No, we didn't drop off the face of the earth...

We've just been busy and the blog got abused. We have put up a lot of hay this year(probably around 850 acres). I think we have put over 1,500 bales on the baler this year, all on dry-land hay! We put up a bunch of hay and our neighbor hired us to do his as well. Most of the time Dad would cut out a field and then Mom and I would take turns cutting. Danny and Jessi would usually rake although Mom got her fair share of it. Dad and I were the the balers. It took us about two weeks to get everything finished. The rain kind of tapered off starting late in June so we hardly had any hay get wet. However, we could use the rain now.

Now for the pictures!

This picture was taken from the tractor in "thinner" hay,

Here is a blurry picture of some windrows,

Good hay,

Here is a pasture we decided to hay. We worked it up about five years ago and planted alfalfa in it. The hay wasn't too bad considering it used to be almost bare here. We still got about a bale and a half an acre, but compared to the field in the above pictures, which we got about three bales an acre, it didn't look so good. Although what it lacked in quantity it made up for in quality.

Here I am baling.

An aerial shot of our best field.

I still have an extremely late post I started in the middle of June that I still plan on posting.

D.J.

Drawing Sam

Since I like to draw, I decided to post how I digitally drew a picture of Sam.

First, I drew and colored a picture of him and scanned it onto the computer.

When I got it on the computer, I drew lines on it so I knew how to color it. (The lines are on a separate layer.)

After I did that, I used a grass brush to draw the base coat of fur. (This was done on a layer just under the lines.)

I then used the mouse to draw the main fur that you can see on a layer above the one in the above picture. Unlike the base coat, I had to make sure it went the right way.

To finish off, I blurred the fur so it looked more fuzzy, put shadows and highlights on the head, and I added smaller furs and stuff around his head. After that, I added grass with the grass brush and made the sky.

I used a picture as a reference. The program I use is Photoshop CS4. For someone who doesn't want to buy Photoshop, my advice is to download a free program called GIMP. Though not nearly as good as Photoshop, GIMP is a good program to experiment with.

Jessi

Chickens and stuff

I decided to do a post on chickens in general. Here is a picture of the chicken coop. As you can see, it has three rooms in it. The room in the middle is the main coop. The room on the right is the brooder room. The other room is a spare room.

In the main room, the roosts are attached to a rope so I can easily lift them when I clean the coop. The feeder is under the nests.

The brooder room. The extra saw horse is for the chicks to perch on. (This picture is an older one so the chicks are smaller. The really small chicks are the broilers and leghorn.)

One of the chicks. These chicks are now free ranging but they don't go far from the coop yet.

A few weeks ago, my family went to town but I didn't go with them. They called and said that there were some chicks at the feed store but from the description, I thought they were close to the age of my chicks. I told them to get five white leghorns. It turns out they were about three or four weeks younger than my chicks. After I got them, I kept a close eye on them to make sure the other chicks weren't bothering them. Everything seemed fine until I realized four of the five chicks were not white leghorns but cornish crosses. I figured it might be a good thing they were broilers since they would grow fast so they'd catch up with the other chicks.

All was going well until I got a cold. Mom was taking care of my chickens when the other chicks decided the broilers, who by this time were about the same size as the other chicks, tasted good. Luckily, I went to the coop before they were all killed. One was dead so I separated the three remaining broilers and the leghorn and put them in the other room.

Pictured here are the three broilers and the one leghorn. They are the same age and you can see the difference in size and shape.

Here are the wild geese and their goslings. This is the first year they've raised their goslings on our reservoir.

They are a little older in this picture.

Jessi

May

I thought I would tell you about how our month went as it draws to a close. It started out kind of cold, but warmed up as the month progressed. We started calving late in April and into May. We are pretty much calved out now. We didn't have any real trouble calving so we are thankful for that. Danny also picked up his bees early in the month. You can read all about it on his blog, Beeginning Beekeeper. One of the biggest highlights was we had much more rain than usual. (More on this later.) Dad fortunately got the alfalfa seeded across the river before it started raining.

Here is a picture of Blue Mountain that was taken on the twenty-first of May,

Like I said, it was much wetter than usual. These are pictures that were taken the twenty-second when there was supposed to be a branding. Needless to say, the branding was postponed.

Last night at about 12:45 I woke up to rain and hail hitting my window. Luckily the hail didn't get too bad. When I checked the rain gauge this morning this is what I saw,

Our other rain gauge showed an inch, but I didn't take a picture because the markings are almost worn off. With this rain it increases the rain for the month to around five inches!

Our neighbor who lives about ten miles away has a weather station you can check from the internet and see stuff like temperature, rain, and other stuff. You can access the weather station here. This is what it shows for rain right now.(They only got three tenths last night when we got an inch though) Update: I just found out that it updates on here so now the month rain is for June.

That is a lot of rain for where we are. We might have gotten even more than they did though. I think our average yearly precipitation is around ten to twelve inches so we already have a really good start.

It is really wet so the grass is growing and should continue to do so.

Looking west,

Towards Danny's beehives,

Looking south towards some of our cows,

Looking east,

We collect water off some of the house and shop for Mom's garden because our well water has high alkalinity and isn't good for plants. With all the rain we've gotten we figure we have about 11,000 gallons of rain water stored! We won't be able get anymore though because we ran out of water tanks. What a good problem to have!

Here is a picture of the shop with the 1,600 gallon water tank. There is another tank in the shop that holds about 1,800 gallons.

This is a picture of Mom's new garden.(Notice the water tanks on the left side of the picture.) She has another garden by the creek, but she watered it with well water(when we didn't have rain water) so the soil isn't very good and gets really hard. We still planted stuff in it just in case this one didn't work out. This is the first time we have planted this much in the new garden. We only planted potatoes and a few other things in it last year. Dad put manure on it and plowed it last year. He disked it in April and we (mostly Mom because all of us kids got sick) planted it.

Here is some corn that is coming up,

Some radishes,

The onions came up really fast,

We tried putting plastic on over the watermelons to keep them warmer and moist and it seems to be working. The only problem we had was the plastic kept trying to blow off. Notice all the dirt we have on the edges.

Here are some of the watermelons that are coming,

The peas seem to be coming really well. That is good because they never have come very well in the other garden.

A picture of our house,

D.J.

Snow

Today we woke up to a couple inches of snow. Yes, that's right, snow in May. Here are some pictures.

Looking east,

Looking west towards the barn,

A picture of the snow and grass,

By afternoon the snow had all melted off and the sun even came out. As you can see from the pictures it is starting to green up due to getting about an inch of rain in the last couple of weeks.

Here you can see Blue Mountain,

Here is a picture of the sun,

I hope it warms up a little bit since we are now calving. We normally try to fly every day to check on the heifers that are calving. All that flying is just fine with me though. :)

DJ