What's Been Happening on the Farm

Good Morning!  Well, here we are at the last week of February and you might be wondering what's been happening here on the farm.  A lot.  A lot of wildly different stuff.  So I figured today I would catch you up and maybe I can get back on track.

Septic woes - When we moved in in September 1998, the septic tank was in a sad state, with "water" standing on the ground and flowing under the house.  Since at the time we planned on adding on to the house, we installed a new, large septic system (with 10 people in the house we went big) with an enlarged drain field.  It worked and we forgot about it.  Then, in late January, we began to notice "water" standing over the holding tank area.  After a little researching I began calling to get estimates.  $200 would get my septic system pumped, another $100 would get the grease trap taken care of.  Finally, one company offered to do both for $250....sold.  In the midst of all this I discovered that you are supposed to get your system pumped out every 2-3 years.  Who knew?  From there Ray handled it, and passed on the word to me that the guy said that it was FULL!  We are very fortunate that it didn't move over and begin to clog up our drain field.
PS - We never did add on the the house.

Hot Water Heater - We knew it was coming.  We knew we were living (or showering) on borrowed time.  Our water heater had been put into the house in the 1970's.  We had repeatedly replaced the element in it, each time pumping out huge amounts of calcium deposits.  The last time we replaced it the threads on the water heater got stripped, so we knew that when it went again, that would be it.  Well, it happened and so we purchased a new one.  While I would have loved to have a tankless or very large heater, we decided to stick with the same size.  We very seldom run out of hot water, even with 8 people and all of the cooking and showering that goes on here.  A tankless was way out of our price range.  So we stuck with a 40 gallon.  Now, replacing a water heater in a 100-year-old house is not an easy thing.  When the bathroom was originally created out of a back porch in the 1970's, the water heater was installed and the closet built around it.  So we had to replace it with one that would fit in the hole.  The old one also had not been installed with cut-off valves, so when we needed to turn off water to the heater, we had to turn off water to the entire house.  My husband, Ray, is a marvelous man.  The knowledge that man has packed in his brain is a treasure trove.  His only mistake was in asking me to unhook the wiring. 
At some point in the distant past, a load management system had been wired in.  Since I am extremely quite a bit somewhat a tiny bit rebellious, I didn't want the electric company to tell me when I could/couldn't have hot water, so I had it turned off but the wiring remained.  This gave three different wires to disconnect from each other.  I didn't know that I was supposed to remember what wire was hooked where.  I didn't discover this little item until it came time to hook the new one up to the electrical system.  And we came up with extra wires.  This was not good.  We tried everything we could think of......calling a relative who is equally endowed with this amazing knowledge, EVEN looking at the wiring layout in the instructions, but we could not get the water heater on.  Finally, out of desperation, Ray checked the wiring going from the house to the heater.  With me flipping breakers back and forth we discovered that the wiring we thought went to the house breaker, actually went to the old load management system.  Once we figured out that little gem and changed over the wiring......Voila.......hot water.  Thank the Lord for my husband.  Left to myself I'd never have thought to check out that little detail.

Radiator/Water pump:  Ray's truck is 12 years old and has 270,000+ miles on it.  He uses it to commute to work and run farm errands.  We knew there was a leak and have been trying to keep water in it, but this has gotten rather difficult.  We have spent most of February looking for a used or rebuilt water pump.  Now we have decided that they don't exist and are working on getting a new one.

Kidding season:  This is upon us.  Heidi, one of our cashmeres gave birth to twin doelings, Callie and Allie, (pictures to come).  Next up looks to be Lynn, matron of our Boer herd.  I was hoping to have all of the cashmeres kid in February and the Boers in March, but such is life when dealing with animals.  At first all was well with Heidi and the kids, then she began to push one of the kids, Callie, away and not allowing it to nurse.  So we are bottle feeding her with Maggie's milk.  Or, rather, Samantha is bottle feeding her and doing an awesome job.

Rabbits:  All of my rabbits have been bred and I will be expecting litters in early March.

Maggie's last calf, Faline, has been sold.  L'il Bit is on ice, aging, and will be put in the freezer in a couple of weeks.  That made a major difference in my weekly feed purchases.

Rain:  It has rained about every 3-4 days all winter.  The ground is completely saturated and it is impossible to get the wheelbarrows into the pens on a daily basis for cleaning.  Consequently, on the days where it has gotten dry enough, it has taken all day to do the cleaning.  The rain has also prevented us from getting Penny, our sow, pen ready and getting her rebred.  In addition, February was the month that we were supposed to lime and sand all of our pens and that is definitely not happening.

Also, due to the rain, several of my Boers have come down with foot scald.  More on that in a later post.  Suffice it to say that that particular treatment is rather easy but time consuming.

Taxes:  enough said.

I'm sure there is more, but it is time to be getting on with the day.  It's suppose to rain.

May Yahweh bless you in this new day!

Laurie

Schedule? What Schedule?

Good Morning!  OK, it's probably clear to everyone by now that I am not organized nor scheduled.  I'm not even sure that I could ever become that way again.  There was a time when I was.  When the children were much younger, I was REALLY organized.  I had a planner with all of the appropriate sections and calendars where each activity was color coded with a different colored pen.  We separated our dirty clothes as we took them off and each load had a certain day of the week.  We had a scheduled time for getting up, going to bed, eating meals, starting school, etc.  The house was cleaned on a routine basis.  It all worked really well. 

Then we moved.  And it all didn't just go slowly downhill.  It dropped like a rock.

My husband's parents were aging, his mom had had two strokes and was consequently disabled.  His dad just couldn't work and keep up with the place, which included a 100-year-old house and 4 1/2 acres.  So we bought it and they began to live with us. 

That was the end of the organization.  All of my stuff remained packed up and was only gradually integrated into the house, which made doing some things very difficult, like:  packing away papers, clothes, or anything else that needed storing.  Cleaning could only be done as a room was available and, since most of the stuff belonged to my in-laws, I was reluctant to let the children clean as I had at our own home.  We went to bed early and got up early.  They went to bed late and got up late. There was no room for anything and nothing had a place.

Then, as the children got involved in 4-H, we started adding animals.  The first things, chickens and rabbits, didn't really do too much to our schedule.  Even the heifers my children showed didn't change things too much.  The show schedule itself played havoc with our fall schedule.  Now we are, at least a little, what we had so desired when we first moved:  a working farm, and we love the life.  But it does not lend itself well to schedules.

Believe it or not, I sat down the last week of December and scheduled out soapmaking, cheesemaking, blog posts, cleaning, school, meals, shopping, etc.  I made it a little over halfway through January and "then came the rains.  And with it my troubles with the" schedule.

For instance, we have a small trench dug in the goat's pen to help drain the water.  The problem with this is that it has to be maintained, i.e. dug out, on a regular basis.  If we have no rain or just a little rain, this is easy and not very time-consuming.  But when you get a lot of rain on a daily basis, or on most days, it is more difficult.  So, during the last month, I have been spending quite a bit of my time trying to keep this open. 

Since we don't use a dryer, the laundry schedule has also taken a direct hit from the rain.

Then you have the day one of the puppies got into something that caused her face to swell and required an emergency visit to the vet.

And the day the heifer got loose and it took all of us over half an hour to catch her.

And the day the goats got through the fence and had to be rounded up and the fence repaired.

And the day I found one of the goats limping and had to treat and bandage her leg.

etc., etc., etc..

What have I learned through all of this?  I'm not really in control of my schedule.  Yahweh is.  And I need to be open to whatever He chooses to bring my way, even the customers who stop by for eggs and end up staying 2 hours talking and trying to learn how they can get started on becoming more self-sufficient.  Does this mean that I don't need to bother trying to plan or schedule?  No.  It simply means that I don't need to get upset when my schedule doesn't go as I have it.  It also means that some days it's just easier to change the date at the top of my TO DO list rather than to completely copy it over.

May Yahweh bless you in this new day and may you welcome all he has planned for you in His schedule!

Laurie