This little Piggly Wiggly is a market…

Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is bare. The pantry, fridge and freezer are showing a lot of empty spaces as we are running low on a lot of items. However, some hit the critical phase this morning.

* No flour for making bread, therefore,

* No homemade bread, and no store bought either.

* No eggs for breakfast or baking. (And boy! I can’t wait for farm fresh eggs again. Those pale yolks in store bought eggs are past pathetic.)

* No toilet paper for… well, you know. For putting in the bathroom, right!?

Both The Farmer and Young Son are working today, so I had to drive myself to the store. To most people, that’s not such a big deal, but driving aggravates my pain, so I don’t do it very often.

That being the case, I opted for the closest store, which is – you guessed it! Piggly Wiggly.

I’d never heard of Piggly Wiggly until we moved to the south. The name still makes me laugh, but it’s a convenient 3 miles away, so to paraphrase the nursery rhyme a little …

To market, to market, to buy at Piggly Wiggly;
Home again, home again, a fast jiggety-jiggly.

High ANT-xiety

It's a cold and dreary day here. We've had a few sprinkles, but not really enough to even measure in the rain gauge. It's just misty out there.

I don't know if the weather had anything to do with this, but when I came back to the house from doing morning chores, I noticed a flower pot in the rosebed had what looked like a lot of dirt all over the edges.

When I got closer, I realized it was NOT dirt. After all, dirt doesn't usually move on its' own.

No, indeed this "dirt" was actually a moving mass of ANTS! The pot and the plants in it were positively polluted with ants.

I've never seen them on a pot out in the open in such masses. There were creepy crawling piles of ants all over!

I kept a safe distance while taking pictures. Over the past few years I've developed a sensitivity, if not a downright allergy, to ant bites. Makes me feel kind of sorry for the poor gnome...
He's being tortured by ants crawling all over his stumpy body.

Just looking at all those ants was enough to give me the creeps.
High ANT-xiety indeed!

The Farmer's (Grand)Daughter

We have several grandchildren, and all are special. However, I must admit they're extra cute when they're little tykes like our youngest granddaughter shown here:


The Farmer's tractor seems to be great fun!

Colder weather is here again!

Tuesday it rained all day, and yesterday was overcast. Today it’s bright and sunny, but a cold front has moved in, and temperatures dropped drastically. It doesn’t seem to bother the animals. Wish I could say the same for myself!

I notice the peacock has pretty well re-feathered, and has nice new plumage in time for courting.

He hasn’t starting displaying his lovely fan of feathers yet. The incessant honking that signals breeding season usually starts in February sometime, along with Mr. Peacock dancing and prancing to get the girls attention.

Then it'll be Saturday Night Fever 24/7!

Spot needed probiotics...

Our cat, Spot, has been on antibiotics for a few days now due to the fact he got bit by something and developed abscesses. I was concerned about the effect antibiotics have on the normal "good" flora of the intestinal system. I have a probiotic powder I sprinkle on food for the sheep and goats, but I doubted Spot would eat his cat food if I sprinkled stuff on it. He's a rather picky eater.

I got the bright idea to try feeding him yogurt, though I had my doubts Mr. Picky would actually eat it. But I figured people eat yogurt for the beneficial bacteria, so why not Spot?
Why not indeed? Turns out Spot loves yogurt! I barely sit it down on the porch before he's shoved his nose in it and lapping away.

It sure makes it easier he likes it. I'd hate to try squirting the stuff down his throat!

Corn Crazy

In the mornings when I go out to do chores, the chickens always come running because they love me so much. Okay, maybe it has more to do with the fact I always throw some cracked corn out first thing.

The guineas aren't far behind, and rush in to get their share. It seems every critter on the place loves to munch on cracked corn. Even wonder dog Toby will lick some up now and then.

However, the top of the food chain here is the goats, and when I let them out, they chase everyone else away.

And just what do you think you're doing, trying to eat MY corn????

For that reason, the goats are always the last critters I let out of the night pens, but I always make sure there's some left for them to have a morning treat also!

It seems the only critter outside that never wants their share is the cat, Spot. I guess he figures that corn isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Strange Self-Portrait

When I was looking through the pictures I'd taken of the water-filled troughs, I noticed this one particular shot of my reflection:
As you can see, the wind was blowing my hair and there are clouds in the sky. Also, I have a camera in my hands (how else could I take a picture, right?).

A strange picture of a strange person...

Wild and Weird Worms

Okay farm fans, here’s the trough full of water after it rains…

And here’s the question:
How does the earthworm get in there?
Seriously, every time it rains, I find earthworms in the feed troughs. I understand they’re coming up out of the soggy ground to get some air, but how in the world do they manage to crawl up the slick sloped plastic sides of the water trough and end up in the water there?

However they manage it, they can’t seem to get back out of the trough and it’s full of water. I reckon it correlates to “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” only it’s “Out of the mud and into the water.”

All of which equals one dead worm.

The Wounded Warrior Comes Home

Spot got to come home this morning, but boy! Is he a sorry looking sight! There’s a big patch of fur shaved off, and we were wrong… there were actually TWO punctures and abscesses, not one. I guess the second was a little smaller and covered under fur, so we didn’t notice it.

I tried to get a close up shot, but he wouldn't hold still. Here’s a link to the best shot I could get a for a closeup of the wounds, not for the faint of heart, or easily grossed out. I’ve seen worse, but this is nasty enough!

Since these sites were infected, we have to leave those wounds gaping open and uncovered to allow them to continue to drain. Spot’s on an antibiotic, which is thankfully a liquid, and not too difficult to get down him.

I don’t know what he was fighting with, but it definitely left him a wounded warrior.

Spot's Adventures

We have a cat named Spot. The Farmer named him Spot because… well, he has big spots. I think the name gave the cat some sort of identity crisis. He thinks he’s a dog. Why do I say that?
* He comes when I whistle for him.
* He’s been known to play fetch.
* He follows me around everywhere like a dog.

Further, he is positively fearless. Once we had a huge snake eating guinea eggs. We're talking 5' long or more, with room enough to hold at least 5 guinea eggs in its' belly.

Just look at him checking out a snake in this video…

And after he looked at this BIG snake a while he decided to whack it one. The following is a VERY short video of him doing just that… you can actually hear him swat the snake.


I’m afraid sometime recently this bravado got him in trouble. He tangled with something that fought back and ended up with a huge abscess above his left front leg, which has an obvious puncture wound in the middle of it.

Since we weren’t sure what he tangled with, we took him to the vet. He cried pitifully all the way there. VERY vocal, which is highly unusual. He usually has a very short, quiet “mew”. These were loud and oh so mournful. The kind that makes you feel like a heel, even though you know taking the cat to the vet is doing what’s best for him.

He’s scheduled for some minor surgery to lance the wound and drain it. If all goes well, we should be able to pick him up tomorrow.

If he keeps this up, one of these days this look…
... is going to be permanent.

But I hope not. Spot the cat is one of the best dogs we’ve ever had.

Toby Chasing Thunder

When we had that bad storm last week, I took a video of Toby running around like a demented critter, chasing after thunder. Yes, the dog chases after a SOUND. He runs, he barks, he jumps... he thinks he is going to catch it, sometime, somehow.

In this first one, you see the lightning flash, and him taking off through the main pasture chasing the noise while sheets of rain blow over him.

Here he once again runs through the field, but I caught him when he came back and jumped up against the fence, barking and trying to let that thunder know some day he's gonna get it!

I don't think there's a single critter on this farm that's normal.

Stormy Weather...

We've had some wild weather here today! For a big part of the afternoon and evening, there was a tornado watch. Thankfully, we didn't have one, just a lot of rain and straight line winds.

Here's a video of the rain and wind blowing through the trees - these are mature trees, so it was moving some heavy timber!


We didn't get away totally unscathed. A fair size limb blew down out of one of the walnut trees in the back yard.

The wind also blew down part of the pallet fence The Farmer built around my lilac bush and trumpet vine to keep the goats from eating them.

All things considered, we didn't fare too badly. Just a lot of wind, and almost 2 inches of rain, which we really need!

Perhaps there's still a silver lining to every cloud?

Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?

The weather remains changeable here. Yesterday it was up in the 70's, last night it rained, this morning it was in the 40's. At least the sun was shining brightly when I went out to do the morning chores.

The sheep were still resting in the main pasture, in a nice, neat row near the orchard:
That's the matriarch on the left, Coconut, then Rowan, Domori, Payapa and Valrhona. They're retired now from producing lambs, though of course, they still produce wool! In fact, each one produces a different color. Being Shetland sheep, some of those colors have special names. From left to right, their colors are: white, gray, moorit, shaela and musket.

So to the question, "Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?"
The answer is yes! And so do all the other different colored sheep!

Mutant Grape

I bought home a bag of grapes from the grocery store. The guys really enjoy munching on them for a snack. One grape of the bunch was much bigger than most of them.

Tops of a regular grape and the big conglomerate grape.

It's rather strange. It looks like a bunch of grapes just grew all together.

Bottom of the same grapes, regular and weird.

If all the grapes grew together like that, you could have raisins the size of prunes!

Toby, our handsome wonder dog!

It was another cold night here. I was out taking pictures of the ice on the pond, when I happened to get this shot of Toby.

I was really pleased with this shot because I have a hard time getting good pictures of Toby. First off, it's very difficult to get a good picture of a critter with black fur. It's hard to see the details without making the rest of the picture too light. I have that problem every time I try to take pictures of Toby or our llama, Keira, as they both are dark. The background in this picture just happened to work out well.

It's also difficult to catch him standing STILL for a long enough time to bring the camera up, focus and take the picture. He's constantly on the mooooovvvvvveeeeee, and he usually comes running the minute he sees me look at him.

So there he is, standing still for a change, posing for a picture to show what a big, handsome dog he is!

This Polar Bear Club is for the BIRDS!!!

I spoke too soon yesterday about being glad I didn't have to chop ice. Figures. I went out this morning and there were empty heated water bowls in the peafowl pen and poultry pens. That meant I either had to carry water out from the house, which is a fair distance, or chop the ice off the top of the unheated water buckets so I could pour water out of them into the heated buckets. Follow that?

I chose the latter, and whew! That's tiring work. The good news is I had enough water to fill the bowls back up. The bad news is, if it's still this cold tomorrow, I'll have no choice but to carry water from the house to the distant water bowls.

While I'm chopping through ice to fill water bowls for the domestic fowl, some of their wild cousins are trying out for the Polar Bear Club, and splashing around in the birdbath.



Even though this birdbath has a heater to keep the water from freezing, it's not THAT warm, and the air is FRIGID. Personally, I think they're birdbrains to be playing in the water when it's this cold.

I figured I was providing drinking water during the cold weather months for the birds, but never imagined I'd be providing a heated spa!

Back to our regularly scheduled program…

The holidays are over, and it’s back to the old routine. The Farmer went back to work today, which means I have to do morning chores again. Naturally, it also happens to be one of the coldest days we’ve had this winter, with a way wicked wind whipping through clothing.

I hate cold weather. (Okay, so I hate really hot weather too. I’m just a temperate kind of gal.)

I put on thermal underwear, flannel pants and gym pants. I put on a shirt, sweater and winter coat. I stayed fairly warm, except the wind still managed to slip through the fabrics and spread its’ vile chilliness.

The goats weren’t thrilled about moving out, and even the sheep with their way wooly coats were tucked in the shed this morning. Usually the cold doesn’t phase them and they sleep out in the field, but I suspect the wind was whipping through their wool and getting to skin, so they were feeling winter’s bite also.

We’ve been missing a hen for a couple of days. I found her this morning in the hen house which I thought The Farmer was looking into every night to see if there were any eggs. You know what they say about assuming things! Our hens are elderly, so I suspect it was just old age.

That meant a long trek out into the woods to dispose of the corpus not so delicti (a body, but no crime… and it wasn’t too delicti-delectable looking either). Toby went with me until we got to the electric fence. It wasn’t on, but he doesn’t take any chances and won’t go near it. We never saw it happen, but at some point in time, he must have gotten zapped but good, because we can’t even carry him across without he totally freaks out.

It seemed to take forever to get all the animals fed, check water, dispose of a chicken corpse, and otherwise finish up the chores this morning. I’m glad we have heated water buckets so I don’t have to chop ice, and I'm glad I don’t have to shovel snow. There were a few flakes floating around, but not enough to really say it was snowing.

And I’m thrilled to be back inside where it’s WARM.
I’m afraid I wouldn’t make a very good pioneer!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Here we are, all set to start a new year. And every year, I think I’m going to do better, and get more done, and have BIG plans for what I’m going to accomplish. And every year, most of the things I accomplish don’t seem to match what I’d planned to accomplish. Maybe this year will be different? (I know, take off those rose-colored glasses!)

So what’s on the agenda for 2008?

#1) Get rid of all the wool from past shearings sitting in my basement.

#2) Update our farm website. Our critter population has changed dramatically.

#3) Rejuvenate my flock of laying hens. Time to order some new chicks this spring! My hens are getting elderly – I didn’t even know that chickens lost coloration in their feathers like we do in our hair.

#4) Order some meat breed chicks also, and fill our freezer with some “I know what’s in ‘em” chicken. My biggest hang-up is finding someone to do the processing. I can’t handle all the feather plucking and cleaning out and stuff like I did when younger and healthier.

#4) Find someone who raises beef without hormones, and put some no-dye-or-anything-else-in-it beef in our freezer.

#5) More, higher raised beds in the garden. Even just one that was tall enough I don’t have to bend over to work would be great. It would make growing veggies so much easier for me.

#6) Finish refinishing the house, specifically, the hall bathroom and my office. Those are the major projects, but there’s a bunch of little stuff that needs done, too.

#7) And the most major project, clear out all the extras in the house, from merging 3 households of packrats. It’s time to clear things out, but it takes a lot of time and effort, and is difficult when you have lots to do, and not enough hours during the day you can work!

I know doing all this will be difficult in one year, but it’s good to have goals to shoot for!