Sue peaches they brought me from Dallas.  That was delicious too!

Hope you're having a great weekend!  

Stubborn Streak

It defies all conventional wisdom, but I planted some new seeds today anyway.

 It's just so late in the season to start something,  but I was just itching to plant the green beans I've had since last year!  I guess I just figure I like small fresh green beans anyway, so they should have enough time to at least produce some beans even if they're small.  I also planted some of my dahlia tubers that my friend Sarah gave me.  I was determined that they should at least have a chance to sprout this year, even if they don't bloom this season.  My peas, that I put in late in the season, are doing really well! I harvested some this weekend and they're really sweet and crisp.  I love fresh peas!

That's why I called this post stubborn streak.  I'm just too stubborn to give up on the garden this year.  And I'm glad I haven't.  It's looking really good.  I have a lot of weeds of course, but I'm keeping those at bay as much as possible. I'm also happy to report that my tomatoes are recovering from the rainy spring and they're growing nicely.

Our potatoes are doing marvelously too!  Check them out.  I had to hill them again this weekend and I can hardly hill them high enough!

 

Now we're going to be gone for several weekends, so I'll have to rely on my trusty friend Rachel and my weekday evenings to keep things under control.
Other than gardening this weekend, we enjoyed a visit with our friends Jim and Brenda from Missouri and Rene' who now lives here in Portland and her boyfriend Nick.  We all had a great time checking out Farmer's Market and Portland Saturday Market.

Hope you had a great weekend too!

Weekend Away

So, we got away for the weekend... and went to Roseburg, OR, with Jason's cousin and her family for Graffiti Days.  It's a huge "cruise in" with hundreds of cars on display.  In the evening they all cruise around the downtown area.  It's great!   We had a great time, although it was 100 degrees while we were at the car show, so we escaped to the shade often!  This is one version of my favorite car, a '57 Chevy Nomad (I'd prefer the Belair edition though).  It's beautiful, the perfect color!

Jason's aunt and uncle live on the Umpqua river, so Sunday morning we walked/hiked down to the river and took a few pictures.  It was beautiful, and so peaceful to hear the water flowing all the time.

On the way home, we convinced the guys to stop by a couple of lavender farms as the 2010 Oregon Lavender Festival was in full swing.  This farm was just outside Springfield.  It wasn't very big, but they had some nice things.  I bought some soap, lip balm and some lavender short bread cookies.

We stopped for lunch at The Wagon Yard BBQ just outside of Springfield.  It was really good!  It's a hole in the wall little restaurant in the middle of nowhere, but they had GREAT food!

This little lavender farm was beautiful!  The whole setup was amazing.   

I didn't get pictures of all of it, but the little sale barn they had was really pretty.  The wood shown here was from the old barn that they demolished. They did a beautiful job with everything.  I would love to have some lavender plants.  I'm hoping to plant some this fall.  We'll see how that goes. :)

Someday I'll have a cute little shop like this.  In the meantime... I dream!

On another note, the garden is doing well and the tomatoes have recovered from being nearly drowned by the tons of rain we received until the end of June.  Things are really looking up!

Hope you're having a great week!