Sunday, July 22, 2012

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Llama shearing and garden produce!

 
Well, I needed to do some shearing, as the wool inventory is getting low for the little shopkeeper, so I rounded up Regalo, and brought him down to the little chute, that I use for shearing and other health management. I sheared off his heavy wool coat and also trimmed his hooves and then gave him some worm medicine also. Below you can see my nice and trimmed up Regalo!
 I did also trim up Lily our little brown female, but I didn't get pictures as I was trying to finish before it got to hot out. Then it was on to mowing the yard!

 The shearing along with lawn mowing took place Saturday when it was a little cooler out, and today I worked on cleaning up the garden, in other words pulling weeds, and harvesting some of our produce.Below you see two zucchini that I found while pulling weeds and I had picked two smaller ones yesterday for our supper. There are many more coming along with a wide variety of other items.

I also picked what few pea pods we had, and the peas this year did not yield much for us, I got them in later and then and they didn't germinate very well, and what few plants came up did not like the heat we have had the last 3 weeks. I have lot of bean blossoms and some of them are converting into beans.

It was a hot dirty job, but now things look really good and hopefully we will get some more rain soon. Otherwise I may have to water the garden some to make sure all the produce coming will finish developing. 
It won't be long and we will have green beans and tomatoes along with the zucchini and lettuce we already have!


Sunday, July 15, 2012

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Hot humid days! and Fans!

Well, we have been experiencing more of a Minnesota summer that last few days.

It has been hot, temps in the low 90's and also humid, which means the electric fans are running constantly in our home. We do not have air conditioners, or central air. I am not complaining as the nights cool off enough to allow the house to cool down and in the morning we can shut a few fans off to enjoy the peace and quiet.





We have 4 fans running right now including a ceiling fan in our bedroom, which helps to keep the room cooler of course. Yes we may be using some electricity, but at least we are a little more comfortable, and considering we typically only get about 2-3 weeks a year when we need to run the fans this much, we are ahead int he long run!

Monday, July 9, 2012

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Kitten Update!

Well, the kittens got to stretch their legs tonight on the porch, and they attracted lots of attention from the dogs, partially because they had just snacked on some soft tuna cat food.
 They are used to the dogs being around, and they didn't seem to mind the attention.
 We have been keeping them in a cage on the porch, because mama cat Gracie, as moved them twice to the neighbors about 300 yards away, where we have retrieved them twice!

Saturday, July 7, 2012

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July 4th Storm Damage

 
Above you see one of the trees we lost in the July 4th storm that rolled through our area, this tree was the tree the tire swing was tied too. part of a couple of large oak trees, that are int he corner of our yard close to the lake. 



 We also had a piece of our facia blow off the side of our roof, which caused some of the soffit also to fall out, and this will need to be replaced. We didn't loose any shingles so this will just be about a 10 minute repair job hopefully.


We also lost about the 3 jackpine trees along the fence row which are located in the pasture. 


The biggest tree we lost was a huge old popple tree located along our driveway just north of the house. It tipped out of the ground form the wind and all of the rain we have had made it easy for it to be tipped over, in the process it caused heavy damage to an old birch tree right next to it and that tree will be removed also.
 
As you can see I have to fire up my chainsaw to remove all of these which means this weekend will be filled with the noise of the chainsaw. 

Oh by the way we lost power for about 12 hours as a tree in our pasture blew over and took out the power line between us and the neighbors. We didn't see a lot of damage else where in our neighborhood, but they were a few other trees down not to far from our property. Other than that all is well and no one was hurt, and the power was back up by Thursday noon!