heavy metal

Just one of the locals out for a morning drive!! :)

Have a great day ya'll!

whats cookin in my kitchen

So if your a lemon lover like me hold on to your hats!!! I have a tempting your taste buds recipe ya'll need to look up. I of course found it on Pinterest! So go to Pinterest and find one today and make it post haste! It is really good too. What is it?!?!?
Lemon Cheesecake Mousse!
Now don't get scared about the word cheesecake. Some folks tend to balk at the idea of attempting them. But they are really not hard to make. Really. Maybe I'll share one someday. But there is no baking involved, just cooking a little, in this little dessert. Or if you hate to cook you can find it all at the store. Just gotta mix to up together. I prefer homemade.
Here is the pics...

 Homemade lemon curd. I prefer homemade stuff. But you can buy it at the store too. Again, this is easy to make. Just be sure to not stop whisking it while it's cooking, or you'll cook the egg yolks the wrong way :)

Then TA DA. There is it.
 It has whipped cream, cream cheese, vanilla, and powdered sugar in it. Mix in the lemon curd after you whip the cream and vawalla! It's nice. Cheesecakey and lemony.
Enjoy.
Have a great day ya'll!!

goldie

Sweet little Goldie. She is turning out to be such a nice little heifer. Her personality is sweet. She is gentle enough to help build up the confidence in our youngest daughter around cows. And tough enough to make her work for it too. She loves to have her cheeks scratched and will walk right up to us in the pasture, and rub her head on you. Or give you a good lick across the face. :)
See no snow! Haven't really had any most all winter. And the frost is all but out of the ground..

I just thought you might like to see a cute little Jersey heifer today. She puts a smile on my face too.

Have a great day ya'll.

spring ahead

Well it's that time of year and has been for several weeks now. Oh to be out collecting the sap and bringing it home and boiling it down to that thick, sweet, sticky deliciousness called maple syrup. That is what we should be doing.
But this is sad news. We are not. For the first time since our son was just a little fellow and I was huge pregnant with our first daughter. I feel conflicted with this for lots of reasons. We have perfected the science of making maple syrup and we enjoy the time outside and the time doing it. My children are no longer little people, but big people that I love with all my heart and soul. I wonder from time to time as I look at them where my littles have gone. Sigh. Time passes and years go by in a blink of the eyes it seems. It also gets us outside in the sun and fresh air t take some of that cabin fever out of our system. It's also nice to work as a family at another thing we enjoy here on the farm.
But the reason we are not tapping trees is because our truck, remember the one that caught fire a few weeks ago, is still at the garage. It sat in the driveway waiting for the mechanic to come look at it, but didn't. Guess he forgot about us. So we had it towed to his place, and he had to order certain parts that have taken a long time to come in. And so that about sums that up. Now the season is all but over. That and the weather has been very mild, and if you know tapping trees you know it needs to freeze at night and be mild during the day.
We are moving ahead with our summer plans for the farm. As in getting ready for another growing season. We have ordered our broilers (meat chickens) for this summer. We are looking forward to that again.  We have contacted out customers from last year and have moved ahead with that.
 I am thinking about what I would like to have in my garden this year too! No, I haven't done seedlings. I don't have time or space for that at this time in my life. But my husband would like to build a green house! So I'll let you know if that happens. It would just be a small green house. But none the less. How cool is that?! Probably if you don't have one but want one it is cool. I'd like to try a few new things in my garden if there is space enough for it. And hopefully I don't get a hail storm to take it out again like last year...shudder.
Well I guess that's all for now. I've rambled on long enough. So I'll leave you with a parting shot.

Have a great day ya'll!!

lights, glorious lights

 Well I know I told you that we, and when I say we, I really mean my wonderful, talented husband, put lights in the barns this fall. I just stood there and was the silent, err not so silent chatter box,  go-for this and go-for that girl. I know nothing about electricity. Other then flipping the switch to turn it on and off. LOL. Here are the big milking girls in their barn. Yes we milk 3 by hand. And yes the barn is small. But for now it works, we and the cows are happy. And see. Lights! There are 2 lights in this barn. So here is the proof. We now have been milking in the lights! Before we used headlights. Which work great better then a flashlight on the floor. But then he decided to put in lights to make life a little brighter in the winter. Come February it's always a delight when the days get longer and brighter.

And here are is the other barn with the younger stalk and horses. There are 3 lights in this barn! And the lights were on. I'm standing in the corner of the barn by the door. They were all too busy eating to pay any attention to me.
Have a great day ya'll!

cows and heifers oh my

 We decided to out Callie and Goldie with Suzie and Bulls Eye. We had been rotating the pasture time for them. Then decided that it was time to put them together. They had to play some push and shove to set down who was who in the pasture. Thankfully that never lasts to long and they settled down to eat. Suzie had to realize there was enough hay to go around for all and let the younger girls eat from the hay bin.

Suzie is getting better about sharing the hay with them. She is just pushing her weight around a bit, trying to be the boss of them I guess and throwing her size around, maybe. So far they all get along, and move when she tells them too. But here are Callie and Goldie, on the right side of the picture, getting some hay out of the hay bin.
Have I mentioned how thankful we are for that thing?! It's been wonderful. Our sweet hay, (sweet hay is wrapped hay. It's cut one day and baled and wrapped the next, so it's a little fermented, if you were wondering what that was. Up here we call it sweet hay).  The round bales are a 3x4, kinda an odd size, but that is what the guy has for a baler, one fits in the hay bin and they chow down on it.
Life is good.
 See?!  No snow. Warmer temperatures. Mild winter. I love it!
Have a great day ya'll!!

monday confessions...but on wednesday

Last month my husband went on a road trip to visit some dairy farms. Some Amish dairy farms in beautiful upstate New York. They are strictly grass fed farms. He went with some other Amish from some nearby communities and some English folks. Like us :) I stayed home with the farm and kiddos. I could have gone, but that meant that the kids had to do all the chores for 3 days. I felt unsettled about that, although they are perfectly capable. Our kiddos are amazing, just so you know!  And the night he left we were having a terrible rain, wind, sleet storm. I had no idea if we would loose power or not. That would not have been ok. So I stayed home, and was just as happy to too.  The reason for the road trip was to see how their barns were set up and get a better idea and design on what we wanted to build when the time arrives for us. So now we know really what we want.

We are working on our own dairy farm. We have 6 cows and 1 steer. For us that is amazing. We have slowly built on what we have, in literally every aspect of our married life, once we decided to really take a new road and grow/raise most of what we eat.  We would like to become certified Organic. All our farming practices are currently organic, just without the certification. We were at one time, but decided to let it go for a number of reasons.

But another reason for the road trip was to look at a round baler. We decided last year that instead of depending on others for their time and equipment to get our own. Would make life a little easier for us, and round bales are the way we want to go for the cows. Makes winter feeding easier too.  We also need a wrapper, but have yet to buy one. Well, we ended up buying the baler and got it home this week. It's a 4x4 Krone baler. So that's good news for us! Now we wait for warmer weather and haying season!
Have a great day ya'll!!

another glorious sunset

Well leap year came and went. A whole extra day to be added to my life that seems to fly by me at an alarming rate.

I watched the sun go down on a glorious February night. A balmy 40 degrees while doing chores. No snow and no wind on the hill. I breathed in deep the air as it started to cool as the sun sank deep, and fast into the mountains to the west. It lit the sky up with yellow and orange and cast the most amazing shadows over the lawn and our neighbors house against the dark cloudy sky.

The extra day ended and moved us closer to another month.

Have a great day ya'll

good quote

"Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough."

Og Mandino

nap time

Abby and Time Out wanted to take a nap in the warm air on this February morning. It was so nice out! The sun was out the wind wasn't blowing and it was just a great day to be taking a nap in the sun. Well, if your a horse covered in a thick winter coat that is!

Check out that manure pile out back. With all these critters it sure does add up! Don't worry about that tipped over water bucket. Their water is in the barn!
Time Out is on the left and Abby is on the right.
Have a great day ya'll!

last tuesday

Boy things can look different in a weeks time. Things go from everyday routine to calling 911! Now before you get too excited it was not a big deal. Not life or death. So why did I call them? Well let me tell you about last Tuesday.
We have hay stored in a barn down the road from our farm, we don't have a place for it here So when we need some we take the truck down and get some. We also have some round bales that we bought at a farm as well. Well, we were done chores and my husband sent our son down the road on the tractor to get the bale. It's a round bale and we get one on the truck and one on a spear on the tractor. That's very handy. Well off went our son down the road. My husband was warming up the truck because it was a cold morning. When he went to get in the truck we noticed that there was some smoke coming out of the hood. He thought that was odd. I was standing nearby with one of our daughters. We looked at each other and waited. My husband opened the hood of  the truck and there was more smoke coming out of it. And this truck just so happens to be a standard, so he went to move it, but when he stepped on the clutch it wasn't there. I just so happened to notice that there were then flames under the truck. I wondered for a second if I should get the hose, then hollered to my husband that there were flames under the truck!! He told me to go all 911, and proceeded to try to move the truck away from the house and our other vehicle. I called 911. Only the second time in my life calling, and the first time calling since I was married. For that I am very thankful. And thank you to all the 911 operators too out there! They were great.
So after the call was toned out I went back outside and the fire was out. A guy on the fire department who lives down the road came down to help and he is also a truck driver. He took a look under the truck and what he told us was the clutch line had a hole in it somewhere and when we pushed on the clutch it was hitting the muffler. Should be fixable. But we are waiting for the mechanic to come and look at it. It will need to be towed as well. Thankfully we have AAA. Thankfully he was home when this happened and not on the road. Thankfully it didn't get worse. Thankfully no one got hurt.
I ended up taking the van down the road to get our son, who was waiting on the tractor with the round bale of hay. He nodded and grinned when I told him what happened and then we started back down the road to home.
Oh ya, then that afternoon the computer crashed and we had to get another one!
Hopefully today goes better then last week!
Have a  great day ya'll