Carpe diem
I don't think I ever
understood the expression "Seize the day" until I moved to the
farm. But now I know that, sometimes, it's worth throwing the list
out the window and going with the flow.
Thursday
morning, we woke to a 14-degree farm, and when I took Lucy for her walk
through the floodplain, nothing even crunched under my feet --- the mud
was solid. The weather was so wet this year that we haven't had a
single day in which we could drive the truck back to our core
homestead, but frozen works too.
Three hours later, the
truck started slipping around as it brought in the last load of straw,
and Mark had to pull it out of the ruts with the ATV. But we'd filled the barn with 33 bales of straw and had cleared out a year's stock-piled garbage (two truckloads full). If Mark had tried to do all of that hauling with the ATV, it would have taken him at least a week.
By the way, Mark's newest heated chicken waterer incarnation was still flowing at 14 degrees. Want to guess how low it'll go?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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So beautiful! Your rear-view mirror one reminds me of the girl on the raisin box, holding another box, etc... I wish you could print postcards of these photos!
How do you keep that much trash stockpiled without the wildlife coming around? We make a dump run about every other month (for a family of seven) but we have the darndest time dealing with bears and such even with the trash being locked in a shed.
Also, it's probably in some obvious spot that I'm missing, but what is the address for your chicken blog?
Mom --- I'll put a few in your next photo order if you want.
Karyn --- We can't take credit for protecting the trash --- it's entirely Lucy's hard work that keeps critters away. (We do lock the trash in the barn, though, so Lucy won't pick through it.)
Our chicken blog is at http://www.avianaquamiser.com/news/. Enjoy!
Does Lucy live outside? Our dog is great about trying to keep critters away but the bears are just nutso for scratching at the door of the shed and they'll go away when the dog first runs out but then come right back - which equals a bad night of sleeping for all involved.
I'm looking forward to reading your chicken book. We just finished our fourth failed attempt at keeping chickens and I'm hoping to figure out how to make this work. I'm so bummed out. This last time it was a bobcat or mountain lion (the neighbors are in dispute) picking off meals between our house and neighbor's.
Thanks again for your blog. I love reading about a homestead that's in a similar setting to our land.