Monday, April 30, 2012

Is Anyone Interested?

Is anyone interested in seeing the rest of the camping photos?  It's mostly pictures of fish we caught and the river.  Just curious because I don't want to waste my time putting a copyright on a bunch of photos no one is interested in seeing LOL!  Sorry I've been so quiet.  It's just so hard to spend time blogging when it's so gorgeous outside.  And I'm trying to catch up all of your blogs.  I had 500 in my Google Reader this morning!!!  I'm following too many lol.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Reasons why camping/fishing rocks!!

ETA: Oops, this was scheduled to post and didn't. Sorry!

In a hurry so just thought I would show you a review of the camping trip in pictures. :D

#1 The Food!!

 
 
 It was windy so we had to rig the camp stove with foil so the flame wouldn't blow out.  Foil is like duct tape lol!

 
 We had too much chicken so we had to wrap the grill too lol!

 
 
 It turned out sooooo good!!

 #2 The company!

 
 Spending time with awesome friends and family (and hubbies) who enjoy goofing off!

 #3 My dad's new camper and boat!

 
 This pop up camper was awesome!! 
I can't believe I didn't get pictures of the inside.  
It had a bathroom, kitchen, eating area and two beds!

 
Dad's awesome new boat in my favorite color . . . blue!

 

 #4 Campfires!

 
 Very smoky campfires and it was very windy the whole time!!

 
 Macro of the wood and smoke.

 
Macro of the flames and charcoal.

 #5 The River!

 
 The view on the river was awesome and I'll be sharing a lot more pictures.  :)

#6 The Sunsets!

 

 Oh yeah . . . and then there was the fish!  :D


I'll share more pictures when I have time.  Hope you enjoyed these.  We had so much fun on the trip.  The weather was awesome, even though it was too windy to even go out on the river half the time.  :)

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Duck Update

Just thought I would share an update of the ducklings that were born back in January.  First though, here is a picture I took of their daddy duck.

 
 Isn't he handsome? 

 And here is a picture of one of the males from the set they hatched out last year.

 
 Doesn't he look a lot like his daddy pictured above?

Now without further delay here are the pictures of the ducklings from January.  They are siblings to the ones I posted about recently.

 
 
 This is one of only two hens from the nine ducklings that survived.  Isn't her pattern beautiful?

 This is the only other hen.  :)  

 
 

That's all of the pictures I have.  Since the opossums have figured out they can kill our birds again we're going to have to pen the poor ducks up.  We will only be able to let them out during the day when they will be safe.  I love these Muscovies!!  They are so self sufficient and really good at raising their own ducklings.  :D

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday

Jackal's favorite spot on the deck where he can watch everything that happens in the yard.  :)

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Good News and Bad News


 So sorry I haven't been posting.  Things have been busy and my husband and I went on a three day camping/fishing trip with my dad and some friends.  I'll post pictures of the trip when I can.  For now I want to get the bad news out of the way first because I don't want to dwell on it and would like to end on a good note.  Our beautiul Midget White turkey tom was killed last night.  We think it was an opossum that somehow got into his pen.  :(  I'm very upset about his death.  He followed us everywhere when we worked outside, talked to me constantly and would even threaten other people (not dangerously, just showing how tough he was) if he though they were going to get us lol.  We will miss our TomTom.




 Now on to some good news.  Our wonderful little Muscovy hen has hatched out another set of ducklings!!  That's a total of close to twenty five just this year so far!!  She had nine (surviving, don't recall the number that actually hatched) in her January hatch and fourteen in this hatch!!   Sadly she lost some of them and now has nine (which is how many she had last time that survived so we think she just can't keep more than that warm so next time we will steal some of them and brood them ourselves) making a total of eighteen surviving ducklings this year.  Here are some pictures.


 
 
 
 

 The second good news is that our young Buckeye hen has hatched out her very own chicks!  She has hatched seven of them (this is her first time) and so far they are all thriving.  She is very protective of her babies.  She will even attack us if we try to handle them.  They are so cute. 

 
 What are you hiding miss hen?

 
 Seven beautiful chicks.
 
 
 
Chrome saying hi to momma and babies.

So cute how the chicks climbed up on the log to follow her.  :)

Sorry I haven't updated in so long.  I will try to do better.  I have garden updates to make and I'll share pictures of the camping trip too.  :)

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Garden Growing

Our garden is growing and looking so awesome. :D Here are some pictures. Captions are above the pictures. You can click to enlarge.

Our square foot garden . . .

And it covered in stuff that keeps it from freezing if the temps drop suddenly.


Our strawberries . . .


Our little peach tree.


The remains of our fall garden . . .

Some of our cabbages are trying to make heads, but most of it bolted when it got hot, so we're basically letting everything from last fall go to seed.


Also I totally forgot to mention we got a tractor! We got a really good deal on it and it's already paying for itself. Without it we never would have gotten the horse barn fixed! It's also going to save us a ton of money in brush hogging the pasture. Paying someone to brush hog for us costs about $300 plus and we need to do it several times a year to keep the weeds from taking over. So it will pay for itself quickly. My husband loves it! Looks how cute it is pulling our tiny little Gorilla cart. :D


And we used it to build a new garden bed!! We used the bucket to get some old horse manure from the barn on the lease land. Once it cooks down we will be planting pumpkins here. :D

My pictures of the gooseberries, blueberries and blackberries didn't turn out. I'll have to try to get more pictures later when the sun isn't so bright. :)