Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from the North Pole, or so it seems! We’ve even got an aspiring Santa here! Our kids can’t wait till Grampa Tom puts on that suit and bounces his little grandbabies on his knee. His beard is almost all white now and the hair is starting to turn.

Only our youngest will be home this year and no grandchildren, but we have all kinds of babies coming next year!

Spence and Tristina recently had an ultra sound that confirmed a little boy is on the way! He will be named Walter Terry Whitson, Walter - after his Daddy, Grampa Tom, and Great Grampa Whitson, all of whom bear the first name of Walter and Terry - his momma’s family name. He is due the end of May.

We also found out that one of our “adopted” kids is due the first week of June. Our little Katherine will finally be a big sister!
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Then, I’m talking to my daughter a few weeks ago and she starts telling me she’s been offered a job running the nursery at the on base church they attend but she turned it down because she wouldn’t be able to lift soon. “Why won’t you be able to lift?” I asked.

“Well when I get the circlage…” she starts to explain.

“What? Circlage? Are you not telling me something?” replies a suspicious grama.

“Oh shoot! I knew I couldn’t do it! And we had such a creative way to announce it at Christmas!”

The kid never could keep a secret. I swore not to tell anyone but her daddy that she was pregnant, but hopefully most of the family has received presents from “Justin, Mary Jo, Olivia and Jellybean”, so I can announce it to everyone else. She is due the first week in July.

Our chickens are still on strike and we sold some sheep for about a third of what we wanted for them, but Grampa Tom got paid big bucks to dig out his parent’s driveway this week! They were victims of some fraud several years ago and the bank that had allowed it, after they had repeatedly asked them not to honor electronic transfers, refunded much of the money they had lost. They graciously shared some of it with us! Thank you Mom and Dad! Course now Grampa thinks he ought to get paid beau coup bucks every time he plows a driveway ;)

Not much about the business this week, but we’ve got so much to be thankful for!

Thank You LORD for:

New life!

Generous people! Thank you to Mom and Dad and my wonderful sis Sharon!

Our wonderful family!

A warm house!

No broken bones in spite of the ice!

Jesse, the child I got to keep. Well, kind of, he did move out and get married, but at least he’s only 10 miles away. He came to our rescue when the water froze up the other day. Thank you Jess! And thank you Devan for sharing him with us!

Oh and for all the beautiful clothes I got in the last couple of weeks! I hate shopping for clothes. I’ve never been too talented on the fashion front. Shopping is for the most part just an exercise in frustration. Give me some pretty hand-me-downs and I’m tickled pink! This last week I visited with both my Daughters-in-love. They are both so talented in this area and they both gave me some beautiful clothes! Thank you Tristina and Devan!

The fact that my computer is working much better since I took it to see its previous owner in New Jersey. Spence didn’t do anything to it. I think it just wanted to see Daddy.

The tree is still standing. Last night it warmed up and the ice from our roof started crashing to the ground. This huge crash at the north end of the trailer woke me up. I knew Grampa was in the TV room where the crash came from. Scared me silly!

And my last, but most important, expression of gratitude today - the fact that You gave up everything to come to earth and bring light, hope and salvation to our darkness! Thank You LORD JESUS!

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND GOD BLESS YOU ALL!

THANKFULNESS

Our egg production is way down. We had been getting 20 – 30 dozen per week, but with this cold weather and snow we were down to 10 dozen this week. Grampa Tom decided he’d better put the water and the feed back inside the hen house. Hopefully that will help.

The lady that was staying at my MIL’s decided to go home so I’ve been spending some much needed time cleaning my house. Our finances are so tight right now, but several years ago I learned a secret that literally opens doors for miracles to occur. When I started doing this, I had done all that I could do and we still didn’t have enough for groceries. People started giving me money. I’d go to church and not be able to get my kids in the car for all the groceries stuffed in it. There were even times when I’d open the cupboards knowing there was nothing in them to feed my family, and I would find food that simply wasn’t there before.

Why was I opening the cupboards? To lay hands on the non-food items in there and thank God for them. That’s the secret! Thanking God for what you have and focusing on that.

With the economy the way it is, I want to challenge you to do what I did then and am doing now. Sit down and make a list of things you are thankful for and every time you are tempted to panic, read it over and add to it. There’s just no better way to calm your nerves and give God a chance to work. Post it here and/or on your blog and challenge others to do the same!

Grama Sue’s Thankful List
(This is so partial!)

Thank You God for:

1. Your great mercy
2. My wonderful husband
3. All the food I have stored in my pantry
4. My comfortable bed
5. My friends who bless and encourage me
6. The wonderful doctor we have in town who made the time to see me when it was time for her to leave
7. My house that is so easy to heat and cool
8. My computer and the internet
9. Warm clothes
10. Crocks and all the varieties of these comfy shoes that are out now!
11. My digital camera
12. My assessing job
13. My sleeping around job
14. My parents who challenged me and held me to high standards
15. The gift of wonderful in-laws who love me
16. Running hot and cold water
17. Cars and roads to drive them on
18. Upholstered furniture … LORD we are so spoiled!
19. My automatic washer and dryer
20. My stove, 4 refrigerators, and my chest freezer
21. My chickens and sheep
22. The chickens and guinea hens that were given to us last week
23. Lighters and matches
24. My huge bathtub
25. My Bible and all the wonderful online tools to help me understand it

OK, I’m going to quit for now. I need to get some lunch and go to town.


God Bless You All!

No More Cock-A-Doodle-Do!

Or at least that’s the plan. We went out at about 10am this morning and rounded up 15 roosters (turned out to be 14 and one hen, but sometimes it is hard to tell). We spent all day processing them. Grampa Tom killed and plucked while I cut and gutted.

Between Grampa and I, it takes us a total of about 20-30 minutes to process a chicken. Not exactly cheap meat, but I’d much rather eat chickens I’ve butchered myself than those processed in a FDA approved packing plant. My kitchen has to be 1000 times cleaner and I’m not known for my housekeeping !

I’ve seen programs about how those places work. In my kitchen, if I accidentally nick the intestines, all the fecal matter is immediately cleaned up, the chicken is doused with bleach and then rinsed with copious amounts of clean water. In one of those big packing plants, all chickens regardless of weather they’ve been contaminated or not are placed in large vats of chlorine and fecal matter laced water to soak up whatever. Yuck! I’m also constantly bleaching and rinsing my sinks and all the equipment throughout the process.

Not to mention the incredible taste difference between slow growing pasture raised chickens and those mutant things that the factory farms grow!

I’ll miss the roosters. Well maybe not at 2 am, but I really enjoy incubating my baby chickens and they are so beautiful! It’s just that with this large of a flock, we can’t afford to feed enough roosters to keep the flock fertile through the winter. We thought about penning up a few roosters and bringing hens to them come spring, but the logistics of it were more than we could handle right now. We can’t even keep the hens where we want them now, much less trying to keep a separate flock! They are always in the garden and all over the place. Maybe next year I can find someone who has fertilized eggs I can incubate.

One thing that amazes me every time I butcher is the difference in lung size between one chicken and another. Here’s a picture of lungs from 4 different chickens.

The other organs of all these chickens were of similar size, yet some of the lungs are huge and I have a hard time finding others! Makes me wonder how some of them breathe! They all appear healthy so why the difference? Maybe one of the youngsters reading this will take up the challenge and find out for me. The smallest lungs on the upper left hand are actually from a bigger chicken than the last ones on the lower left. Interesting.


God Bless You All! ~Grama Sue

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!

September

HA! I bet some of you thought I was never going to post again! September was one booger of a month. We were busy enough with the garden, chicken’s and farmer’s markets. Then in August, we finally got the stuff we needed to finish up the assessing job for this year so I was trying to find some time to stuff that in my schedule. Just as I was about to ask to be cut down to 1 day a week with my sleeping around job so I could get the assessing finished, one of the other girls announced she would be gone for most of the month. So, instead of only one day a week at Maxine’s, I wound up working 3. Around the middle of the month, we found out that an old friend, who had come out to my MIL’s when she was sick before, was wanting to come out again but was afraid to ask. So, I offered to stay with her while Mom was at Maxine’s. I really thought she would wait till the first of the month when Kathy was back. Instead, she came out right away. So, it’s been 3 days at Maxine’s and 4 days at Mom’s. Whew! My life has been a little bit crazy! Kathy is back now and I’ve been on the premises for almost a week now (for those of you who don’t know, Tom’s parents live on the same property as us). Things ought to be slowing down a bit – I hope!

Grampa Tom says he’s done with farmer’s markets for the year. He’ll soon be in the fields helping Lane get the crop out. He’s trying to get things cleaned up a little. We have a huge bon fire going tonight. I’m so thankful that we have markets for our eggs for the winter!

I’m working on a chicken page for our egg business. I’ll be using a mini-blog service called Squiddo. Will give the link when I’ve got it somewhat completed.

RECIPIE

Did another experiment the other day that worked. I browned strips of chicken breasts along with onions, garlic and mushrooms in olive oil. Then I added ranch dressing and broccoli and simmered for about 30 minutes. Mmmmm …. Good!

God Bless You All!