Milestone

Today, my beautiful daughter turns 20!!  How did that happen?!!?  Two decades?!?!  She was just a little peanut all those years ago...8 weeks premature....would never know it looking at her now!!

Happy Birthday B!!!  I love you with all my heart!

H O T

The dogs are hot.
The cats are hot.
The chickens are hot.
I am hot.  (well, not really...not that way, anyway...)

That sums it up fairly well.

P.S.  OH!  It's going to be even HOTTER tomorrow.....Calgon!!  Take me away!!!

Tidbit Tuesday

• If 88F feels like 94F, then why don't we just say it is 94F outside????
• The puppy dogs really miss playing outside...when it's hot like this, they get to out to do their business and then it's back into the A/C!
• Eggs????  Anyone????  Not yet :-(  However, I do think they are practicing their egg song...or I could just be hearing things....
• Feels like winter - being cooped up inside and dreading having to go outside
• Been doing A LOT of reading (you can tell if you look at my Books page)
• When is our government going to do the right thing - like the rest of us are expected to do....and keep our economy from tanking worse than it already is?
• Stay cool and drink plenty of liquids (up to you whether they are of the" adult beverage" variety!!)

Dear....

Dear Mother Nature,

It is 7PM and the temperature is still 91F.  We do our best to honor you by planting flower and vegetable gardens, raise livestock and try to keep our lands as natural as we can.  And you repay us by keeping us in a stewpot hovering around 100F for days.  Thank you very much.  But if this is how you thank us for honoring you and nature, then I think we may just have to raze our land and put up a parking lot!

My wildflowers have up and died - how do WILDflowers die?  They get baked in the gawd awful heat and throw up the white flag.

The vegetable garden is hanging on by a thread because we water the snot out of it every night for 20 - 30 minutes.  We will be lucky to have the tomatoes ripen so we can have a meager harvest.  Not sure the squash is going to make it...I am holding out hope for the carrots though since they are UNDER the ground.

We have to fill the pool every day - why?  The temps are so high that the water just plain evaporates.  But the forager bees are having a ball drinking the water and keeping us from being able to get in the pool to try to cool off.

So any time you are done playing your little game with us lowly humans, we would appreciate you taking the cover off and turning the heat setting down to at least a low simmer.

Sincerely,

Broken Road Farm
(or maybe we should rename it to Blazing Road Farm....or Boiling Road Farm...I'm open to suggestions!)

Tidbit Tuesday

• Don't you just love that I started Tidbit Tuesdays and then haven't done one in weeks?!
• The commute to the big city really takes a lot out of you
• We got RAIN!!!
• Going back up to 96F the end of this week with a heat index of 105F+....Pwwaaahhhhttthhhh
• The girls are 18 weeks now - eggs anyone?!?!  Anyone??!?!  Not yet...
• Our dogs are itching themselves to death having the A/C running non-stop for the past month.  No bugs - just bad dan-dwoofies!  (You'll figure it out!)
• Hope you all had a super day!   I am going to go crash now....

What did we do this weekend, you ask?

My husband played with his toys:

While I watched from a safe distance!

I did help move the branches into a pile and load the logs onto the wagon - well, until they got too heavy for me....which was quite a few of them.  It was a rather large tree we had to take down!  Firewood for next year :-)

Why Am I Doing This?

I have recently been reading a new blog - well, it is new to me - by Small Farm Girl.  As I usually do when reading a new blog, I start from the beginning.  In one of her older posts, she asks why each of her followers blogs....so...why do I blog?

At first, it started out as a way to get through the winter....not one of my best times of the year.  The shorter days, cold weather, wind and snow are not fun for me.  Even though I grew up in the Northeast, I never "got used to it" - and now that I live in the "South", I was hoping I would not have those things anymore...but alas, we still get cold weather, wind and snow.  Just not to the extreme that we did up north.

As I continued to blog, I thought, hey - maybe the journey and struggles we have endured, I mean encountered, may help someone else who is doing the same thing or thinking about it.  So, I keep blogging.  There are a lot of differences between living in the "big city" and now being out in the country.  Let me illustrate for those of you who may only have the knowledge of one and not the other.

Living in the City

• When you move into your house, the electric, water and natural gas are already turned on and ready to go
• There is already landscaping around your home (probably not much, but it is there)
• You have grass in the yard
• Your home has been treated for bugs (termites, etc.)
• The only bugs you have to deal with are ants, mosquitoes and Japanese beetles (in the Spring)
• You have a driveway
• Your mailbox is about 30 feet from your front door

Living in the Country

• You have to drill the well, have the septic tank and leach field installed and jump through hoops to get your house the way the county wants it so they will give the approval for the power company to come out and turn on the electric (we were on a generator for 7 weeks!!) - what did we need?  Gutters....really?!?! Yes...
• There is no landscaping - other than the woods; no grass, just mud everywhere whenever it rains
• There are BUGS - every kind you can conceivably imagine, and then some!  I swear we find a new kind every day!
• There is no driveway - and when you do put down the gravel to make one, it disappears the following winter/spring because it sinks into the mud when you drive on it - you have to keep putting down dump truck loads for 3 years before it finally stays on the surface!  Which is why I drive a Jeep Grand Cherokee with 4-wheel drive :-)
• Your mailbox is 1,200 feet round trip - that's almost a quarter of a mile!

These are just a few things that come to mind immediately.  There are a bunch more, believe me...but, there are some things you can only have in the country - peace and quiet (no cars speeding by with their music blaring, no kids screaming and riding their bikes on your lawn), stars in the sky at night (it's DARK out in the country at night), chickens in your backyard, a vegetable garden (or at least the semblance of one) and a 24-ft. above-ground pool in your front yard!

So, for those who wish they could live in the country, I wish you luck in achieving your dream.  For those of us who are already there,  isn't it great?!?!?!

Random Update

I know I don't usually post pictures, but today I will :-)

My husband cut down the saplings and branches that impeded my view of the chickens from the back porch.



Black-eyed Susans in full swing!



Lettuce from the garden and wild black raspberries from the hill.

Our backyard when we moved here in July 2008.

Our backyard 3 years later - July 2011.

Visitor to our backyard last week.

And last but not least, my Jello Flag cake that I make
for Memorial Day and Independence Day each year - YUMMY!

The top two rows of blueberries are from our blueberry bushes.  That was all that was left after we ate them as fast as we picked them :-)

Holiday Weekend/Vacation Day Update

Wow...holiday weekends really throw your sense of timing off, don't they?  Add to that a vacation day tacked to the end of the holiday weekend and BLAM!  Where did the time go?

Saturday, we did some stuff outside - until it got so blasted hot we had to quit and jump in the pool for fear of heat exhaustion!  My husband had a big piece of dirt digging equipment dropped off at the house, so he played with that most of the day.  You know, knocking down trees, picking them up and throwing them around, digging into the hillside, moving the dirt somewhere else.  It's like a REALLY BIG Tonka toy :-)  I weeded the vegetable garden, dug up all the onions and garlic that had no tops left - big disappointment.  Neither really seemed to grow much....guess I need to read up some more on how to get those to grow BIG.  The tomatoes are coming along and we have a stalk of broccoli sticking out.  The lettuce has finally decided to bolt, and the tops of the carrots are huge!  Wonder how much is going on underground...this is the first time I have tried to grow carrots.  I have a hard time with the things that grow below the surface - you can't see what is happening!!

Sunday, it was blazing hot again, so, much of our time was spent inside in the a/c.  Watching TV, reading, surfing the net, etc.

Monday, my husband slow-cooked a pork shoulder in the crock pot with his homemade BBQ sauce - Oh My Gosh!!!  Scrumptious!  And I made my Jello Flag Cake that I make every year - a big hit in my family.  That night, we lit off fireworks - the dogs barked and barked (they really do not like loud bang sounds), an errant firework almost killed me - but I survived by screaming my head off and running away without even spilling a drop of my wine, thank you very much - and the next morning the chickens were still alive when I went down to let them out.  All in all, a very nice weekend.

Oh - wait!  There was one more day to that long weekend :-)  Tuesday, we both took a vacation day.  Since we had such a fun filled, action packed weekend, we decided to slow it down for a day.  We hopped in the Jeep around 10:30 AM, took off, found a road we had not traveled before and just kept driving.  There really is a lot of pretty farm country around us.  We kept taking back roads - if the road we were on had lines painted on it, we made sure to turn onto one that did not - and gravel roads and just admired everything.  This is much easier now that GPS units have been invented to get you back home :-)  Otherwise I would have been a panicked mess trying to keep up with all the turns and roads to make sure we could get back!  Anyway, we ended up in Virginia in a little town called Meadows of Dan, where we stopped at a small restaurant and had an AWESOME lunch.  We got back home around 2PM and slacked off the rest of the day.  It was a vacation day well spent - sometimes you get so bogged down in all the stuff you need to get done around the homestead that you forget there are some pretty nice places to visit off the homestead.

I hope you all had a fabulous Fourth, and are enjoying the "short week"!

Independence Day

Happy Birthday United States of America! 

Land of the free - home of the brave! 



I am proud to be an American!

Thank you to all of our military who secures that freedom for us every day,

And to their families, who support their decision to keep us free!

Cat Burglar

There is a thief among us.....her name.....is Zoe:

Mild-mannered house cat by day....but lock up your bratwurst everyone!!  It isn't safe while Zoe is on the prowl!!

Last night, we decided to have some brats on the grill for dinner.  Then my daughter and her fiance called to see what we were doing and to ask if they could come over and hang out for a while.  I told them we were starting the grill for brats and/or hot dogs and to come on over.

When everyone was done eating, the remaining brats and dogs were on a plate on the kitchen table.  Next thing we knew, we heard a loud THUD - which is indicative of a cat jumping off a high surface such as the counter top or table.  Of which, our cats are allowed on NEITHER.  My husband says "Uh oh...I forgot about Zoe and brats..."

Huh?!!?  Apparently, Zoe has an affinity for bratwurst.  Loves the stuff!  Will scale the tallest mountain if she smells brats on the top!  She made it as far as the end of the table when she came face to face with the dreaded SPRAY BOTTLE!  She dropped that brat so fast and was gone in a blur of black fluff.

A cat who loves brats - what will we encounter next?!?!