New Commers and Visitors

     This past week has been a time of coming and going for visitors, workers, and consultants, and the arrival of new farm pets.  I got the goldfish into the pond with out any casualties.  I also brought the chicks home from school the end of last week.

  Kaysha loves to watch them.                        And to smell them.   

    We leave for South Carolina tomorrow morning.  Joe’s  2 sisters are getting here for dinner tonight and we are meeting the other sister with her husband and 2 kids in Tennessee tomorrow night. Joe's two sisters will be riding with Joe, Courtney and I....so traveling should be fun.  Hope I can leave my farm cares behind for the week.  They aren’t really “cares” but chores and things I want to get done.

     It has been rather slow progress around here because the weather has been so wet.  Farmer Jeff is going to do our fence corner posts but has been too busy or waiting on the weather.  His Uncle (Dave) will probably be building our tact room, but has been re-hired so is not as free with his time.  The gate guys arrived from Indiana Tue. evening with their big truck filled with gates as seen here. 
We bought 5 gates, at a very reasonable price...one 16 footer so we can get the hey cutter into the fields, and will do two 8 footers between the barn and corn crib.  The 10 footer is about 4" too long for the inside end of
the corn crib, but we may angle it to
                                                    keep the horses away from the electrical box and light switch at that end of the corn crib. The 6 footer is for easy access to the back pasture.       After unloading gates into the corn crib the Kentucky "boys" headed out going down Becks lane to the west of us. 
        
     The ground hog remains a pest.....reminds me of "Caddy Shack"  seems he is impossible to catch.  We tried 2 different poisons, a sonar device, a guillotine trap, and now have a live trap baited and set.  The dog has been on a constant search for the bugger also.... but has had no luck.  Daniel, who has been painting out buildings has spotted the ground hog several times, but been unable to get the 22 fast enough before the ground hog returns to its home.  He even sat out with the gun for a few hours 1 day waiting for the ground hog to surface.

     We got the big dead tree just south of our garage cut down last Sat morning.  To get it done for $650.00 we had the three men cut it into "manageable" pieces and leave the stump.  This first picture was taken of
the "the beast" (as the men referred to it) a few
days earlier.  Here is a series of pictures
showing that whole process.   You can see that the skies were threatening rain during the early part of this 2 hour process. If you click on the pictures they will enlarge.  In these first two you can see the man up in the tree trimming out large branches.












Then they cut the wedge, knocked it out, and using a truck pulled on the tree as the last cut was made to the backside of the it.  It was frightening and amazing.  Their biggest fear was climbing on and hanging from the dead branches.  The dog even got in  on the clean up action.  The last picture shows all the big logs just as they left them for us to later clean up.

     We then spent all last weekend hauling parts of it to the wood shed and burning the rest of it.  Some sections
were too big for the Kobota tractor to lift even, so we drug or pushed them.
We had a fire going for three days that got put out by Monday nights rains.  I got it burning again yesterday, and will keep at it all day today.  We are making progress, but it has been slow.

     We are now short 1 chicken that escaped and was caught by the dog. 
                                                      It was too late for me to intervene
by the time I realized what was happening....but I made it clear (I think) to the dog that that was not to happen again.  As you can see from this photo the 5 remaining babies are growing fast.



     We ended up getting 3 barn cats, they convinced Joe to take the third one. He picked them up just last night.  Our attempt at keeping them in the barn failed.  I saw the male (I am going to call him “Him”) drinking out of my fish pond at 4am this morning.  At least I know he is doing okay.  He was really freaked out yesterday.  I haven’t checked on the 2 girls yet.

<- the black and white one in this crate is the boy.





I have decided to call other black and white one in the crate by herself  “Her” and the all black one will be “Girl”.  I let the chickens out this morning but did not go all the way out to the barn.  All three cats are extremely wild, each is neutered and has it’s  shots and all were free.  Hopefully they will stay around and catch lots of mice. I’d rather they leave the birds (especially the chickens) alone.

      Well, I need to do lots of cleaning before guests come and I haven’t even started packing.  There are also daily chores and a few more flats of flowers yet to plant.  And if there is any spare time, I wanted to work on un-packing some more boxes of books.
Daniel built the two bathroom medicine cabinets I just bought, now I need Joe to hang them so I can finish unpacking and organizing all our bath stuff.  I am not so worried about the unpacking (although it would be nice to get it done).  What is most important is to spend time with family and enjoy the farm as well as take care of the animals.