Snow!

It’s snowing! November 30th – the old timers say the date number of the first snow will be the # of snows we get through the winter. Grampa Tom says we’ll have 30 snows. I told him we did have some snow a couple of weeks ago. It was just a small flurry, he didn’t even know we had one. I can’t remember what day that was, but I’m hoping that counts!

The last time I wrote, I was sick and unable to do much. It got worse, much worse. I spent about a week fighting a high fever, unable to get out of bed. Finally broke down and went to the doc. She gave me a shot in the butt and some other meds. It helped, but it was days before I had the strength to lift my laptop. For those of you that know me, I went 5 days without tea or CCU. You know I was bad! I’m still not 100% but I think I’ll live now. God is good. There were a couple of times I was very tempted to just say LORD take me home, but I know my job here is not done so I’m still here!

A couple of weeks ago, our dog Blue showed up with a huge gash on his back. Pinky has been missing since then. We thought maybe they had been tangling with farm equipment, but the other morning our cat came in sporting the same huge gash and there were a couple of piles of feathers out in the pasture. Don’t know what we are dealing with, but the chickens are being shut in the hen house every night now. No one has seen Pinky’s body, so I’m not giving up.

I’ve been accused of having “unrealistic hopes”, but isn’t that what faith is? Hope in impossible things? My hope for Pinky is not without basis. We once had a lamb that got lost. The kids and I prayed for it. Months went by. Surely the coyotes got it. Then one day it showed up in the neighbor’s barn! Then there was my daughter’s dog. This ornery little shiatsu ran away while I was babysitting it. After 2 days everyone was sure it was coyote bait, but on the 3rd day it scratched on the door of one of my students about 2 miles away. Then there was the cat that fell in a pan of gasoline. My kids had some friends staying with us. They were just sure the cat would die, but my kids prayed for it and by the next day it was just fine!

There is a place coming up for sale next week that we would love to have. The track is 20 acres with a house and several out buildings. Someday we will have the capital to buy a place like that. We really need more ground. Last week, our neighbor who offered to let us set up at her barn on the highway asked if we’d like to use an old chicken house at her son’s place down the road. I’m so glad she likes us! We’ll get there !

Our chickens have dropped production with the cold weather, but the egg quality is much better so we still have almost as many available to sell. We were getting quite a few cracked and goofy shaped eggs. Some of the older hens have died. They were probably where the goofy eggs were coming from. We also changed from store bought layer feed to a brewer’s mash based feed that my friend Pastor Aaron Ferguson is selling. It seems to have helped quite a bit.

We finished the tax assessing job the first of November and it is time to start again! This week I plan to clean the house. Then as soon as Grampa Tom is out of the fields, we’ll be combing the back roads for new construction. Sure hope we get the books before August this year. Legally, it is supposed to be done by April 15th, but that’s a little hard when you don’t get the stuff you are supposed to work with until August like we have the last 2 years. I ran for the position because I thought it would be a good winter job, but the last 2 years it has gone into November. The county is working on computerizing everything, otherwise I’d quit. Once we have things on computer, hopefully we will be able to complete the job on time.

I still have a bunch of apples to put up. We had to feed the sheep and chickens about 4 bucket’s that we couldn’t get in the big refrigerator we bought for eggs because the temp dropped and I was to sick to do anything with them. That may sound like a bad thing, but the sheep and chickens really like apples and we really consider them to be free feed.

Well, I'll stop rambling now.


God Bless You All! ~Grama Sue's

Chicken Page

Wow! This being sick stuff is great for my writing! The Bible says that God uses all things for our good. I actually got my chicken page up. It is mostly complete I think. I was going to put it on Squiddo, but I couldn't get it all on one page. This doesn't look quite like I want it, but it's close enough. I also put the link on the side bar!

God Bless! ~Grama Sue

Writer's Block

Ugh! I’ve had such a case of writer’s block when it comes to this blog!
Grampa and I are currently exercising our immune systems. Seems we picked up some horrible flu bug. I can’t do much of anything so I thought I’d better at least post!

We’ve been getting some frost here. My parsley really loves this weather and the cilantro is coming back nicely. If we were still going to the farmer’s markets I could sell some of it, but that’s about all we’d have to sell and even with the drop in gas prices it wouldn’t be enough to make it worth it.

My October was spent finishing up my assessing job. Grampa spent it cleaning up around here waiting for it to stop raining so he could get in the fields. Normally, they are done with the harvest around here by now, but it’s been to wet! Oh well, he’s gotten a lot done around here. One thing I really like about him working at home is that our place gets a lot more of his attention!

Then the first week in November we went to the small farm conference in Columbia, MO. We’ve gone down there for a day every year for a while now, but this year we decided to go for the full 3 days. We learned all about marketing, chicken breeds, sheep, honey, etc … as well as getting to meet so many people like ourselves. We may be crazy, but we’re not the only ones!

Since then I’ve been putting up apples. We had a wonderful apple crop this year! A lot of it went to the sheep and chickens because I was to busy with the assessing, but I’ve made about 4 gal. of apple juice and 40 quarts of applesauce. I was planning to put most of it into apple juice but the juicer I snatched out of the garage sale gave up on me. I’ve got 7 more 5 gal. buckets to go. They will all be applesauce. That’s way too much applesauce for us, but my bees will like it.

The standard practice in the honey industry is to harvest all the honey and feed the bees corn syrup over the winter, but we’re not real crazy about that. We decided to leave the honey this year and supplement only if we needed to. Then I was reading that bees liked rotting fruit. Then I saw a bunch of them on some apples on the ground. I decided to see if they’d like apple juice and they loved it. Since my juicer quit, I think I’ll put ½ applesauce and ½ water in the jars. They ought to like that. The chickens will love the treat when the bees get done with it too!



God Bless You All!