Category: Normal Life Updates

Things Are Going Airborne

Things are becoming more up in the air now than before as we try to figure out the means to do a big life change, and just what the end goal is. We are sure we need to rehome a few llamas, and that there are other animals we won’t be able to take with us for practical reasons. Anyone interested in goats, two old llamas that need to be able to live out their days in peace, and a young male llama or two? We also have pot belly pigs that need a new home. None will fit into our moving plans or be easy to take with us. There are sure to be other animals too, such as some chickens, geese, and ducks, and maybe even the peacocks, as we are thinking we are going on a long journey forward. Three girl llamas will probably be going with us at any cost, though it would be good to get them stud service before we go.

Our range of possibilities lead us anywhere from Minnesota to Maine, and several states in between. It is time for a change, and a serious one at that. But to give up the farm totally is off the cards. We are looking for land, and it must have some pasture, some place to work our hobbies to turn them into businesses, and some trees. We want the trees! The places we are looking at are just too far to take many animals, and would be hard on all but the healthiest, and us.

Is this any different from when we threw everything into the wind and moved from the UK to America? Life should never be boring.

Right now, we are thinking to look towards Maine, go all the way, and set up a llama heard there, and of course some chickens for eggs and meant. We may get going on goats again, and others. But if we get the chance to get a fiber mill going for her, and a wood shop going for me, then that’s what we ought to do. Too much else is a distraction from where we both have our hearts set. I’d like to see us find a place where we can accommodate all that, and hopefully a bit more, too.

Nothing is set in stone, but either way, we need to get the older llamas rehomed, and the males sold for a reasonable price. They could help us get a good trailer to move the girls in!

I am keeping my eye open for a stock trailer. Bumper pull would do for the girls, though I would really rather have a gooseneck as I think it would be safer to pull long distance, and give them a bit more room to ride in. I have searches set up and check them daily.

I have arranged for a test hole to be dug to prepare for a new septic system on the house. Lucky I have a friend with a backhoe. That part is paid for with the county, and I have to pay for the permit for the system, next. Then it is time to get a solid estimate on cost for a new tank and field put in. Let’s just hope that comes in cheap! If I keep my personal spending under control, I can pay off my debts in a month, and if the contractor can take a payment from a card, and it is cheap, I can hold the cost of it there till the house sells, and begin paying it myself in the mean time. I am sure I have not covered every contingency, but I think as a general outline, we have forward motion.

As we have looked at houses, there are some really nice ones coming up on smaller properties, around five acres. I would much rather come in around twenty, especially with a wood lot, but we have to consider what kind of condition we are willing to accept the house in when we move in. Putting it bluntly, this house has gotten ahead of us on repairs, needs someone to do some work before moving in, while it is empty, and we need a fresh start. I don’t want to let this house get lost to disrepair and end up among the rubble of the many in this area that have fallen before it. It is such an historic home, and so many people are connected to it somehow. This is really important to me. But we have had such a long to do list that it has always been a case of having to do temporary fixes on one job while looking at the next three that also need to get a short term fix. This is why it needs a moment empty, and the work all done at once.

I know I have not been totally clear on this blog where we are going from here, and what is to become of The Peasant’s Manor Farm, or the Whittle House, but we just don’t know yet. We know we have put off moving for a long time, though, even though we have both thought of it every summer for years, now. We have ghosts here that need to be buried. This is the only way. That is a personal reset that we have not been able to work out any other way. We have both had time to figure out finally what we want to be when we grow up, and the Peasant’s Manor Farm idea, and the Antiquary Artisan are our dreams. Those are our path forward. So the farm will not die. It will just transition, then rise again, more focused on providing supplies to the Antiquary Artisan’s workshop!

Ponderings On Our Direction

I did not sleep well last night. I was too busy thinking up things to worry about! Hopefully tonight will go better. Missus is hard at work this week and being swamped with things that are frustrating and high pressure. I won’t say more due to business being a business. I just want to put down that she is under a lot of pressure, and her job role is difficult because she is a multi-hat wearer including Senior Project Manager and Director. While she is wearing multiple hats, I take mine off to her for dealing with all she is right now, while we are adding more stresses at home with the farm.

Someone has driven by the place across the street and looked at it a couple of times today. I think it is in a prime location and will draw some attention. I was just amazed at how quickly it turned from an office visit with the realtor to actual people looking it over.

Seeing such things just about leaves a knot in my stomach. Turning ideas into reality can do that, especially early on, and when we are not sure where tomorrow leads us. But there are ideas of what to do, and I am happy to share some of the generalities.

We love our llamas, and have no plans to give them up. We would like a few more! They are wonderful animals, and for all of the talk of them being great guard animals, and the viciousness that that implies, I have always found them quite the opposite! They are lovely. Just this morning I went into the pen with the old girl with the bad hips, Mystique. I have to go into her pen to water the little pigs, and she has formed the habit of coming up behind me and waiting for me to turn around and spray her down with water. She does this early in the mornings, before it has got hot, so either it is really hot being a llama, or she just likes it either way. Whatever the case, I would like to quarter all the llamas and be able to work with them better going forward to develop these sorts of habits. I think having a barn for them to do that in, and to put them up in during bad weather would be really wonderful, so it is on the shopping list! Any new property going forward wants to have a barn.

I think in addition to a barn, a field to turn the llamas out in that gives them access to a pond and lots of water would also be very good, and increase the odds of us leaving the property for longer than we have been able to before. Currently, we can go out for a tops of about 36 hours. We would like to better that.

Chickens are a given on a farm. The eggs and food source are obvious, and helpful. There is too much that can be done with eggs to give up on them, and fresh eggs are really so much better than store bought.

We will keep the peacocks, too. They are ornamental, and maybe they could pull a bit of money selling them as they breed, but we would like to have them as a permanent part of our farm, wherever.

I don’t want to do pigs again unless we are properly set up for them for the long term. I am not a butcher, either, so that has got to either be learned, or they have to be given up on. Maybe they will come again in the future, but only if there is good housing and strong fencing set up for them, and the breeds we pick are a bit smaller than our Large Black was. She was lovely, but weighing in at about 400 pounds, she was also a big, expensive pet. So pigs are probably out, at least for a bit.

Missus wants to carry on with goats, but we will need the means to sell them of so, or we will be overrun! I have the boys away from the girls now, because they come in twos and threes when they do come! That turns into a lot of hay consumption!

Missus wants to carry on with our Lionhead Angora Cross Rabbits. Who could blame her? She wants a better pen for them where they can have social time and such, so that is something we are looking at in a new place.

Waterfowl are okay, but again, I would like to seem them with access to a pond because ducks and geese see fresh water as something to go ruin with mud and dirt just as fast as they can, and messing it all up for the chickens that currently live with them.

I have been on this place not for some nine years, working with one hose connection for all of it, and with no tractor to help out with the heavy work. Those are two things that have got to change, especially where I have crossed the fifty-mark! Snow removal is a pain, moving hay impossible in the size bales we currently buy, and so many other jobs that would be aided, especially firewood and compost and other wood products and byproducts!

Other tools I would like to procure include a sawmill and a few more hand tools to try my skills at some furniture building from timber to finished product. I could use a workshop rather than a garage for that kind of thing.

Missus wants to get the fiber mill going where we can handle our own llama fiber, and other people’s fibers as well. If you are following my logic here, you may be adding up the out buildings we are shopping for so all this does not have to be stuffed into a house with us! There are places, and they are in our range, but we have to get ourselves to one, and hopefully not find it in serious need of work when we get there. Only time will tell on that part. Geography has not even been worked out yet.

Last, but not least, I have got a little model of the train I rode on with mom when I was nine. I would like to have a little space to set up something with that. A basement or an attic would do it.

Leaving the area we are in would be bittersweet. While we don’t know a lot of people around us very well, there are a lot of wonderful places around us that we like to go to, such as the ice cream manufacturer’s shop, and the flour mill, the cheese factory, and the honey maker. These are places we can get items that are very fresh, and very good. There are other treats as well, such as the milk shakes over at Brea Lake, or the wonderful little BBQ place over in Malad.

Right now, things are not set in stone or even wet cement. But the ball has been pushed and will either roll, or not. It is time for a change, so I am happy for it to. I have had changes of scenery all of my life, from living in places like California and Colorado and the UK, to little changes from city to city.

I’d like to live where the grass is tender, and I can scythe it without it pushing over because it is dry. I’d like to put a canoe in the water and row from shore to shore, listening to the birds, and spotting the occasional fish breaching the surface of the water, and teaching my daughters to appreciate nature and out part in it. I’d like home to be a place where I can let my llamas graze all summer long, and where I can provide winter feed without being subject to massive price hikes like we have recently. I’d like to spend my evenings in the wood shop, working out how to build a chair for a grandchild, or building a detail for the model railroad. I would like to roll around on a tractor, pulling a chicken coop behind and setting up the birds so they can peck and scratch in a new spot each day. But mostly, I want to see Missus able to spread out and do her hobbies and making the things she enjoys doing, and have a space to teach others the many things she has spent years learning on our hobby farming adventure, and I would like to see her with a deep, contented smile on her face. It is going to take a change to do all of that, and the time is here to at least try to make it so.

I am fifty. Accidents aside, I am probably 20 to 50 years away from snuffing it. Whatever, I need to make good use of it all. We need to put down where our roots can grow a little deeper than they have been able to here.

Oh, and I still love heating our place with the woodstove, so wherever we go, I am going to need that! There is nothing better, and nothing that provides more security over the winter than having heat with the flick of a match and a good pile of dry wood at the ready! I don’t ever want to give that up! That rules out most rest homes for me in the future!

Some Evening Photography

I took a short walk this evening and took a few photos around the yard. Golden Hour is always a great time to shoot. I thought I would share what I got.

It is Father’s Day, and my family sure has made me feel special! I got lots of love and a few wonderful gifts to help me get started on leatherworking. I don’t have big ambitions with it, yet, but I do want to be able to do some basic projects and practical items, and the tooling set I got will be more than enough to give me an idea what direction I would really like to take the craft, and how far I really want to go with it.

Giving Up On The War Against The Grass

We are uniquely cursed here on our place. We have grass growing here that I cannot remember the name of, but it is a blended type that when cut short serves as a wonderful lawn, and when left to grow long serves as an equally lovely pasture. It is a curse because I have burned holes through it with burn pits, I have tilled it to death, and I have even in the distant past used grass killers on it in places. In every instance, within two years of letting up these attacks, the lawn has been back, and by the start of the third year, the place where it happened has been completely indistinguishable from any undamaged part of it.

This is a great place to be if your life is about your lawn, and cheap upkeep, or if it is about grazing cattle, and you want an easy pasture to keep.

It is not so great when your wife wants a flower bed, and so you till and prep and cover and till again, and by the end of the year the flowers have all but succumbed to the weeds, and are followed the next year by a lawn that will choke out even them.

We have put in raised beds with no bottoms, we have put in raised beds with cardboard bottoms, and we have put in raised beds with plastic bottoms, and the grass has come up through and overgrown the tops of the beds. I have pulled raised beds out again, too. I am in the process of doing that, now. The only place where we have succeeded has been where the raised beds have been covered at the top with cardboard or plastic and mulch. We have done a fair job of keeping the grass at bay with those efforts. So that is the direction we are looking now.

So this year we begin anew with a different approach to the flowers. We have a couple of beds where we have flowers coming up through plastic, and mulch all over that. We also have purchased half barrel shaped plastic tubs that will sit on beds of plastic and mulch, filled with flowers. It is not necessarily the look we would like, but then, neither is “pasture choking petunias to death.” It is just too grim.

I have a bed right in front of the house that I would like to till, surface with the appropriate slope, cover in plastic, and mulch today. It is not too big, so that should be an attainable goal. There are five tubs for that space. I am not going to win against the now two Russian Olives growing there, but I suppose I can trim them back till I can get my dream tractor with a hoe, and dig out the stumps.

There is work to still be done in the herb garden, but we have got to the point it could be easily said it is half way done. We were working out a watering solution for it yesterday, then I went with a shopping list to the stores down in Logan, and while I was at one of them, I spotted a pair of copper-toned sprinklers that were about three feet tall, and decorative, almost Celtic, and got those to put up in the garden, along with feeder hoses that worked out really well. I could not decide between a green one and a red one, so I got one of each, and while I had other plans for them, they worked for the sprinklers to the point that the green one now sits across the grass, and the red one across a mulch bed of nearly the same color. I could not believe it.

We have a space under the kitchen window that needs doing, and against the back of the garage where Missus would like a she-shed, or a space where she will be able to sit outside and work in the future. By, ‘in the future,’ I mean after that noisy goose finally dies of ole age! But then, a quick Google search suggests that he may be with us for another 20+ years… Maybe it is time for him to move to the water across the street! Apparently he is not like to leave us anytime soon.

With the flowers in place in the spots I have discussed, I think that planting season is about done here. If anything is to get root, and flourish it needs to have been in by now, or at least sooner than we can afford more. I can see a couple more trees going in, and I will be putting in the potato starts in either today or tomorrow. I have about 330 feet of potato rows to plant into in 11 rows. I may be out doing that tonight at sunset, or after, when it is cool. I know it is getting late in the season, but that is fine, as Missus prefers New Potatoes anyway.

We have a short, almost cool spell on us till around Friday, so it is a good time to get some mess cleaned up and sorted out. I would like to see the girls and myself picking up firewood down at the Logan City Dump on Friday. I am pretty sure we are all stocked up for the coming season, but I would like to get a trip or two in before summer’s weather is hot in earnest, and then go back down again in the autumn for the rest of the following year’s supply.

Our rejected goat has been staying in the duck run, and making friends out there in the daytimes, and coming into a crate in the house at nights. We are bottle feeding her milk from the fridge, same as we drink. In the days since we brought her in, she has started walking correctly, and even becoming more playful, and she has gotten fatter across the mid section where he backbone was starting to show before. She likes to follow us around in the house. It looks like she is becoming a part of our family! She’ll have to go back out with all the other goats when she is better, and when she is big enough to take a full hit from her mother and either withstand it with no problem, or even deliver it back to her.

Two Days Of Wanted Rain

The view out the window yesterday and today reminded me very much of England!  It has been cool, but not cold, and rainy since yesterday morning.  It has been cause to keep a fire burning in the stove and to keep indoors, too! 

The rain seems to be letting up for now, and is forecast to have gone by tomorrow, leaving only a little cloud, and green grass!  I welcome it! 

Just as the rain has been preparing the environment for spring flowers to blossom, I have been preparing the kids for a summer of gardening ease, with little to do for plants, and more to do with plant beds and the yard, and animals.  While I look forward to a year off gardening, I feel a little empty already at the thought of growing nothing!  Something should be in the ground and something should be beautifying the place!  I try to console myself with the thought of getting the last trees for our orchard, and getting them started. 

Our focus will be shifted from the gardens to the overall shape of our space, and hopefully updating ‘how we work.’  We have an expensive repair to do on the house in the next couple of weeks, and I plan to spend most of the summer paying that off.  First, I did order a new laptop computer, because Missus and I like to play a particular computer game together, and that is our Friday night unwind, but my current computer, which is set up to be my weather station, is not configured for gaming.  I also want the freedom to sit in the smae room as her, so we can talk back and forth, rather than having to stop and type or to talk via headsets.  Yup, I’m 50, a hobby farmer, and someone who will be playing the same old video game I have since the early 2,000’s.  Well, we have all got to have a way to unwind! 

I also foresee the computer helping out with this blog, and with office type stuff on the farm, so no harm, no foul for buying it. 

Our grandson will be visiting us through the summer still, but only on every other week, so I will use the odd ones to get firewood, starting this Friday morning with a trip down to scope out the situation where I get it.  We are nearly down to four cords of wood, and need to start piking some up for the coming year, to get it split and dried as best we can in a single season.  Then I can get to work in earnest on next year’s wood, and be a full year ahead, at last! 

I had hoped to have a tractor in the yard by this year, complete with tiller and back-hoe, and a loader ready to lift gravel, hay, animal fodder, and firewood.  The big repair has got to come first, so any hope of a Tractor is shot till fall at the soonest.  There was so much I needed to get done this year, and it looks like it will have to be done by hand, or with the help of a neighbor, if he is willing. 

I may have been confused in the clouds yesterday, but it looked like the mountain was almost completely clear of snow already, which is a bad sign for irrigation this summer.  The western drought is very apparent here in southeast Idaho!  It is a huge reason I am glad the rain has just picked up again!

The weather ought to clear up this week, starting tomorrow, and we are forecast to see low 70’s by Wednesday. I expect to find soem time to get some things done, provided I am not too distracted with a certain game machine.

This weekend we had a son over to visit, which was lovely. In addition to enjoying his company, he helped up to set up two new beds for our daughters. Their room is nearly reset in a way they should be able to keep better organized and clean. That meant the stuff they temporarily dumped into my den got removed! I have a nice little space that is almost all my own, except that it is also a passage from downstairs to the bedrooms, and sitting room upstairs. Some people have a “Man Cave,” I have more of a tunnel.