What I do when I'm not blogging...

Spring is such a busy time for us on our farm we decided to stop schooling for the season and start again in the summer when it is too hot to go outside in the middle of the day here in Texas.


Our garden is in and trying to survive the torrential rains of May. We had 14 inches of rain in three weeks.

We ordered more chicks through the mail. I ordered leghorns. These don't look like leghorns to me.

The two roosters are in solitary confinement because of wife abuse. Our little ladies need time to heal from those nasty, nasty fellows.

I spend a lot of time trying to keep all our birds alive and happy. I have a thing for birds. They stink, make messes everywhere, carry lice and die if you look the other way. But I still like them. They have to be completely closed up at night so wild animals don't get them, but the geese peck the ducks and the chickens peck the chicks so we have to keep them all separated.

The daily fresh eggs are worth the work.

My newest venture is ducks... Daisy and Daffy.

And geese. So far they are very sweet. I hope they stay that way.

Our goats dropped so many kids this spring I have lost count. All together we have 54 so far. They keep the weeds and thorns down on our 37 acres. We will eventually sell some for their meat.

One night during a hard rain, a nanny got stranded with her triplets on an island that was quickly shrinking from the rising waters. We found her just in time and rescued the little family. Our neighbors weren't so fortunate and lost all their goats in a flash flood.

This kid's mother had mastitis so we had to feed her every two hours around the clock. The children LOVE the goats. Our visitors usually want to raise goats when they see ours. What they don't see are the times when we have to trim each hoof-all 250 of them, deworm them, delouse them, demite them, pull off ticks the size of grapes, give them antibiotics for various diseases and occasionally watch newborns die for no apparent reason.

By the way, I made yogurt and feta cheese this spring. It came out well but our milk goat went dry so I'll have to wait awhile before I can make some more.

Our cows gave us two more calves and we bought a milk cow at the local auction. She is still a very young heifer. If our bull does his job, we will have milk next year.

One of our young bulls broke its leg a few months back so we killed and butchered the entire thing ourselves. It took a week but the freezer is full of grass fed hormone free beef. It is good, too. My husband comes from a ranching family and my own family hunted and butchered a moose or bear every year when I was a child, so we are not totally new to this sort of thing.

I spend about two or three hours outside every day weeding the garden and flower beds, mowing, taking care of the animals, refilling the bird feeders or taking care of fences. When I'm indoors I find myself looking outside the windows constantly. It is so beautiful in the spring.

I also like to fish : ) We've had several fish fries already. Our pond has a lot of bass and perch.

Due to the heavy rains, the pond almost washed our road out.

We often have visitors. When they come, we give them a hoe and keep on with life. My kids usually commandeer them into being in one of their latest films. Here they are filming a scene from Robin Hood. One day while at the river, they saw an alligator gar go swimming by and grabbed it.

Our friends came from Illinois and introduced us to the wonderful movie SECOND HAND LIONS. The following morning we found our husbands sitting on the front porch with guns and tea looking just like Hub and Garth.

On our last evening together, the children put on a ball for the adults. Wonderful!

Well, that's just a small slice of what's been going on in my life recently on the farm. If you have a blog where you share your farm adventures, please let me know so I can stop by and visit.