May
2009
Horse home… cows out
May 10th, 2009 at 07:04 pm by Shari Thomas in Around the Farm, Day off, Family CowOnce in the house, Cindy, who was having a hard time catching her breath… gee I wonder why. She’d been thrown from a horse twice in the past 3 hours, and then had to walk the beast over a half a mile across the desert.
While she was showering, that is… getting the tumbleweed out of her hair and place on woman should ever have tumbleweed, we called Amber, who is an RN. Our main goal was to see if we should do anything special for Cindy. read the rest of the story
Buy me a beer and I'll write more posts more often. Tags: back fence, barbed wire, barn, calf, hay stack, pastureRelated posts
Sep
2008
It’s fall, time to count our successes
September 22nd, 2008 at 06:43 pm by Shari Thomas in Around the Farm, Chickens, Family Cow, Horses, Sheep, WeatherI love this time of year!
It’s that time when we take a minute (or an hour) to just sit and watch the sheep, the cow, the chickens we’re now letting truly free-range, and all the other wildlife.
Our little garden patches yielded goodies this year for the first time in three years. We’ve been enjoying ripe tomatoes, fresh potatoes, broccoli, carrots, lettuce, onions and garlic. Our corn may not make it in time, and the eggplant is questionable.
Once again, we planted winter squash (spaghetti, acorn and butternut) in hopes we’ll get not only enough for ourselves, but also enough to take to market.
Ever the optimist, Cindy planted watermelon, the small seedless variety in hopes of getting at least one ripe melon. We’ve been covering them, as well as the squash, every night since our first frost Sept 1.
Over Labor Day weekend, we rented a tractor (they call them skip loaders in this area) with a bucket and a grading box so we could rearrange some of our sand and clean out part of the sheep pen. We had to go to St George to pick it up on Friday afternoon, but were able to keep it until the following Tuesday morning. For the weekend, we could use it 8 hours. Additional hours cost extra… no problem!
What follows is a snapshot of what was and now, what is.
We smoothed off a lot of “dunes and tumbleweeds” around the horse corral as well as made “homes” for each stack of hay (72 bale stacks… that’s a little over 4 tons per stack).
Before…
After…



















