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     Today we are enjoying summer afternoon thunderstorms.  Since the farm work is caught up, the house is dusted and vacuumed, I am enjoying some crafting time.

On the spinning wheel I’m spinning the wine part of a wine and roses yarn.  The dark wine color will be plied with the rose colored merino to make what I hope is worsted weight yarn.

On the needles is homespun by Kirsten of Echo Valley Finnsheep.  It is called Licorice with Vanilla.  These two yarns along with the Jamica that I spun recently are being knit into little stuffed bunnies from a pattern Henry’s Rabbits on Ravelry.  They will be given to our granddaughters and our daughter and son-in-laws new nephew.
     It seemed time to finally start knitting some of my homespun yarn and since most of my homespun are too little yardage to knit much but hats and scarves, toys are a good use for the fiber goodness.

     Summer arrived with a vengeance.  It is hot and humid, reminds me of when we lived in Virginia Beach.  It is cooling at night, fortunately and our log home heats slowly during the day and cools well at night, so we haven’t had to turn on the A/C, but it is near 90 today and the air is so thick you drink it instead of breathing it.
     Two days ago, the tractor and brush hog were brought out for the first time since they were haying and a little mow was done.  We have the area that we consider the lawn that covers maybe a couple of acres and it gets mowed fairly regularly.  A medium mow includes the area from the “lawn” to the barn and west beyond a row of pines we planted to the edge of the woods, maybe another couple of acres.  That gets mowed 4 or 5 times a summer.  The big mow are the hayfields that get hayed by neighbors in the spring and mowed by us in the fall.  Our farm is 30 acres and only about 5 are woods or too rocky to mow.
     When we moved from Virginia Beach, we brought with us a riding mower that was going to be used around the house.  It was stored in the barn until the house was complete and the grass and clover planted around the house had come up.  Unfortunately, by then, the mice had found it a good place to nest and it wouldn’t run.  At that time, I was still working at the high school and the school had a small engines repair class, so I took it to them to try to get it functional again.  It had some funky kind of carburetor that the instructor had never seen before, but he didn’t realize it until he had allowed some students to start working on it and they managed to get rodent nest and other unmentionables into the carburetor and fuel lines.  The mower ended up at the local fix it shop, twice, many dollars later, it still would not run.  We also had a push mower, but it was a flatland version with little tires and a chore to push up and down the irregular yard and then it too quit working.
     About this time, eldest son and I made a trip to the local small equipment store and bought this monster…

a commercial grade Stihl edger with harness and he used it to keep enough yard mowed for us to get in an out and around the house.  That led to the purchase of the John Deere and brush hog, but it just doesn’t get close enough safely to the house to really do the job.  When eldest was here in May, he weedwacked a 5 to 6′ path around the house out to where I could mow with the tractor and after I weedwacked around the outside of the orchard, he took over and did around the garden, the coop and the trees.  Since then, I have done the path around the house, the entire orchard, garden area and it nearly wore me out.  That was about 2 weeks ago and with the rain, the orchard was again nearly a foot tall.  We started discussing what to do, hubby still can’t do that type of work, his knee hasn’t healed enough and then he broke a toe on the same side, so he is still hobbling.  I didn’t think I could manage the Stihl again for that much, and though the chickens in the chicken tractor do this to a patch in about 2 days

the area is too big for the 4 X 8′ chicken tractor to be moved enough to keep it mowed for us.
     The solution we decided was not another riding mower, but a push mower with larger tires.

Though the task is still not easy, set on the tallest mow setting and working back and forth across the slope, the job is done.  The area the tractor won’t mow and the orchard are now about 4″ instead of a foot tall.  Perhaps I have a couple of weeks before it must be done again. 

     Summer has arrived, though a much rainier summer so far than we are accustomed to having.  Between showers, the porch umbrella and chair cushions were brought out in hope of dinners on the deck, the deck planters are filling in with geraniums and lantana, the herb pots filled and growing.  In the garden, two half barrels were started with potatoes, to be filled a bit more every few days as the sprouts reach for the sun in hopes that the season will end with two full barrels of fresh potatoes for the winter.  The beds of the garden were weeded and mulched, the winter squash has it’s first blossom, the cucumbers and pumpkins getting secondary leaves.  There are pea pods and a good stand of young bush beans.
     The young roosters are getting vocal, three of them challenging each other to see who can be the loudest and most annoying, beginning at 5 a.m. and continuing through the daylight hours if they see me out in the orchard or garden.  Moving their ark/tractor every couple of days is reducing the area that has to be mowed in the orchard.  The pullets (young hens) are reaching the time where we may start seeing eggs, so their coop was thoroughly cleaned and bedded with fresh hay and the nesting boxes seeded with fake eggs (golf balls) to encourage them to use the nesting boxes instead of the run or main coop when they finally figure it out.  It is about time to rearrange their run again to give them more fresh grass, but the rest of the compost beside their run still needs to be moved and a 100′ roll of 6 ‘ fencing purchased along with a few more posts so that their run can be set up along two sides of the garden in a 4 to 5’ wide expanded run for them.

*This idea borrowed from SouleMama, a delightful blog of a young homesteading family in Maine.

     There are mountains beyond those trees in both directions, so unless we are in Oz, I think we are socked in.  At least it is not raining.

     Like so many parts of the country, we have had a series of years that have had some level of drought.  Not so this year, it is again raining.  Normally by the time the hay is mowed, the rains stop and the yard and fields get a parched look to them.  Mowing is reduced to every two or three weeks and the fields are slow to grow to a height that requires a late summer/fall mowing, if it weren’t for the invasive stickweed.  Our mowing of as much of the land as possible and then allowing haying in the spring for the past 2 years has reduced this pest, but as we can’t mow all of the acreage, there are patches of it that persist and it comes up in the hayfields by fall.  This spring and summer have produced many inches of rain above normal.  Hardly a week goes by that the region doesn’t get a flood watch for the creeks and rivers.  The grass continues to grow, thick and tall and it seems we have to pick a semi dry day each week to mow at least around the house and garden.
     I know farm work isn’t always pleasant, but dealing with morning chores in the rain is an unpleasant start to the day.  Today we are looking at 100% chance of rain.  The chickens barreled out of their coop this morning and looked at me like I was responsible for it again being wet.  Some returned immediately to the inside of the coop, others huddled underneath.
     In the past couple of days between storms, I did get the upper hand on the nut and wire grass in the garden beds, put down weed mat and a heavy mulch of hay on the grape bed, mulched the beds of squash, cukes, okra, peppers and tomatoes.  On the positive side, I’m not having to water.

     On the next semi dry day, I still have a section of path that never got a layer of newspaper, weed mat or plastic that needs some work and I have a free source of year old wood chips that I am going to haul to the garden to put in the paths and hope to win the battle of wire grass there too. 

     The mountain laurel is blooming in Pandapas Pond park, hubby’s knee has healed enough for the pups to get a walk and they were happy about it.  The hayfields are mowed, the hay baled, making the property look neat for a month or so, the garden is thriving, and I added two tomato plants from the farmer’s market to replace two that didn’t survive.  The pullets and cockrells are growing, getting close to time to start seeing eggs and time to harvest the rest of the culls.  We have had a great week, survived the summer storm with only a few hours without power, the start of produce from the garden and  good weather for the most part.

     Today was a beautiful day following yesterday’s devasting storms.  Again, we were lucky, suffering no damage and this time only losing power for about 6 1/2 or 7 hours.  That meant dinner out, but that wasn’t a big deal either.

     A beautiful day on the farm means work, for us and for the neighbor haying our fields.   I started off early, moving the compost from the area where we removed the bin structure into one of the existing bins, after raking the area where the temporary chicken pen had been to get the wood shavings and chicken provided fertilizer into a bin.  When my back could take no more of the shoveling for the day (only a small amount of the compost actually moved), I took a break.  After lunch, we took a walk to help strengthen hubby’s knee, then moved hay around the fruit trees in a thick layer for mulch.

Hopefully, this will keep the weeds down, hold the moisture and help the 10 young trees to thrive.  Using some of the hay that was dragged out beyond the baling area, the tomatoes and peppers were also mulched and while working in the garden, the nut and wire grass that has been taking over the grape bed was removed.  Tomorrow, I will put down weed mat and cover it thickly with more hay.

While I was working in the garden, the neighbor was busy with his help, raking and baling the hay he had been mowing for the past few days.  Two of the bales were put within our orchard area to be used for chicken coop maintenance during the winter, 22 more were lined up in the upper field for loading and removal.

Two trailers of 22 bales being hauled away.  The low field and the western most field have been mowed, but not yet raked and baled.  The low field is the largest and where most of the hay will be baled. 
 
The day ended with Jalapeno slaw with the first jalapeno from the garden, garlic beef with mushroom gravy, the garlic provided by a few of the dozens of garlic scapes that have emerged in the past couple of days, and a pot of Farro, my new favorite grain product, washed down with a bottle of Porter, brewed and bottled in Hampton, VA, near my hometown.

A good day, life is good!

     When I bought my new spinning wheel, to get used to it without “wasting” good fiber, I took all the ends and samples that I had around and started spinning, adding the next bit when the bit I was working on was gone.  This had me spinning Merino and Merino/silk blend that I had used before, but also got me to try an assortment of other fibers such as Llama, Llama/Mohair, Corriedale wool, Blue Faced Leicester/silk blend, Alpaca, Shetland/Llama, Pendleton/Angora, Llama/wool, Cottswold Tunis cross wool, and Shetland/Mohair blend.  Some of the samples were neutral colors, some bright and vivid.  When they were all spun into a lightweight single ply, I spun an equal amount of Blue Faced Leicester that was undyed into another lightweight single ply.  I worked on this at the weekly spinning group to which I belong, The Spunsters, and when we arrived home after the wicked summer storm that hit and discovered that the power was out, I finished that bobbin and plied the two singles together to produce this

a delightful funky 320 yards of fingering weight yarn.
     For years, I have wanted to knit a blanket or throw for cold mountain nights and this this might be the start of it, a bit of color, a bit of natural, all handspun.  Since I have other handspun left from other projects or never designated to a project, perhaps I will use it too and make my blanket, not only one I knit, but one I spun first.
     As for the power outage, it got our neighbor out here to finish mowing the hay, since they had no power either, and just as he finished and darkness was falling, the lights came back on, only 6 1/2 hours this time.  Not bad considering every household in our entire county was without.

     These are some of the accoutrements of farming currently parked on our acreage.  There are two huge tractors, one with a baler, one pulling a monstrous gooseneck trailer.  Three smaller tractors, one with a trailer, one with a hay tether and one with a rake.  Another with a rake went home and yesterday there were two sickle bar mowers attached to two tractors, maybe two of these, maybe different ones and none of them are ours.  I guess it is too much trouble to trade out the attachments on these beasts, I know our brush hog is a bear to put on and take off, so they just keep adding tractors to put all of the attachments on.  Not all of these tractors belong to the neighbor who is doing our haying, the one pulling the baler belongs to his neighbor, but he maintains it and gets to use it.  One or two belong to his uncle who raised him and lives on the same farm.
     Our little tractor and brush hog mowed the 5 or 6 acres we keep groomed as a lawn today, hauled a load of scrapwood to the burn pile, moved a load of compost to a different area of the garden to start 2 half barrels of potato starts and made this work much easier on me than if I had to do it all with a push mower and wheelbarrow.
    

     It has been a few days since there was a post on this blog.  We have been waterlogged and I just couldn’t bring up enough creative energy to blog, but today the skies finally cleared.  We went into town to stock up on chicken and dog foods and to get lunch.  It was still somewhat overcast, but no real rain expected.  When we got home, the neighbor who hays for us for the bulk of our hay was here and they got the upper parts of the yard mowed and turned in preparation for baling it tomorrow.  The big hayfield, the lowest part of our land is still too wet, but hopefully will be dry enough for haying this weekend.  We hope this will reduce the tick load, they have been terrible this spring.