Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Well.............

I've had a few people ask about what we have decided to do with our well.  Well,(get it? "Well"  I just kill me sometimes!  LOL!!!!)  We have decided to go ahead and get county water.  We scraped and scraped around until we got the down payment for the tap.  I mean, we were rolling pennies here people!   The money that we used was for our house.  We were saving it so that we could get insulation in it.  Well, (hehehe) we realized we needed water worse right now than we needed insulation.  

I did talk to a very nice person who did help me out on guessing what was wrong with our well.  They said that we had an iron bacteria problem.  Ever heard of that?  Me either.  They said that a bacteria, not harmful to humans, gets into the water and feeds off of the iron in the water.  When the bacteria feeds on the iron it poops out this slimy clay like substance the same color as iron.  This "poop" clogs up EVERYTHING!!!!!   Therefore it clogged up our water supply.  The only way that it could be fixed was with a big toothbrush looking thingy (that's a technical turn folks!) that would go down into the well and scrub the sides and spray water. It basically cleaned the well.   Then we would have to bleach the well every so often to kill the bacteria. We thought about doing this.  The problem with that is, no one around here does it.  It would also cost us more to get it done as would a water tap.  

Another thing that I didn't mention, is there is a company that bought land behind our property. They are dumping waste from a steel mill.  It's not liquid waste.  It looks like black rock. I'm wanting to say it's slag.  Anyway,  Hubby's dad told me that he thought that they had covered up 3 open wells down it the holler that they are filling in.   We never gave it much thought until our well started going bad.  Plus, we noticed that we are getting a little bit of black in our well water.   I don't trust it now.

 I want you to know that we have done everything we can do about this company.  We even called the EPA on them.  Nothing can be done.  The EPA  says everything is legit.   We also found out that the person who owns the company is a relative of a "higher up" in the politics of this county.  I would be fighting a losing battle.  Believe me I've tried.  One neighbor who was fighting it really hard just finally packed up and moved.  I tell you people,  politics are bad even in small towns.

Anyway, we have decided not to fight anymore and just get the county water until we can come up with the money to possibly  build us a big cistern.  (The way things are going, that's gonna be a LONG way off.)  But right now, I'm looking at the bright side.  Now I can actually buy white clothes!  And white towels!!! And white sheets!!!!!  Oh I'm sooooo excited!!!!!  I'm even gonna put out there  I might just get me a dish washer!!!!!!  Okay now I'm really dreaming!!!

So until next time,

Small Farm Girl, dreamer of clean dishes.

P.s.  We wont be drinking the county water.  We will be getting water from Hubby's Dad's house. He has an old well that has the best tasting water in the county!  We just need to find us a water cooler to use. We will get there sooner or later.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Rakin' and Rollin'

Today has been a long day. Hubby raked and rolled the field of hay today. He started early and ended late.


                     As you can tell in this picture, the hay rake rakes the hay toward the left.


He goes one way down the field and then turns around and comes back. The rake makes, what we call, windrows.


     You don't want to make them too wide because it has to fit into the pick up of the hay roller.



                                          This is Hubby with the big tractor and the hay roller.



                                                   He goes down the windrows.



The roller has little teeth that catch the hay that is in the windrows, and picks it up into the roller.



Here's a picture of inside of the roller.  The bars that run horizontal, roll around and around and form the round bale of hay. Hubby just drives and picks up more hay, making the roll of hay bigger and bigger.


                Then he reaches back and winds up the roll with twine as it is being turned in the roller.



        When that's done, Hubby pulls a leaver and the back of the roller opens up and the bale comes out.





It's fascinating to watch sometimes, just not when it's 95f  outside. If anyone asks, I'll be in the air condition sipping an ice tea.

So until next time,

Small Farm Girl,  ice tea sipper.


Saturday, June 22, 2013

Day Two, Tedding Hay

Today is day two of making hay.  Early this afternoon, Hubby jumped on his tractor and started to ted the hay.


This is the tedder. It basically flings the hay around so that it can spread out to dry faster. You can tell that it's going pretty fast.
                    It can be a dusty job.  This is an area where the ground was just like powder.


                                        Here you can see how big of a field Hubby is tedding.


The field off to the left will be done on a later day.  Hubby doesn't like to get all of the hay down at once.  This way he can take a few hours out of his days to do it.  Plus, if it rains on it, you don't lose all of your hay.


                                           Once again, I am being the water girl.


We aren't sure if hubby will start raking it tonight or do it early in the morning when the dew dries up.  It all depends on how dry the hay is.  Looks pretty dry right now, so we'll see.

So until next time,

Small Farm Girl,  water girl.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Makin Hay!!!


                                             Well, it's that time of year. Time to cut the hay.


                      Hubby had a pretty good sized piece of land to cut.  Just about 16 acres this time.



For those that don't know how making hay works, the machine that Hubby is pulling behind his tractor is called a hay disbine.  What it does is cut the hay very close to the grown. It actually cuts better than our lawn mower. hmmmmmm. lol


The difference between just a regular mowing machine and a hay disbine, is the disbine has rollers that squeeze (or condition) the grass as it goes through the disbine.  It smashes the grass and breaks the stems so that the moister from the grass will escape faster.   It cuts the drying time a lot!  Why do we need it to be dry?   Well, if we don't dry the grass, it can mold. Or, even worse, it will cause the hay to go through, what we call, a heat.   Sometimes the heat will actually cause the roll of hay to catch on fire.  I've only seen this done once.  Luckily it wasn't one of our rolls of hay.


You might think it's a fun job out there riding a tractor around all day long.  Well, it is, to some extent.  Especially if you like it hot and dusty.   I had the hard job (cough, cough) of  running cold drinks to Hubby as he was on the tractor.  Oh, don't forget the REALLY tough job of taking pictures.  Oh, I'm so exhausted!  (Back of hand to forehead.)  hehehhe.


I'll get pictures of the next steps of turning grass into hay.

So until next time,

Small Farm Girl,  hard worker.  (Okay, even I couldn't say that with a straight face. hehehehe)

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Amish Horses

In Amish country I turned into a giddy teenage girl. Why? Because there were HORSES all over the place!!!!!! Like any teenage girl I LOVED horses. This was like a dream come true.

 This big feller was posing by the fence just for me.


We went to a petting zoo and this was the view across the street.  Looks like this mare is the babysitter for all the young colts.


                    This little one was looking the other way when all of his classmates went to the barn.


                                                                     Wait for me!!!!!



This big feller is Big Ben. He is the biggest horse in Holmes County Oh. To put that into perspective, that lady was taller than I was. They would feed him ice cream cones.


Here was the plack in front of his stall. He is 1 1/2 tons!!!! Here it says his height is 19.3 hands. If you don't know anything about horse measuring, a hand is 4 inches. So if you figure that up, he is 6 1/2 feet tall at the shoulders! That's where they measure the horse.


And then while we where driving around, we saw this stunner.  Isn't he beautiful!!!! He was just standing there just like that as we drove by. We even turned around and drove back to get his picture. I think he was posing for us too. LOL



I have other pictures of horses but I'm gonna leave them for another post. They do come in different colors. lol

So until next time,

Small Farm Girl, giddy!

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Amish Homes

I promised you some pictures. So here are some pictures!!!!

 I was mesmerized by the Amish homes. They were beautiful! You can tell right off which house is Amish and which house is not. Some of these pictures are blurry. It's because I was taking them in a moving car.  I think you get the idea though.

First off, they are HUGE!!!! Generation of family members live together.

As the grandparents get older, there's usually a smaller house, or portion of the house, that is "given" to them as their home.

Here is a picture of a church that caught my eye. There is an old cemetery off to the right of it.

One thing I did notice was the Amish would plant their fields in strips. Usually strips of corn and alfalfa hay. I wander why? Never did find out. I should have dug deeper to find out.

I noticed something else about the Amish homes. Their gardens weren't as big as I thought they would have been. That is unless, they were selling vegetables, the gardens were, in my opinion, small.

Here are some more pictures of these beautiful homes. The second day we were there, the sun finally came out.  It was perfect.


I have so many more pictures to show. Stay tuned.

 So until next time,

 Small Farm Girl, Amish house lover.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

It Just Might Get Smelly Around Here

We have no water.  Our well, for some reason, is out of water. Not totally, but it comes in so slow that I can't do a half a load of laundry without stopping 4 times to wait for the water to catch up. Are we in a drought?  We were last year, but we have been through worse droughts and we had plenty of water before. Now, we don't.  No one around us is using our water supply. Everyone around us has county water.  We were going to stay with our well because of how the county screwed us over on getting a tap. Now I'm not so sure if we can.

When the county was going around asking people if they would sign up for county water, (They would get it for free the government was giving them a grant to pay for it.)  We signed up.  Then a few months later we heard that we were not going to get the water. There wasn't enough people on our road for them to put water on it.  Then a few months after that we heard that they were going to put county water around here again.  Once again, we signed up.  Then there was a rumor going around that the county had to buy new equipment with the money that they got for our leg of the ridge.  No water for us.  Then out of nowhere, they started to dig the ditch for the water line to come our way. Yea!!!  Or so we thought.  Come to find out, for some "unknown reason" we weren't signed up for the free tap to the county water. For us to get a tap, we would have to pay $1400. WHAT??????  They used our name so that they could get the money, but they wouldn't give us the free tap? Somethings wrong with that picture!!!  When we found out about this we told them we don't need their water. We have a well that has never gone dry. It may have some rust or clay in it. It may be red sometimes. But, at least we had a bounty of water.  Now, we do not. We have know idea what happened.

We considered getting a cistern but at that time we thought we had more time to save up the money. A cistern would cost us a lot more money. Money that we don't have now since we took our vacation. (Crap)  Once again, we thought we had more time to save.  So now we are stuck with no water and no way of building a cistern.  We don't really have the money to put in the tap.  When we left, we knew that the water was getting kind of slow. But, we thought we still had time to save some money. It's been acting like it for some time.  Me and Hubby haven't been on a vacation for a long while and with this, being our anniversary, we thought we would risk it.  Well, I guess we lost out on that risk.  Now we don't have the money and we don't have water.

I'm not telling you this so that you will feel sorry for us. I know that we could have not taken the vacation and we would have been closer to having the money for the tap. I'm telling you this so that you realize that there are times that you will make a bad decision for your farm. This is just one of those times for us.

So if you start to smell something your way just realize that is a smell of a bad decision.

So until next time,

Small Farm Girl, Aka Smelly.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Out Smarted In Amish Country

I'm home!!!!!  Did ya miss me?

We had a nice vacation up in Amish country. We have Amish that live only an hour away, but we wanted to go to the more populated Amish community. They would also be the more "commercialized" community. We rented a very nice room at a four room lodge.  And I learned a few things while I was there. First, my house is dirtier than I thought. lol. Second, just because you are on vacation, the weather is not. We had two tornado warning on the same night.  Thirdly, I don't think I was born for luxury.

Let me explain the last one.  Our room was really nice!  It had a gas fireplace, cathedral ceilings, and a HUGE bathtub that when you pushed a button bubbles would come out from these little, tiny holes all around you.  This bathtub intrigued me.  I LOVE to take baths.  I would rather take a bath instead of a shower anytime.  And since there was a separate shower, Hubby went in to take a shower while I enjoyed our bathtub. (Which was right beside our bed, by the way.)

I just knew I was going to enjoy this luxurious bath.  You turned the faucets on and water came out of a rock!  It flowed down other rocks and made a waterfall right into my tub!! Oh ya, this was gonna be nice. I filled the bathtub up and added the bubble bath that they keep there for the tub. The bubbles were great!!!! I get ready to get into the tub. Now, you have to sit on the tub and then swing your legs around to get in. No problem! Except when you sit on rocks. I swung my legs around and the rocks that they had around the tub, scraped my behind.  Oh well, I'm getting into this tub, things can't be that bad!  I slowly set down into the water.  Ahhhhhh. Just the right temperature. I scooted around so that my back was against the end. This was going to be relaxing!  I slowly sunk down into the water........and kept on going!  My feet didn't stop me on the other end like I'm use to.  I slid on down under the water!  I come up covered in bubbles!  What????  I tried it again. Right back down I go.  The tub was so slick that I couldn't get any traction! It was just like a slip n slide!  After a few minutes of trying to figure out how to NOT go under the water when I lay back, I finally got it.  Then I decided that I wanted to turn on the bubbles.  There were four buttons off to the side of the tub. I found the "On" button and pushed it.  Bubbles came out of everywhere! HARD!!!! There went my balance in the tub.  I started sliding around all over the tub. The bubbles were pushing me everywhere!!!! I felt like I was in a clothes washer. Around and around I went.  Did I forget to mention that this tub was HUGE!!! lol.

I finally slid around to where I could turn off the bubbles.  Phew! I made it through. The little power button kept blinking for some reason. I didn't notice if it was blinking when I got into the tub. I don't know, maybe it was..... Anyway, I commenced to washing. I had just went under the water to rinse out the suds from my hair when the stupid thing CAME BACK ON!!!!!!  I felt like I was being tumbled all over the place. I came up for air spittin and sputtering.  I about DIED!!!! ( ok, maybe that's a little too dramatic. But, could have! )  Then on top of it all, I couldn't turn the stupid thing off!!!! I pushed every button that they had but it kept going!!!!!  Finally, FINALLY the bubbles turned off.  I have got to get out of this thing before it kills me!  I drain the water and get out.  I made it!!!!

About 30 minutes later while me and Hubby was laying in bed watching the weather channel wondering if we were going to get hit by the tornadoes, THAT STUPID TUB TURNED ON AGAIN!!!!! It had no water in it! It just started blowing out air!  I run over to it and started pushing buttons again. Nothing worked!!!! I just stood there and stared. I tried to talk Hubby into going and getting the lady that run the place, but he said that it was 1 a.m. and he didn't want to wake her for something this stupid.  Stupid?! This thing could kill us in our sleep! I guarantee it!!!!  As I was watching it, I went to push the button. A split second before I did, the thing turned off. Too bad I had pushed the button again. It turned right back on.  I think I figured it out.

Hubby, not wanting to ruin it, added water back to the tub.  And then we waited.......

Quite a few minutes later it turned on again. This time we didn't do one thing. We just let it run. About 5 minutes later, it turned itself off.  Hmmmmm who would have thunk it?

It's funny how on a vacation to the Amish country, I am out smarted by a fancy bathtub.

So until next time,

Small Farm Girl, maybe I should have just taken a shower.

P.S. Pictures of vacation to come.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Farmsitters

I'm going on a rare vacation.  Me and Hubby are going to celebrate our 14th anniversary and take a vacation. "Where we going?" you ask.  We are going to Amish country. I know, I know, we basically live the same life here. Well, not really, I do like my air conditioner and my t.v. (sometimes).  But, I wanted to go somewhere where we don't have to run into fifty million screaming kids and people on their cell phones bumping into you as they walk.  Amish country usually doesn't attract those types of people.  Kids get bored in Amish country, no roller coasters or flashing lights and, there isn't that great of cell service there either. So texting is limited.  This is going to be just a nice relaxing get away.

One problem with us going though, is farm "babysitters."  It's hard to find someone to watch your animals while you are gone. At least someone who you would trust with the lives of your precious farm animals.  I will always wonder, while we are gone, if they are being taken care of the way I would take care of them.  9 times out of 10, they are not. That's why I don't like being gone for too long. I figured if I'm only gone for a couple days, the damage shouldn't be too bad, at least I hope not.  

Well, Phelan is going home tomorrow. The fun is over for a few days. : (   But, she will be back permanently in about a month. Watch out world!!! hehehee We have come up with all kinds of ideas on what we are going to do. I bet you can all just imagine, huh.  

So for now I will leave you with this cutie.

 
Small Farm Girl, soon to be on vacation.





Monday, June 10, 2013

Rambles

These last few days that Phelan has been here has been a blast! We have talked and talked and well,.....schemed. hehehehe.  We have found out we are WAY too much a like. And, both of our husbands get along like they have known each other for years.  It's nice having someone like that live close to you. Me and Phelan have informed her husband that we will be needing a big porch put on their cabin before long so that we can sit and rock back and forth in our rocking chairs. LOL. Oh the things we will be concocting!!!! Be afraid! Be very afraid!!!!!

Today Dad and Mom got to meet her for the first time. They thought that she was very nice and talked to her for a while. Of course Dad had to tell her a few of his jokes. LOL! He"s turned into an overnight comedian. (Thanks Duck Dynasty!)

The reason Dad came over was to help me tell what sex our young rabbits were. I couldn't tell. They all looked the same to me.  I thought maybe I was looking at them wrong. Nope, I wasn't. They were all does. Now I get to sell some. I've had quite a few people interested in the meat, but I've had a lot of people want them for breeding rabbits. I guess I'm gonna have to breed more does!

Hubby had to kill the new baby bunny. While we were looking at them, we found out that the ONE rabbit that one of my California does had, had something wrong with it. It looked like the mom rabbit has squashed it. All of the baby's legs were spread out. It moved around like a walrus.  I wasn't going to sell it like that so we had to put it out of it's misery. Too bad. Well, that is part of having animals. You take the good with the bad.  I think I'm going to sell the mom too. This is her second litter since she has been with me and she has only had one rabbit each time. The first time she even gave birth outside her nest.  She's not a keeper. At least, not for me.  Maybe someone else will have better luck with her.

In the last few days, I've had a few people ask about if I had any veggies for sale.  Not yet. We got a late start on our garden and then when we got it in the ground we didn't have any rain.  This week we got a good inch!  I told Phelan that she brought it with her.  Thanks!!!! Hopefully we will have extras now and I can sell some. Always nice to have a little extra money.

Well, time to go and see what else I can get into today.

So until next time,

Small Farm Girl,........I got nothing.


Sunday, June 9, 2013

Phelan Is Here!!!!!!!

Wow!!!  What a last few days!  Phelan of A Homesteading Neophyte, has come and signed papers on her property. It has been non-stop since then! We have been having a GREAT time!!!! Me and Phelan have hit it off like we have been friends forever! Her husband and my Hubby are getting along great too! It's almost scary.....

 I've got a few pictures of some of the things that's been going on around here.

 This picture is of Dan (Phalen's husband) and the boys in the creek. The boys LOVE the creek!



Here's Hubby bush hogging some weeds out of their yard. And yes, the grass is that tall. At first Phelan was going to leave the grass for the livestock to eat, but then she started to realize that there was so much grass that she didn't have to worry about it. She had plenty for them to eat!

This is Dan walking in his field. He is sooooo excited about moving here. He walks around with a big smile on his face.  Phelan said that she hasn't seen him this happy in a long time. I'm glad I could help them find this place. I like seeing people happy!

And of course, what would a Saturday night be without a campfire. So, Dan and the kids built a nice fire pit with the rocks from the creek. Phelan has it made!!!! lol

So that's what we have been doing around here for the last few days. I have a feeling you'll be hearing more about me and Phelan's adventures in the future. We'll be like the "Lavern and Shirley" of Homesteading! hehehehe (Of course I'm Shirley because I'm the sweet and innocent one. Hahahaha!!! Ok, even I couldn't say that with a straight face!)

 So until next time,

 Small Farm Girl, aka: Shirley