New Life Old Farmers

With summer in full swing our Hip Camp site “Pasture View” has had a steady stream of guests.

I am delighted to report that our campers have been fun to share the farm with. No matter their age, they seem interested in the animals, their names and their stories.

I’m always a bit surprised at this, but I guess if they had wanted the Ritz Carlton, they wouldn’t have shown up at a farm in an RV.

On the 4th of July our guests selected our location, as we back up to the Palouse to Cascade Trail. They are riding bikes on the trail as part of their year-long adventure of biking across America.

Being the 4th of July and this being the country, our neighbors had invited us down for a fireworks show over their pond.

This being the country, we invited our bike riding guests to join us for the show. We all jumped (some of us ‘carefully clamored’) into the bed of Whoa Nelly, for the drive down the road.

We parked Whoa Nelly and set up our chairs for the action. I knew we were there for the fireworks, but it didn’t keep me from literally jumping out of my seat as they lit up. What can I say, I startle easily.

The neighbor fireworks were the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Partly because it can only happen in a small country town, partly because my neighbors were so excited to put it on and especially because we got to share it with our Bike Riders.

Sharing Glory Farm with our guests is sharing what we love best about being here.

Sometimes you can just see the stress roll off of our traveling guests, as we did with Jean’s Dad.

…and we are blessed.

School is over and to be honest, it was something of a long slog to the finish.

One hour after school got out ‘they‘ (Our Little Miss and her entourage) showed up. We couldn’t have started the summer holiday in a nicer way.

The birthday blocks were a great hit, as were the colorful bags I’d sewn to store them.

Bags with the emphasis on the ‘s’.

Bag #1 was too big. It’s use was deemed to be a ‘picnic’ bag.

Obviously bag #2 was a tad too small.

Bag #3 was just right!

A house full of people you love is an excellent antidote to a tough year.

Every time we asked Our Little Miss, ” Where’s Uncle R?”

She pointed to the ceiling fan. He’s tall, but he’s not that tall.

I made the family classic ‘Covered Wagon’ cake, which made a lot of my people happy.

The plate is the one my mother always used to serve it… only the beggars during construction have changed.

Our Little M was not quite sure.

But she quickly came around.

The wind blew for the whole visit, but that didn’t keep us from playing croquet or the kids making me laugh so hard, that I was crying.

It was the best Father’s Day ever…

(Number 5 Son in the middle has grown so tall we made him kneel).

A precious time and picture.

And we are very, very blessed.

Number Two Son borrowed my car to visit Number One Son, so I drove Whoa Nelly to school.

I love country living where a ’52 International truck creates a delightful ‘ruckus’ in parking lots.

Another country living site is the beef jerky vending machine, which always makes me laugh out loud. (For the record this is high quality stuff from the butcher in the next town).

Glory Farm was recently full of cousins. Sharing life together in times of healing and planning the next steps in life is the greatest gift we can offer. (I just wish one of them would have told me we were wearing plaid.)

The Prom is ‘over’. Justin is a happy bull, but it is time for him to go to the Prom up the hill.

Then there are our free range chickens…. the time and tricks I’ve used to try and keep them out of my flower garden are immeasurable.

A few of the things that do not work…small fencing, water, screaming at them (well, this works for a little while) just to name a few. With 4 acres to roam, they pick the one place we don’t want them. Until now..

I was encouraged to try it as the fine print says it repels birds and crows, hmmm, that made me shake my head a bit. It smells like garlic, so we’re currently free of vampires as well and our personal favorite (read the fine print) armadillos.

Yes, we are blessed.

We’ve got fleece, not fleeced, but….

The boys were recently sheered. (I’m always so embarrassed for them after the fact.)

To add insult to injury their faces did not get the clean up they really require. How well they can see is a mystery. We’ve ordered clippers to give them a ‘fresh look’, but as we’re the ones who will be welding the clippers it is anyone’s guess how ‘fresh’ it will be.

We were past due to deal with last year’s fleece. We had been told an easy way to clean it. So I got busy.

I dump it out on an old sheet because we know it will be dirty. Alpacas roll in the dirt for their hygiene. The fleece quickly expands.

The more I try picking out each little stick and burr, I begin to question the whole…”it’ll be easy”. However, I trudge on, getting a very small pile picked sort of cleaner.

It floats easily so I move it to a bucket to soak out the first of 4 cleanings.

We start to wonder (down right question) the whole “it’ll be easy” instructions. Dual laptops begin watching every You Tube video about washing alpaca fleece we can find. We’re experiential learners, in other words we learn by trial and error with a heavy emphasis on ‘error’.

I move into the family room to continue ‘skirting’ (official fleece word for getting the crap bits out of the fleece) while watching more You Tube videos.

My Loving Spouse heads to Freddy’s to pick up the much needed bags prior to putting the first bit of skirted fleece in the washer for a spin dry. As I pull the fleece apart you can see the dirt fall out.

We spin the fleece dry and lay it out by the fire on top of an old screen.

We’ve only cleaned about 1/6th of the first bag, unbeknownst to My Loving Spouse.

‘Why did you empty all the fleece at the same time?’, he asked.

“I didn’t”, I explained. “This is just one bag.”

‘Oh…how many more bags are there…?’

“Eight.”

‘Ohhhhh…..’

We’ll be hosting a fleece skirting, bit picking party soon…you’re all invited.

There will be adult beverages, I promise

and we’ll all be blessed.

‘Someone’ had a Bee in his bonet.

‘Someone’ (My Loving Spouse) had been talking on and off for some time about getting bees. As I am allergic, he knew this would not be a ‘group’ effort. Then he met a few bee guys (Dave and Hugh) at church. Almost instantly 50% of all words coming out of his mouth started with, “Hugh Says”. 95% of all videos watched had bee keepers in them. 75% of discussions were about bees. Being a good wife, I listened to it all! I did have to draw the line that he was not allowed to wake me up at night to talk about bees. (If you think this clear boundary wasn’t necessary, then you’ve never met My Loving Spouse.)

Bee keeping equipment started showing up.

Then the day came. He took off early one Saturday morning to pick up his Nuc (nucleus) containing approximately 1600 new friends.

Hugh Says was there to help him get everything set up.

I was there from a distance to watch everything unfold.

Hugh Says picks up one of the frames showing My Loving Spouse how to make the transfer. Everything is done slowly. Hugh Says, says that the ‘nuc’ is quite calm.

My Loving Spouse transfers the second frame after spying the Queen.

Can you see her? Nah, me neither, but there she is with all of her papparazzi.

I’m told if they come toward me, do not swat them, just walk away slowly. (Check, got it). I did feel one fly into and bounce off the hood of my jacket, but that was all. No one got stung….this day.

The bees quickly become orientated and start returning with pollen. Apparently all the dandelions in our fields are now a ‘good’ thing.

‘Someone’ has one more activity to daily farm life. It is called Bee watching….

or checking on ‘his’ girls.

Life is sweet like honey (to be) and we are blessed.

We are hosting the Prom this year.

Agnes has been a bit anxious about getting a date, but we were able to invite Justin over for an extended stay.

Justin is a Red Angus bull. He is a bit of an ‘extra’ bull in his herd, which is why we’ve named him “Justin Case”. He’s a bit small, maybe he’s the ‘nerd of the herd’.

However, here at Glory Farm, he’ll be the big man on the farm as he has all the needed body parts.

Our friend was happy to loan us this ‘extra’ bull, as his girls didn’t need his service just yet and this means we’d be the one feeding him, while he is here. Win-win.

Spring is in the air and the pond is full. The skies are gorgeous.

The bulbs are beginning to bloom…

To say nothing of the weeds…

We’re hoping all the prom guests stay at the dance and no one makes an early break through a fence to attend an unplanned ‘after party’.

None of the chickens have pooped on my new door mat yet, and so what can I say….

…and we are blessed.

My Loving Spouse and I both have issues with spelling. However, we rock math. Alpaca math turned out to be a whole other subject.

We wanted 2 alpacas, so we got Benny and The Jett.

After Benny broke his leg in Dec. 2020.

We realized with alpacas 2 is a bad number. We need 3 alpacas, in case one becomes injured. We needed to get 1 more. (2+1=3)

Except…you cannot add 1 alpaca to 2. The ‘1’ will not be able to join the herd as they are a highly bonded kind of animal. The Extreme Alpaca people happened to have 3 little boys, they would sell us for the price of 2. (2+3=5)

Enter Carlos, Santana and Smooth…

Now we have 5 alpacas, instead of 3.

1 of them (Santana) makes the mistake more than once of spitting at My Loving Spouse. (I’m pretty sure this is why he was the ‘free’ one in the ‘buy 2, get 3’ offer.) We have a rule at Glory Farm. “If you’re not needed, you better be nice.”

4 alpacas would be fine, except again, 1 alpaca cannot go to a different herd successfully, even beautiful, but Spitty Santana.

Jett had become so protective of the herd, he began making it difficult to walk across the field. A good, but annoying trait.

We decide to re-home/sell Jett and Santana. They will be their own herd in their new field at someone else’s farm. It is difficult emotionally to re-home animals. As we prepare to separate the herd of 5, the 3 we are keeping move where we want them with ease. The 2 getting a ‘fresh start’ are both a complete pain, reinforcing our math. (5-2=3)

Santana & Jett’s new owners are enthusiastic young men! We feel confident of their ability to handle their new 2, what they lack in knowledge they will make up for with strength and good humor. As they drive off, my Loving Spouse mumbles a few British ‘blessings’ upon Santana.

We’ve now landed where we wanted to be…at 3.

Benny, (no Jett), Carlos (no Santana), and Smooth. Their cool Rock & Roll names don’t make sense anymore, but we’re okay with that.

…because they are nice and nice is important.

…and we are blessed.

As spring comes so do BIG jobs. We were feeling a tad/lot overwhelmed. We had a burden of work to do and little time to do it. It was hanging over our heads. How could we simplify our life?

A Mini-backhoe was dropped off as My Loving Spouse had a hole to dig. Major plans for a new irrigation box. Sounds simple, no? No! Our Handy Man in Training spent most of Saturday down in a muddy hole.

A wooden box with no bottom is replaced with a taller wooden box with a bottom. (Cue applause)

Tightly fitting around the two irrigation pipes was a must. My Loving Spouse builds the box in place with help from the Handy Man in Training and Number Four Son, (who was on a ‘break’ from working with me).

(The hope for the new irrigation box is to force the water up higher in the box. Thereby utilizing gravity to move the water where we want it. No more gas pumps and more control of using our irrigation water for us and our hungry herd.)

The willows were filled with ‘Widow Makers’. It wasn’t safe for the animals and was in dire need of a huge cut back and clean up. (This involves chainsaws and muscles) Number Four Son and Number Four Wife had offered to bless us by coming over for a day to work.

I cannot keep up with all they do, and I am on my tractor.

Agnes and Kirk look on while Number Four uses the back-hoe to scoop up Willow bits left and right.

By the end of the day, My Loving Spouse and I are hitting the ibuprofen and counting our blessings.

-grateful for young hard workers that share themselves with us

-for the amazing progress that was done

– grateful that the tractor is not in the middle of the road, where it was when I ran it out of diesel. (Yes, I do know you’re not supposed to run diesel engines out of fuel. Luckily, My Loving Spouse knows how to fix it, as this might not be the first time this has happened).

My Loving Spouse rebounds from ‘overwhelm’ to…

“Let’s get bees…”

and we are blessed,

especially by those who share themselves with us.

PS: Gunner wants you to know, that camping for a few rainy days was the best part of Spring Break

We do not have an Alexa, mostly because we don’t want one. We do have something on the remote of the TV. It doesn’t work well for us. The first time I tried to use it, nothing worked. Finally the TV got frustrated and a message came up telling me to hold the button down. (Maybe it wasn’t the TV’s first rodeo).

My Loving Spouse’s does not speak ‘American’. As he says, he speaks “The Queen’s English”, which is all well and good unless your TV speaks ‘American’. He tried to tell the TV that he wanted to watch ‘Tough as Nails’. The TV said, “Toss a Snail?”. The Bad British word didn’t work either.

My family had the original Alexa. It was called ‘Hey, Ellen’. ‘Hey, Ellen’ was a more obedient upgrade from their previous model which was called ‘Hey, John’.

‘Hey, Ellen’ what time is it? I would run to the kitchen and report back.

“The big hand is on the 12 and the little hand is on the 5”.

‘Hey, Ellen’ also worked as the TV remote. “Hey, Ellen, change the channel to the 7”

A lot of my kids at school seem to be suffering from ‘Hey, Alexa’ syndrome waiting for someone to spoon feed them the answers. Part of my job in the library is to teach them how to use the library. The older kids get the information they need to figure it out. The little ones get to use the upgraded system called, “Hey, Miss Ellen”, because I just want them to love books and technology cannot replace that.

We just got speakers for the house, so I could enjoy more music than the phone in my back pocket provides. We asked one of our young techy friends to tell us what to get. We’re now trying hard to not ask him how to make them work.

I am on a steep learning curve. The dog will be happy to know that on night 2 he won’t have to listen to piano music all night. I’ve figured out how to switch the kitchen one off, when I’m trying to listen to the sewing room one. There’s a fair chance I will do a bit of yelling at them, but as we didn’t get the Alexa ones it won’t really help.

Now if they made a Hay, Alexa…

… I might be interested.