The experiment is done. Okay, the pie came out good. It tastes just like pumpkin pie - except it's made with cushaw instead of pumpkin. The crust was even good, which surprised me. However, there was a complete and miserable failure with the meringue. Apparently, you can't make one with a blender. Or else I did something else wrong. I am not sure, but when I get a mixer I'll try that part again. Maybe I'll try the whole thing over again, but it better not ever take so long to make a pie again!

I'm trying something new right now. I'm making a pie from scratch! I know, this is probably old hat for a lot of you, but I've never made a pie completely from scratch before. Starting with the cushaw squash that my neighbor grew. It took me more than an hour to cut up and peel the squash - that was a chore! Then I added too much water to the cut up squash and it took all day yesterday and today to cook it out. But now the squash filling is ready and the pie crust is in the refrigerator getting ready for me to roll out. I made the pie crust too, and I sure hope all this tastes good in the end because I've never heard of someone spending TWO days making ONE pie, LOL. Hopefully, it won't take so long next time because now I know what I did wrong and will do it better next time. There will be a next time if this pie holds at least enough promise to make it worth a next time :)

It's a yucky drizzly rainy day. But I did get out and plant some ginseng seeds before it got too bad. I'll have plenty potted seedlings to sell again this year and enough to plant some out in the woods too.

"Word of the Year
Editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary announced their "word of the year" and this year ... "locavore" is it! Congratulations are in order to Chelsea Green author Jessica Prentice (Full Moon Feast) who is one of four women to coin the phrase (actually they use the word locavore without the second "l" as in location as has been adapted elsewhere in the country and used as localvore) and spark a food movement that continues to grow in popularity as people become more aware of the benefits of supporting their local food systems and reducing the amount of food they eat that is trucked in from hundreds and hundreds of miles away."

Link to Oxford site: http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/locavore/

From Chelsea Green’s e-newsletter 12/07

Shrimp Etouffee. Another great way to use green onions, and also garlic and celery from the garden! This dish was prepared by my husband today. Too bad he's down in Louisiana visiting his daughter and grandaughter and not up here.

Today's project was to move the old iguana cage and turn it into my seed-starting mini-greenhouse. It's very heavy so I had my oldest son help me move it. The ground where it is has a drop of about 1' for every 5', and the cage is about 5' deep, so I had to stack rocks under the back end a foot high to make it semi-level.

It didn't go well the first time. I had almost all the the rocks stacked and needed just one more under the front end to make it look just right. Well, when I lifted the front end to slide the rock under, it started an avalanch on the other end and the whole thing slipped off the little walls I'd so meticulously, but apparently not correctly, stacked. Yes, some mortar would make it a lot stronger, but I don't have time for that today. Ha, but I have time to stack the whole thing over again!

Finally got it mostly finished, at least enough to keep the chickens out of it. Still need to drape the plastic over it and make some shelves inside, but I won't need it until later on anyway. I have a picture of it to post, but the picture loader wasn't working a while ago. I'll try it again in a minute.

My friend Dena will be doing the seed starting, for the most part, but this mini-green house will allow me to hold seedlings and start a few seeds of my own. Without the cage, the chickens wreak havoc. The garden is not right here by the house, so they don't bother that. I do have a little garden by the house, but covering the roots of the plants with feed sacks weighed down with rocks seems to be enough to keep them from dying. But last season the chickens were still very small. This year they might be ravenous for that to work. We'll see.

Just wanted to post this recent picture of Comanche :) He's such a sweetie! I can't wait to begin riding him, but he's only a yearling right now. This has nothing to do with herbs, or gardening, or writing, but horses are my first great passion and I couldn't resist putting his pic up here for ya'll to see.

Whooo-hoooo! Today I got the news that my little grandbaby Lillie will get to go home for the first time tomorrow. She is 6 weeks old and hasn't been home yet. Her mom is so happy to finally be able to have her home and get a schedule of normalcy to both of their lives. Lillie was born with CF and was having trouble gaining weight. Now she is taking some pancreatic enzymes and hopefully all will be well from now on.

I haven't been very good at making regular blog entries, I know. But I have been writing a lot in other places, LOL. Does that count? I need to work on my websites, but my program isn't working (FrontPage) because my computer crashed and now it won't reload. I'm not good enough at HTML to make many changes without the WYSIWYG type of program and I just don't have time to learn it right now. Maybe Santa will bring me a new computer for christmas and all the stuff I need will be already loaded onto it...

Corn Bread Recipe

This recipe came about quite by accident, it was an experiment that turned out really good! It is true what they say about necessity being the mother of invention :) After I had all the flour, eggs, and other ingredients in the bowl, I discovered that my cornmeal was rancid. The only other thing I had to use was the yellow grits. This cornbread makes a nice large-crumb cake style cornbread. I like mine on the sweet side, but if you don't like yours so sweet, use less sugar. It is delicious with red beans and rice!!

2 cups coarse ground yellow grits (preferably from pawpaw's gristmill)
2 cups self rising flour
1 heaping tsp baking powder
1 level tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
3 eggs (preferably nice, dark yellow yolked ones from the hens outside)
enough milk to make a runny batter

Put all the ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Heat the stove to 350, oil a cast iron skillet, with enough oil to have a little extra to rise up around the batter when you pour it in, and let it get hot in the oven while you mix the cornbread ingredients. I don't have a mixer, so I just stir till all clumps are broken up and the eggs are well blended.

Pour the batter into the hot skillet and bake until golden brown and the sides are pulling away from the skillet. This makes a fairly dense cornbread, so the test method of inserting a knife might not work so well.

My husband had two boxes of Jiffy mix out waiting for the failure of this recipe, haha, but we didn't need them.

Enjoy!

This weekend I harvested the short row of green onions I had planted late this summer. My neighbor laughed because I was planting onions at this time of year, but these are not bulbing onions and they grew plenty enough for what I needed. You can use the whole onion, including the bottoms, but I cut them off at about 3" so I can replant the bottoms. This herb is essential, it is the essence, of cajun cooking! I know the hispanics use it in their dishes, too, so I can never have enough of it. It is delicious added fresh on top of chili and mexican rice, and it is delicious added fresh on top of a steaming bowl of chicken and sausage gumbo. It is delicious cooked in with crawfish stew or rabbit sauce picante, with a fresh handful added right before pulling off the fire. I just can't cook good food without them!

And I have more to say about these green onions, lol. These are special because they came from my grandpa's garden. He gave me the bulbs and now they've all divided several times over and I can plant many times more next year than I planted this year. I'll sell them at the farmer's market and through my little CSA, and I'll offer an incentive to return the bottoms to me so I can plant them again. So this is an heirloom plant and it's one I dearly love for many reasons.

Wild and wild-simulated Ginseng sold for $805/lb last weekend! For those of you who would like to learn how to plant ginseng (wild-simulated) in your own woods, I'm planning a workshop out here at our property. Hunting season has interfered with the November planning. I believe it is no longer gun season on Dec. 1, though, and that's the date I'm aiming for now.

Cost will be $25/person. All materials needed will be supplied, but we'll have to take turns with the rakes and seeder. If you have a garden rake you'd like to bring, you're welcome to do so. I'll buy a few more if enough people register to warrant doing so.

Some things to keep in mind. It's a fairly good/hard hike out to the planting/growing site, so wear appropriate shoes. The hike itself is short, but it's steep until we reach the location. Bring a bag lunch and water, and make sure to bring a sack to pack out your trash. Smoking is allowed if you pack out your butts (a friend of mine who smokes has a cute little case that looks like a pocket watch, made just for this. A foil bag will work if you don't have the little gadget, though). Tick season is pretty much over, but if you're very sensitive to insect bites, make sure to bring spray. The ticks can be awful when a warm spell happens.

I have dogs, but will tie them before leaving the house, so dogs are welcome if you don't mind tying them at the horse trailer or your vehicle while we're in the woods.

The ginseng seedlings for 2008 will be ready for sale beginning in April until it gets too hot to safely transplant them. If you pick them up at the farmer's market, bare-root seedlings are $2/ea for quantities <50. For 50 or more they are $1/ea. If you will want more than a few, it is a good idea to book them now because that way I can make sure to plant enough. They always sell out by the time it gets hot.

This morning I went outside before daylight because the dogs were barking up a storm. Badger, the great pyr, was really sounding upset, barking with more aggression than usual. Bobbie Sue, who never gets right into the middle of things, was on the sidelines cheering him on. Once they realized I was out there with them, the turned up the heat even more. Whatever it was sounded large, lots of crashing noises out there behind the shed. I yelled for one of the kids to bring me a flashlight. My youngest yelled back "What about the shotgun?!", but I just wanted the light, not the gun. I did think it might be a bear, since we do have lots of those around. but they don't normally come that close to the house. Finally, the light was delivered and I shined it out there. It was a coon, high on top of a huge rose bramble, and Badger was in the bramble with it, furiously trying to reach it but just getting caught up in the thorns the more he tried. That was the source of the loud noise, just Badger in the bramble. The coon saw his opportunity for escape and made a run for it, and the dogs followed him down into the gully. They came back to the house soon, checking to see if I was pleased, which I was. He does a really good job of keeping the chickens safe, but we did lose one a few weeks ago and I'm figuring it was to that coon. I hope he won't keep trying to come back for second helpings. The chickens are free range, but they go into a house at night. Other critters live in the gully, a fox and a weasel, and now I guess the coon too. I don't try to clear all the woods and mountains of critters, that's their space. But near the house and garden is our space and they need to steer clear of it. That's what Badger does, he enforces the "Green Zone" around our home. And Bobbie Sue does a good job of helping him. Sometimes she's the first one to sound the alarm and Badger takes it from there. She doesn't like direct confrontations. Some people couldn't sleep with all the barking they do at night. But it actually doesn't bother me. When I don't hear them barking I will wake up and wonder what's wrong, or if they fell asleep at the post. Then I have to get out of bed and check. Usually, though, it's just a calm night and they don't see anything worth barking at.

The other day my sister, Jennifer, called me and she said that a pelican had eaten all the goldfish in their pond! One of them that went missing was a pretty old fish that had survived all sorts of mishaps, so what a shame that some mis-guided pelican found her pond and did him in. They don't really live near the water, so it was pretty odd for him to even be out her way. She and her husband Brad have also purchased some land in Arkansas, over near Yellville. One day I'll have to do an herbwalk over at her place because the soil composition is different and there are different plants there than what is at my house. In particular they have lots more dogwood and it's really beautiful in spring when they're all in bloom.

Today I went hiking in the woods with my friend Dena, looking for ginseng. There are a few wild plants scattered around out there and sometimes I can look all day and not find them. Today I was lucky and found several, but they were all small. The old ones are already retired for the year or dormant or gone. We also found some slippery elm and gathered a little bark for each of

us. The picture is of dena stripping some slippery elm bark. None of the other pictures I took today came out very good and so that was disappointing.

Last night I went to the Benton county Master Gardener's meeting. It was a delightful way to spend my evening! Before the meeting we toured the exhibit hosted at the Rogers Historical Museum - The Healing Power of Plants, a traveling exhibition from the University of Colorado Museum. That in itself was awesome and without having been invited to the meeting I would have otherwise never known it was going to be so close and would have missed the opportunity to view it - thank you Chari! Afterwards, Chari Cross presented an excellent slide show program on common medicinal plants and their uses, featuring plants we can grow right here in our own Arkansas gardens. I brought some of the ginseng seeds from my planting stock and some goldenseal rhizomes to sell after the meeting. I met lots of wonderful gardeners and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Yesterday we got the floor seals put up on the house. Today Gary bought some boards to go on and finish the porch so we will have somewhere to sit and rest while we work on the rest of it. I am sooooo looking forward to a real house for a change!! The old house we're in has been .... er ... a challenge, to say the least.

Also yesterday I checked on my garden and saw that the horses had broken in and trampled much of it and something ate all the peas down to the ground - again. So today I reworked the turnip bed and replanted and put up a cage over just that row and put protection around the peas. It won't stop mice or rats, but it should handle just about anything else. Everything concerning my garden is always feeling like one step forward and two steps back. I can't ever seem to get ahead and stay ahead!

I just visited the website of some herb-growing friends of mine, Dave and Floralyn Perry over in the Missouri Ozarks. You should definitely go have a look and plan a get-a-way at their new lodge: http://grapevinehollow.0catch.com/dave1.html , it's very beautiful! They also grow ginseng and medicinal herbs. I haven't been able to go see it yet, but I sure hope to do so soon.

This morning we saw a beaver at the bridge on our way out to school. I love beavers! Most folks out here do not like them, though - they don't like the way their dams cause the water to back up in their hay fields. Then when they take the tractor out to cut hay, it sinks them down to the axles... at least that's why my neighbor up the road doesn't like them. So I told ol' Mr. Beaver to head on over to our creek if anyone out here gives him trouble. I'd love to have my creek backed up, haha. It would create a great habitat for some skunk cabbage that I've been wanting to grow. Skunk cabbage is one of the greatest antispasmodic roots in the herb world, but the plant is endangered or rare in some areas. I've never found any out here, but it is supposed to be here, so maybe it is rare here, too. And if Mr. Beaver is really eager, it might make a good swimming hole, too.

Today I had the pleasure of meeting a fellow Ozark herbalist, Kristena :) We met first over the internet a while back but today we met in person and walked around looking at "weeds" at the Compton Botanical Gardens in Bentonville. Her daughter Olivia joined us. You might like to check out Kristena's website, and her blog too.

We saw a few plants that we stopped to pay attention to, but this garden is a great resource for hurried folks; I like to eat lunch here and it helps to break my day if it's been stressful at work. One of the plants I was most excited to see is boneset. I've been searching all over our own land for this one, and it should be there, but I haven't found it. Another one was perilla, which I do have in abundance, but have never really studied it to get to know it better. I do know that it stains my fingers a pretty brown, so if you are interested in natural dyes, this might be a good one. And we saw what I believe to be Lady's Thumb - click on the link to go to a website to read up on it. There was a different name tag near this plant, but I believe the plant it identified was no longer there, or else I am mistaken about the identity.

Planted more peas and carrots, cabbage and turnips yesterday. My dad brought his "arrowhead digger" up with him and while he's here I'm using it to till up some new garden. My husband got his bulldozer fixed, so site prep was easy between the two of them. Now to fence it in and get it growing! I should have enough room now to grow more than enough vegetables to supply my CSA and our own household. The trick is now to make the time to get the 4-year rotation plan together and get started :) I'll probably go on and get it certified now, since the entire bench will be ready this year. Rather than "certified organic", I'll do "Certified Naturally Grown". CNG is the new grassroots organic movement, and it's tailored for small growers and direct-marketing farmers. They require growers to follow the same stringent rules as "organic" but it is not so influenced by the big ag business. I think it is less likely to become corrupt (at least until big ag wants to use this name, too).

A critter has been eating my sugar snap peas, and some turnips, and the sweet potatoes. the poor little seedlings weren't but a couple inches tall. about half of the peas are gone and only a few turnips are gone. but ALL of the sweet potatoes are gone, at least the leaves have all been eaten. I'm not sure they can continue to grow without leaves, but I haven't given up all hope on them yet. It is becoming clear that I need a good fence if I plan to come close to substinence gardening, not to mention market farming!

As with almost everything else I need these days, money is an issue. I can't buy fencing materials until I get my Christmas bonus, and there's a big "if" about whether we will even be getting bonuses this year. If we don't land the contract we need, even whether I have a job or not next year is up in the air. I'm really not worried about not having the job, I think I can get another one fairly quickly if I want to - but I will have to learn other ways to do things that don't involve buying everything I need. As for the critters, I am sure that my sons will be happy to sit out one evening to see who's coming to dinner and turn the tables on it. LOL. Hopefully it is something good to eat, like a rabbit. I've never tried groundhog before, but maybe I will soon. How did people garden before fences were available? If I plant more, will there be more predation or is there a point where volume of produce will exceed predation by enough to supply my own household and a few others with food?

On another subject, the pediatrician called today and they still want my son to see a specialist. His pain was gone, but yesterday it was back although the Aleve aleviated it this time quickly and he didn't need additional pain medication. The fact that it was back is worrisome, though, and it completely blows my theory for what happened out of the water.

Here are some pictures from a little hike I took right before dark today:

oh boy, moving the propane tank turned out to be quite a chore! but we did get it done and i have pictures to prove it :)

getting ready:

trying to decide exactly how we'll do this:
Plow-reining down the driveway backwards was harder than it looks! (1/2 mile and HILLY)
Too far left on the pads:
Reposition the chains and get ready to pull it backwards a little:

All done, FINALLY!

It's a beautiful day today in the Ozarks! It was around 50*F when I got up this morning (late because I was out til around 1:30 taxi-ing my daughter and her friends around) and now at 1:45 p.m. it is still only about 70*F. Wonderful weather for working outside. We're getting ready to move the propane tank down to the final resting place near where we're building our new house. I'll try to get pictures of us hauling this 1000 gallon tank with the bulldozer and me holding it in the right alignment by walking before it with a rope. Or maybe we'll load it on the trailer and pull it up to the house. I don't know yet how we're going to do it, but we'll get it done somehow today. It will be nice to start using this huge tank rather than the small ones we've been using. The only thing we use propane for is the hot water heater right now, but eventually I will have a gas stove and oven, maybe a clothes dryer too. Right now all those things are electric and I hate being dependent upon the electricity especially in the winter when the power is likely to go out during an ice storm. At least with the propane, as long as the tank is full, we will always have the stove to use and with our gravity feed water system we will always have running water. When the kids are all grown and moved out, I may just drop the electricity all together. I rarely watch TV and solar can power a few lights and the computer fairly easily.

Did you know that those blue-belly lizards, otherwise known as Western Fence Lizards, have a protein in their blood that deactivates Lyme disease? When the ticks are very small their main food source is our cute little blue belly lizard. When the baby tick bites the blue belly they get a dose of the protein from the blue belly's blood and if the tick had the lyme-causing bacteria, then they will no longer be carriers of that disease! We have lots of blue bellies out at our place and every time I see one I am so grateful for them. Here are a couple links to sites that talk about this in more scientific terms if you are interested:

http://www.anapsid.org/lyme/sceloporus.html

http://www.downtowntomatoes.com/archives/2005/11/lyme_disease_an_1.html

We have a lot of ticks and I'm always afraid that the kids will be bitten by one that has a disease. Every day we check for ticks before taking a shower, but it seems that the longer we live here, the less likely we are to be bitten. I've noticed this with my horses, too. The horse we brought up here with us, Snippy, was plagued by ticks the first year here. The horse we bought from our neighbor didn't seem to get so many. This year, Snippy only got about as many as the native horse, so maybe we also are building a deterrent-smell or taste to them too, lol.

uh-oh. I just found out that I have to give a presentation to a client that's walking through the lab in a few minutes. you cannot begin to imagine the amount of dread i feel about this! it doesn't matter that all i've lived and breathed for the last 6 months is ICP-MS (at least at work) - i am TERRIBLE at explaining or talking in public! please say a prayer, or hold me in your thoughts, or do SOMETHING to help me through this, lol!

10:11 same day

well, the results were all negative - whooo-hooo! so apparently all this pain was just leftovers from a virus his immune system went overboard in fighting. but just to be on the safe side, i think i'll leave Garrison out of the bamboo harvests in the future.

9-12-07 (just in case Blogger gets it wrong again, it's a habit now)

Not too much to write about today. We should find out whether Garrison has a tick disease or whether his hip has been hurting because an infection settled there, at least. We had to bring him to the emergency room last Thursday morning because he was hurting so badly he couldn't even sit up in the bed. This is a child who did not shed a tear when he broke his arm last year, so I know the pain must be intense. The only other thing I think it could be is that he's allergic to that bamboo we harvested last monday - he rode back to the road in the truck on top of the pile, and he also had a rash by Monday night. But the ER team didn't seem to think much of the idea.

In the garden we have planted some seeds: english peas, sugar snap peas, turnips, spinach, lettuce, carrots, and beets. Last time I looked, the carrots were well up and the turnips were all looking strong. Oh, I also planted some italian leaf cabbage, something new that I've never tried before. It's supposed to be really good and tasty for soups and stews.

I made a pretty little fence with the bamboo and now I need more of it! I'll have to post a picture later.

9-4-07

I had a great Labor Day weekend, but it wasn't labor free, lol. Saturday we poured the concrete footing on the chicken house and barbequed, and harvested big bamboo from a nice lady who lives down the street from our county road. Sunday after church I made my husband come help me harvest river cane to fill in the fence I started Saturday afternoon with the big bamboo. I love bamboo and wish I had plenty of my own growing here so I didn't have to gather it from other people's houses, but both persons who gave me the canes over the weekend said that I could get some started from theirs. The river cane grows like wildfire, so I'll have some of that quick, but the big bamboo takes a while to get going. In 10-20 years, I'll have plenty, lol. I hope I'm still able to be active in my 60's!!

8-28-07 Tuesday

It has been a long time since I posted. My good friend's husband died recently and that was sad. It has been so hot outside for the few weeks earlier that we haven't done much more on our house building, but now it is cooling (only 90 and not 100, lol) and we can get started again. Also, my husband is waiting on a job to start and he doesn't want to be in the middle of framing when they call him.

One good thing to talk about lately, though. I am now the owner of a 2008 Scion xD and I love it! It's funny that the two mechanical things I spend most of my time with (Agilent 7500ce ICP-MS and the car) are both made in Japan. I hope my car embodies the excellent workmanship that the instrument at work displays!

Not much going on in the gardens. It's been so dry and hot that the first attempt to start fall seeds failed. Neither the seeds in the ground nor the ones in pots lived for very long. But we got 1/2" of rain Friday ( I guess because the new car was being washed and fueled up for me to take home) and Saturday I planted out some carrot seeds.

7-25-07

We've been very busy working on the house. The foundation is completely done and this week Gary's been working on the pylons for the porch supports. The next phase will be my project- building the rock wall around the foundation and a retaining wall under the porch behind the supports. Here's a picture of what we expect the house to resemble when we're done. This is looking at it from the east, coming up the driveway which will go on around the back of the house and back down to the front. There won't be any windows in the back, just the door, because that's the north side and there's no sense in battling cold drafts for nothing. The front porch will be large enough to use as an outdoor room and the view will be awesome to the east and west and over to the valley where the horses like to graze most.

(blogger is still not dating my posts right: today is june 26, 2007)
i've decided i will be lazy in this post and not capitalize. the garden is growing, but pretty slowly. The pole beans have just started to climb and the roma tomato bush is loaded. i get about a handful of strawberries every few days, but i'm sharing them with something who lives near my garden... haven't figured out just who that might be yet, though. i've started cutting greenery growing in the vicinity to mulch my ground with, but it's going to take me a little while to get all of it covered heavy enough to discourage the grasses and weeds from growing. i don't know the name of the weed i'm cutting, but it has a strong green smell, has no flowers and doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that will cause a problem by rooting wherever i lay it. right now my sweet potatoe row is covered with it, and it seems to be a good camoflouage because the first few that i didn't cover got eaten and the rest that were covered were left undisturbed. i've been using my little hand sickle to cut the weeds and i love that tool! i grab a handful and cut it off at the ground. works great.



i guess i'll show a picture of me. this might be the only time you'll get to see a picture of me, as i don't take them that often and do not feel very photogenic, lol.

Look what I found in my garden Sunday! I've been searching since we moved here and had all but given up on the notion of finding arrowheads on our place, and then this one popped up while putting in some okra transplants.

Last week's market was not as lucrative as the first one, but I did get to talk to some of the old-timers who know a lot about ginseng. Hopefully this weekend will be a good one for sales.

Today is 6-9-07 (in case Blogger is still not dating my posts right). It was a great first Kingston Farmer's Market today! We had 4 vendors, plus Wendy at the market info table and we all sold most of what we brought. I sold out in 2 hours of my ginseng seedlings, so i think i have hit on a good market item for now. We'll see what happens over the average. None of us but Charlie had produce, as our gardens are still trying to get going. The late freeze in April hurt most of us in that way. But still, for a town population of 400 or so, we did real good for our first market :)

My booth was shameful with last minute thrown together signage, but by next weekend i hope to have some decent signs and information to give out with the plants.

At my "real" job, my new instrument is kicking butt! I cannot use the data from it yet because i'm not qualified by the state of Arkansas on it yet, but I ran all the work that would normally take me a week with my furnace- in ONE HOUR. That just blows my mind, lol.

6-4-07

whoo-hooo! i found my packets of prescott fond blanc AND the french charentais melon seeds! i'm not sure what the difference between these two are, as i was under the impression that the prescott was a charentais melon, but i've started seeds of both and hopefully i will get to find the answer to that question sometime late this summer :)

over the weekend i did get a lot done. saturday morning was spent at the doctor's office waiting room, waiting to get my son worked in for a poison ivy shot. poor thing had a severe case of poison ivy rash and it was getting worse not better and by saturday morning he was ready for a shot. that's when you know a kid has reached his tolerance of misery - when a shot is considered a GOOD thing, lol. he has learned how to work the tiller and last weekend he tilled a few rows up to plant his corn and beans. lots of roots kept getting stuck in the tines and he kept pulling them out. apparently, the roots were poison ivy :( but he got a good garden in before the rash set in, and he thinks it was worth it. he is 10 years old and the doctor was pleased to hear about his interest in gardening. my oldest son likes to garden, too, but he only plants for the deer these days. i hope one day he'll get back to growing food for people.

so i didn't get much garden work done on saturday. on sunday morning as soon as i got out of bed and had coffee, i went up the mountain to look for some goldenseal roots for a friend. now, this is not the right time of year for harvesting roots, but if a person needs a certain herb for a certain need and you have to have it then, then any time of year will do. sometimes it's better than not getting it at all. it's a really hard hike to the goldenseal, about 300' straight up behind the house, and then it's all level to the west side using the logging road. once i make it to the water tank, it's real nice up there, but i sure wish i could hike it without getting winded and sore. i guess i need to do it more often, don't I? it was cool and breezy, and i always love being up there. i did get full of ticks, though.

after the hike i came back down and got to work on my garden. lots of seeds to start (yeah! melons!) and another trellis to make. this time i recruited my oldest son to cut the saplings for me, so building this trellis went a lot quicker than the bean trellis. my daughter doesn't like to hang out in the garden much, but she does like to ride her horse. i might have to put those two to work in the garden...she can get her horse to run errands or something - i'm always having to send one of the kids to the house for water or a hat.

it's really May 29, 2007 - blogger is STILL not dating right! This is looking west over the garden by the house. Eventually I want to have the whole hillside there terraced. It's pretty rough right now, but I can see there's promise of a beautiful "ozark tuscany", lol. You can't see the plants in the picture good, but there's tomatoes on the top row, and bell peppers, and on the second row is more peppers and some squash, and my favorite is the Prescott Fond Blanc melon. I had a whole pack of pretty old seeds and only managed to get one to sprout - so hopefully I can save some seeds from this melon and have some more next year. I hope it lives up to its reputation of being so fragrant and sweet that it stops motorists in france who smell it in the fields as they pass on the highway!

Here's our upper garden. The picture makes the trellis look much smaller than it really is, but it's high enough that i can walk under. Obviously, I didn't get my fence made, or even started, but I DID get the bean trellis done! there are strawberries in the foreground and yellow onions in the two rows before the beans. the beans are there, you just can't see them, lol. they're barely breaking out of the ground right now. in the foreground that you can't see is another row with a paste tomatoe, yellow squash, and more strawberries.

Today I found two overgrown Cherokee Purple tomato plants at the nursery near where I work and got them for half price. One even has tomatoes on it already.

5-23-07 (blogger still not dating right)
This weekend I am going to try and begin a fence around my front garden plot. Lets' hope this project turns out better than previous fencing projects! I'm off work Monday, so maybe I'll have a little time to actually get it started. The idea is to make a rustic stick fence. NOT rustic like my other one, which actually elicits laughter from some folks, but rustic in an attractive sense. We'll see. I fought the other one trying to make it look like my imagination wanted it to look, but it just wouldn't work. I have a new idea to try this time.

5-22-07 (Blogger isn't updating the dates properly)

Last weekend was very good gardening weather. I have almost everything planted that I had started, except for a few things i started as seeds over the weekend. It's really almost too late to start seeds, but I figured I'd try anyway. If they don't produce in time, well too bad. But if they do, then so much the better! Here's what all I have in the garden this year:

Tomatoes (beefstake, mortgage lifter, roma, mr. stripey, cherry, and some unknown variety of seeds that i had saved from last year)
Celery (leaf and stalk types)
Bell Peppers (yellow, red, orange, purple and green)
yellow squash
zucchini
snap beans (bush and pole)
sunflowers
okra (texas longhorn)
melons (one lonely little prescott fond blanc seedling, and seeds started for iroquois cantelope)
strawberries (everbearing, kent, and sparkle varieties)
yellow onions
asparagus (first year, no harvest)
sweet basil

If most of these do well, I should have lots of fresh food to eat and sell this year at market.

ha, well, i've almost let another 1/2 month go by without a post. but i just don't have a whole lot to talk about these days i guess!

Oh my goodness, how could a whole month have passed without even one entry?!! Well, I've been busy. My garden is finally growing and my little horse is growing, too. Here's a picture from the weekend from my son, Zack's, game camera. This was one of 3 bears caught on camera this weekend, raiding his deer corn feeder. I hope they stay up there on the mountain and don't start coming down to the house!

I've put our household on a budge - every dollar has a budget department. So, I took the kids grocery shopping with me the other day. I told them about the budget and informed them that we only had $100 to spend for a week's supply of groceries. They were also told that we were not going to buy anything processed or prepared, all of it had to be ingredients for meals. My optimism at the success of this experiment was low, I am sad to say. We are accustomed to eating lots of frozen or boxed foods - but that is changing. I am so proud to admit that the kids did great - the ticket came in at $66 and we've enjoyed a delicious home-cooked meal each evening so far this week!! The first night was roast pork and Tuesday night Gabrielle cooked garlic chicken and tortalini (that doesn't looked spelled right, i know). Not sure what we're having tonight though, might be just egg sandwiches if i get home too late from work. When the garden starts producing, we'll have even more good food for the table.

it was 30*F again this morning here. i'm starting all of my seeds over again. the peaches and pears won't make this year i'm sure and the tomatoes i had set out are mush. it's going to be a late garden, that's for sure. oh, and the strawberries probably won't make either- frost got the flowers last week and again this morning :(

i went to get my little horse to bring him home yesterday. comanche is the shyest horse in the bunch. almost took a rodeo to catch him yesterday, had to make gary and kids all leave because they were making matters worse and it was making me irritated, too. after they left i got the halter on him halfway, but it was enough to catch him. it was hard because the other two fillies and the pregnant mare wouldn't leave us alone and i couldn't get him separated. once caught he was VERY well behaved, leads wonderfully. had to slow him down a few times because i like him to walk either right beside or right behind but not in front. i can't wait to work more with him, he learns quickly and without much effort :) i was really impressed with how trusting he is, like how he went through the water and past the big scarey things, even though he was afraid, he did it for me without a lot of prompting. gosh, i love that horse already. but he looks TERRIBLE - very wooly and skinny. lots of work to do there ;)

we put the biddies outside last night for the first time. it was a little chilly, but they were in a doghouse stuffed with hay inside the root cellar with the other chickens. for now, our chickens are roosting in the old root cellar. haha, one day i will put a new roof on it (right now there is only a few sheets of tin to keep the rain off the roosting chickens) and install a real gravel floor and ferrocement roof with air drainage. then i will use it like a root cellar is SUPPOSED to be used, to store fruit and veggies from the garden - NOT as a chicken house!

I wonder when Spring will return? Or will we just go straight into summer when all this nasty cold weather is done? My tomatoes and bell peppers are going to be soooo late this year. The only thing doing well in my garden are the new strawberries I put in last month and the turnips, lettuce, radishes, and spinach. The arugula seems to be doing okay, too. It was sleeting this afternoon, though, so no telling how it will all look in the morning!

I need to put my biddies outside, they're getting too big for their box and think they need to roost on the edge of it now, like big grownup chickens. The problem is, they put the tail end out over the outside of the box!

The first time I tried to Publish that last post, it didn't - but the error message was different, so I tried again and voila'! It worked! It's been so frustrating to type in a nice long post and then not be able to publish it, so I'd lost some of the enthusiasm. I'll try to be better at it now :)

The weather has really set back my garden. Saturday night it was 17 when I checked at one point. I think the strawberries are okay, but I'm not sure yet about the peaches. It will take a few days of normal temps to see what's what.

I haven't posted much here lately because every time I try, something is wrong with blogger and it won't let me. It just got to be too frustrating. I hope this time it goes smoothly, since I cleared all my records before beginning. We'll see. If it works, I'll try to post more regularly in the future.

This morning I heard the sure sound of spring: whipoorwill calls! When we first moved here I hated those birds because they would keep me up all night long with that incessant noise they make. But after the absence of their calls for the past several months, I find that I am happy to hear them return. I'm not sure if they actually went anywhere, but they quit making noise for a while at least.

We're running a little slow right now at work (which is unusual) so I am taking the opportunity to work on some personal projects. My co-worker and I have brought in our garden soil and our drinking water. I have two springs that we use for our water source, so I brought in samples of both of those. It's interesting to see the results from our own soils and waters, after analyzing so many other people and business's samples. It's something we like to do at least once a year. This year, both my water and my soil are looking better.

The cabinet maker is here installing formica right now for my new ICP room, and the fumes are about to render me senseless - I don't know how the guy can stay in that room with the door closed! If the fumes are so strong out here, imagine how strong they must be in that small 500 sq.ft. room!

I've been trying to post and keep trying, but I kept getting an error and my post wouldn't get posted! Finally today I found out why - you have to clear your computer's cache and cookies every so often. That did the trick apparently and now I'm back to being able to post.

Spring is really in full swing here now. The redbuds are open, the forsythia is still strong, and the dogwoods are just beginning to unfurl their flowers. I planted out some strawberries over the weekend and I am so looking forward to tasting some of the goodness from that garden this year. I should get some black raspberries and hopefully my peaches and pears will also make fruit this year. Tomatoes and bell peppers are a staple in my garden, but it's a little early yet for that. I have started seeds anyway, though, and put out two tomatoe plants that I got from Wal-Mart the other day. I would have bought the plants from our local nursery, Richlands, but she didn't have any. So from her I bought cauliflower and broccoli, lettuce and spinach, and a few herbs. Oh, and I started some melon seeds: Prescott Fond Blanc and Charentais - both new varieties to my garden and I can't wait to taste them! As you can tell, I really love fruit. But I also love things like glazed turnips and white gravy with biscuits with eggs, so I'm also pulling for the turnips to make good :)

Comanche is losing his winter fur and now his black is really looking nice. I hate it when they have the old winter hair and black isn't really black anymore, but a copper-black. He was gelded last weekend, so I'm keeping him at Frank's corral down at the mule farm until he's healed enough to bring home. I hope he and snippy become good buddies and that neither one tries to hurt the other. I think snippy might be getting lonely enough to be grateful for a buddy now. Since Spanky first died, he hasn't acted too lonely. I have been surprised.

whew! i've been sick lately with whatever it was that the kids both caught a couple weeks ago. it's a pretty bad upper respiratory/sinus infection sort of thing. i've been taking a fresh goldenseal tincture and that seems to be doing a good job on it, though. the kids both have been taking antibiotics, but by the time i could actually get in to SEE a doctor, i was feeling much better already. so i'm glad i didn't waste my time or my money.

it is really looking like springtime around here now. the forsythia is in full bloom everywhere (everywhere but my house, since i don't have any). the redbuds are just beginning to bud out, the spicebush is blooming, the hyacinths are blooming - don't know when they started, i just noticed them today, but they look like they've been in for at least a few days now. the tulips are not blooming yet, but they're growing.

something spooked snippy bad today. he came running at full gallop to the house from across the creek and kept on running all the way down to the gate, which is close to 1/2 mile from where he started, ran through the gate (which was open because we had just come through and i was getting ready to go back down to visit with comanche) and kept running til he got to the Felkin's creek bridge. he stopped there because all the mares in the pasture came running toward him to see what the heck was going on. i have never seen a horse spooked that bad, so i am thinking that maybe the mountain lion or a bear came out of the woods over there by where he was grazing, intending to see about digging on spanky's grave maybe. something keeps trying to dig him up and gary keeps having to go cover him up more every day. why we didn't think of it earlier, i don't know, but zack thought of it today - he put the game camera over there tonight so we can see what is trying to dig him up. i hope it's not my own dogs :(

Today I rode Snippy! I haven't saddled up a horse and ridden in a long time, even though we've been having horses for years now. All of my life I wanted a horse and while I was a kid, my parents would never get one. When my own daughter started wanting one, I decided to get one, but by that time I was so busy with work that I never had time to ride. I still love horses though, and decided I would start riding again now, especially since I'm getting a new yearling next week. Snippy needs a companion since we lost Spanky. He's very lonely and it is not good to try and keep only one horse. Comanche is a black and white paint, half Missouri Foxtrotter and half Spotted Saddle Horse. I've known him since he was born and hoped he could be mine. I enjoyed riding so much today. It makes me sad that I'm so much older now and not nearly as fit as I used to be, but maybe if I ride a little each day or a little at least each week, soon I will be in shape enough to ride better and longer. I'm posting a picture of Comanche so you can see the new baby.

For some reason, blogger is filing this post out of order. It should be listed AFTER the post about Comanche, which is above this one in my browswer.

I got a lot of gardening done over the weekend. Planted peas, carrots, mustard greens, turnips and radishes. In the cold frame I started tomatoes, bell peppers, echinacea, and some other things, but I forgot what all. Monday, the kids were both sick so I kept them out of school and brought them to the doctor, but before that we worked in the garden some more. Gabrielle transplanted 3 raspberry canes that had rooted, over to the trellis I had waiting on them. I love it when the kids help me in the garden, it makes me feel like everything will always be alright. It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't know what I mean, so if you've experienced this feeling and have a better explanation for it, let me know, haha.

well. not good news. spanky died. i'm too sad over it to post more right now, and i'm also at work and have a lot to do. needless to say, the kids got on the bus crying and i went to work crying, too.

OMG, it is so hard to lose a horse, it feels like a family member has died!

For the last several days I've been dealing with a horse crisis. My 3 yr old gelding came very near death, and may still not be far away from that end. It all started a week or two ago when we took in a friend's horse to board while they were away on a trip. She was a mare and very very bossy toward my geldings. She took an outright disliking to the younger one and a strong liking for the older one, keeping the younger one away and forcing him away from his hay and feed. I didn't know she was also not letting him near them in the pasture or allowing him to eat in peace some distance away. It wasn't until Saturday that I got a good look at him, because I work every day during the week and don't get home during daylight at this time of year. He looked awful! So, that evening I fed him by himself and penned the other two up so they'd leave him alone. Another thing that was also going on during this time period, was that my husband was trimming the huge old oak tree in the front yard and the limbs were on the ground. The younger gelding was eating the buds off of the limbs like they were candy and I didn't think much about it at the time, other than noting how much he liked them. Well, apparently oak buds are toxic to horses if eaten in large quantities. A horse with normal access to feed and pasture will not eat huge amounts, but Spanky wasn't being given normal access because the mare was bullying him so much. By Sunday Spanky wasn't moving much and was very depressed, head hanging and not wanting to eat. At that time I still hadn't thought about the oak buds and just figured it was depression because of the other horse bullying him and not letting him near his best buddy. Monday we brought the mare back to her own pasture at her own house, since the owners were back. Spanky perked up a little at seeing her leave, but he still wasn't eating or moving or acting normally. The idea that he might have eaten the oak buds entered my mind by then and I watched him more closely, or as closely as I could when I'm not home most of the day. He would drink water if you held it in a bucket for him and he'd nibble at the hay but not really eat enough. On tuesday he started bleeding from the nostrils a little, not gushing nor even as much as a nosebleed in a person, but it was bright red blood and it was alarming, especially in light of how far down his condition had gotten. So I rushed home from work and stopped by the health food store to buy some ingredients to make him a nutritious and immune stimulating mash. I bought slippery elm powder, astragalus powder, nettle leaf, licorice root powder, and weight builder from the TSC. He would not eat this mixture willingly, so i put it in his mouth and on his tongue and he swallowed. He seemed a little better and wanted to eat his hay, so I left him and went up to the house. He was located in a thicket full of briars and small trees. I came back down to check on him and he was down, nose bleeding and breathing hard. I panicked and told him I'd be right back, so I went up to the house to get a halter and lead rope. Panicked because I didn't want him to die, and if he was going to die, I didn't want him to die there where he couldn't be buried. Odd combination of thoughts, but I was feeling both saddened and practical with equal passion. But when I got back to him, he was up! I think he actually stumbled and fell, and when I saw him he was still breathing hard because of that. I fed him a bowlfull a couple times that afternoon, and by the nightfall he was much stronger and eagerly eating hay.

When I left out for work this morning, I watered him from the creek with a bucket again, by headlights because it was still dark, and gave him some hay. But the good thing is that he wasn't in the thicket and was watching for me to come down the driveway, with his head up and his ears forward!! He hasn't looked that alert and alive for days, so I am hoping he has rounded the corner and cheated death. I'll try to post again tomorrow and give you an update on his condition then. Some things I've found out about oak bud poisioning is that it causes red blood cells to burst or deform, making them unable to transport iron. So the horse will have the symptoms of anemia, which is exactly how Spanky was acting. I thought he was "shocky" the other night and we'd been keeping a blanket on him because he was cold. I'm so happy he seems to be surviving and I hope to have good news tomorrow. One other thing, I didn't bring him to the vet because he was too weak to trailer and they don't make house calls out here. I feel really bad that I didn't notice how poor he'd gotten before it was so bad, and I wish I had known that he didn't need to eat all those oak buds. It's a terrible way to learn a lesson like that!

Someone asked if there was "community", a sense of community, in rural areas where large acreage separates neighbors. They wondered how it works. Here there is a strong sense of community. we're separated by mostly 100's of acres, but all the neighbor's know and help each other out. my closest neighbor called at 5 a.m. one morning last spring needing help with a horse in delivery. we threw on clothes and raced down there, but by the time we got there he'd pulled it himself. we're always watching for their cows to calve and let them know if there's trouble, because they don't actually live there, but come in the evenings to feed. the other neighbors who do live at their land visit when passing on the gravel road. it's common to be stopped in the middle of the road, engines turned off, talking for 30 minutes or until someone needs to pass. the grapevine is alive and well out here, too, lol. once my husband was on the phone with our most distant neighbor and i was outside getting clothes from the washer and i saw my goat eat my fresh picked tomato that was waiting on the top step for me to bring in. i started hollering at her and the neighbor on the phone with my hubbie heard me and got a huge laugh out of that. before 10 minutes passed, the closer neighbor was on the phone laughing over the goat eating my tomato too. this joke carried on for days, with the most distant neighbor stopping me on the road as i was coming in from work a few evenings later, handing me a tomato, cause he just knew i wouldn't have any because of the goat, haha. the most distant neighbor rides his 4-wheeler everywhere, including the 3 1/2 miles to our place to visit. he's an older man, disabled from a skidder accident years ago, and has diabetes. once he busted his toe, and rode his 4-wheeler all the way to our house to ask if i would put a bandage on his toe for him because he couldn't reach it himself.

see? there is lots of community here, even though we are sometimes miles apart. you'll likely find that so anywhere you go in the more rural areas.

Garrison and I saw something interesting this morning. Two skunks mating on the side of the driveway, on the way out to the bus this morning, just before dawn. Garrison is 10 and the questions have been getting asked a lot lately about why he can't have a baby brother. This morning's interesting site brought new questions to the front. "What are they doing?" "They're mating, you know, like the chickens do?" Silence. A silence very heavy with more questions. So I ventured a little more details. "The momma skunk can't have babies unless she mates with the daddy." "Oh..." Our driveway is pretty long, so you can imagine that this was not going to go away quickly. "Oh, so I shouldn't be making the rooster get off the hens then, I guess!" I looked at him, "That's right, if you don't let them mate, then none of your eggs in the incubator will make baby chickens." More silence. "Okay, but I don't understand. How does the rooster help the eggs hatch?" This was going to get technical, I could see it coming now. And darn it if the bus wasn't there yet when we got to the end of the driveway. I was hoping that it would be there, but luck wasn't with me this morning."Well, the hen already has the eggs inside of her, but the rooster has to fertilize them to make them grow. He does that when he's on top of her, when they look like they're fighting." "But HOW does the rooster do that????" I knew it was going to get asked. "Boy roosters, just like boy skunks and boy people have private parts that are made to fit inside the girl private parts and they have a fluid that has the seeds for babies in it -- understand?" "Yes." Silence and complete end to the questions. I added one more thought: "When you become an adult you'll have what it takes to make babies, but it's a big responsibilty." "Is that why some families have like 21 kids, because they didn't be responsible?" I laughed, yes, that's why. It was like a huge weight lifted off his shoulders, and mine too, because I knew he'd been wondering how it works, and he's already been taught the technical words for his private parts, he just never had yet put two and two together when it comes to making babies. For now, his curiousity seems satisfied. Any further questions about the process are getting forwarded to his dad!

We live in a pretty rural area of NW Arkansas. My nearest neighbor is ½ mile away, and all the neighbors are mostly more than a mile apart after him. in between, there’s nothing but mountains and woods and cow pastures. All those woods give a much needed corridor for wildlife like bears and cougars, who don’t like being near people if they can help it, a way to get from one end of their territory to others. So far, they don’t bother us and we don’t bother them. HOWEVER, if I didn’t have good guardian dogs, that would likely be a different story because the predators would indeed come calling for my chickens, at least, and maybe even small children wandering too far from the house by themselves... but I don’t have any really small children. my youngest child is 10 and he doesn’t roam off on foot too far by himself. He’s not allowed to go up the mountain by himself, mainly because everywhere up there is out of earshot and it’s way too steep for him to go on the 4-wheeler without his older brother. And there’s lots of rattlesnakes and he’s not that good at spotting them on the trail, lol. Up the mountain is where the wild things live, and the ginseng. When ~I ~ go hiking, I go sooooo slow, looking at this and that, it’s hard to actually startle much. And if I got bitten, I would know to not run home as fast as I can, haha. At least I say that now, but I’ve never been bitten! The dogs don’t go far from the house, but they will run to the valley for the horse’s aid if they see or hear a coyote over there, or anything threatening of that sort. The land is set up so that it’s easy to hear and sometimes see what’s in the valley from sitting on the hill in front of the house, even though it’s a long ways across if you were walking. He can go over there alone to fish in the pond because it’s in good earshot.

I’m not sure which is really the correct term for it, but I finally built one! It’s been a project on my list of things to do for a long time, a place to start seeds before it’s warm enough outside for them. I don’t have space in my house in any of the windows. I made the frame from rocks stacked higher on the north end than on the south end so that when I put the glass down on it, it’s facing south at about a 45* angle. Put some old clay tiles down inside so that my seed trays will drain better than if they were sitting directly on the dirt, and plus I was afraid the roots would go through the trays into the dirt if I put them directly on the ground. If that doesn’t work out too good, I might just plant the seeds directly in there and transplant them as they sprout. I’m not completely done with it yet, though. I’ve been putting dirt on the surface of the rocks to give the glass a better seal. Right now there are still plenty gaps for cold air to get in. I have a way to prop it to vent, but I’d like to get one of those automatic lifters so it will vent on its own when it gets too hot in there. So, I’m excited that I finally got to do ~something~ homestead related, I’m usually too busy at work and it hasn’t been daylight long enough when I get off to get anything done. Also yesterday I took out my incubator and started saving eggs to hatch out. By the end of the week I’ll have enough for a small batch, but I’m putting the eggs I’ve gathered so far in there with no heat but the turner plugged in so they’ll get rotated while they wait.

Today a fellow OHG group member posted a link to her blog about an apron she'd made recently. I went to look at it (http://mybyrdhouse.blogspot.com) and decided that now I want my own apron, too! I used to have a couple, but now I have no idea where they've gone. In reading her post, I saw she mentioned that she likes to keep her fingers in lots of pies. That's true of myself, too, but it seems that the pies are all so DIFFERENT from each other! I feel strange saying that I like aprons because so much of my life is not categorized as "mother". Mostly I am "scientist" or "analyst", but I wear a lab coat all day, so it's not much different than putting on an apron on the weekends, is it? I love the "mother" category and I don't get to experience it enough. Funny how a little thing like wearing an apron could make me feel more "motherly", lol. I think my kids would like it too, and my daughter might want one of her own, since she also likes to cook with me sometimes on the weekends. Some people are weekend warriors, well I am a weekend mother. And gardener and farmer and wife... boy I'll be glad when the days start staying longer so I can move some of the roles over to the weekdays!!

Whooo-hooo! I got a new autosampler for my furnace today, which makes life at work much much nicer. This afternoon I can leave it running and actually expect it to finish the samples while I'm gone... it's hard to trust it yet, but we'll see.

Gabrielle is sick, hope it's not the flu. But I'm going to stop by and get some oil of oregano and olive leaf just in case. i have elderberry tinc at home, but she doesn't like the taste and refuses to take it.

I am trying to move my blog over to hosting at my website, but it is not working so well...so, maybe no one can even see it right now. Hopefully, this will get resolved soon and I'll be back on the road to blogging, lol, even though i haven't been a steady traveler on it lately!

1039 // Ah-ha!! I figured it out - took me a while, but now i know why it wasn't working. I needed to take the "www" off of the address URL. Not sure why, but for some reason it won't work like that and now it does, so I don't really care the reason :)

It rained all day yesterday and most of the night. When I left for work this morning, I couldn't decide whether I wanted to try the front way out or go on and take the back way. The back way takes much longer, but there are no bridges to cross. Well, I decided to try my luck. The first bridge had a couple inches of water on it, not too much for my jeep to handle, so I crossed it. I always hate doing that because it scares me after having seen my large dog go over the edge of it one time when it was flooded. But no problem this morning. Then the neighbor who lives on that side of the bridge was coming down the road in my direction, which meant that he didn't go over the next bridge, the King's River. So I turned around and was hoping that the water hadn't already risen too high over the bridge I'd just come across. When that happens, and it HAS happened before in the past (but not to me, thank goodness!), you have to wait hours for the water to go down while you're stuck between the two bridges. Felkin's creek will always be an easier pass than the King's River. They're all low-water bridges on our county road, which means they're just a concrete pass over the water, with no rails or sides of any sort, so the water can just pass over it when it rises.

Uh-oh. I couldn't remember my login details to get here and make a post, so obviously, it's been waaaay too long since I've posted! I'll make a better effort to post more often now.

Not much has been going on at the farm, it's just been cold and dreary now for what seems like a long time, even though I know it's only been a week or two. My parents and nephews are coming up this weekend for their Mardi Gras holiday. It seems odd that we don't have days off for that holiday here in NW AR.

I've been far more busy at work than at home these days.