Snow and watermelon

I'm still playing catch up. Here are a couple of recent things that have happened.

We got a couple inches of snow on the eighteenth of September. It melted off pretty fast though.

A shot looking towards Blue Mountain,

It also got cold enough to freeze the watermelon vines so we were forced to pick all of them. Fortunately we have a meat cooler to put them in.

Here is a picture of me with the biggest melon we harvested this year. It weight in at twenty-two pounds.

And a picture of it being cut up.

Recently it warmed up and has been really nice. We are in the process of hauling hay. I might make a blog post for that too.

I'm also hoping to get a blog post written about our trip to Hot Springs SD sometime.

DJ

Spring and summer recap

Now for the yearly post. Well, not quite that bad...

Early in June we got hit by a freak thunder storm. I would say it passed over in half an hour, but our rain gauge still showed eight tenths, but I have to wonder about its accuracy. One of our neighbors who lives a couple of miles up the creek got two inches and Buck got one and a quarter inches. The creek really ran. A few days later dad was riding in a draw and there was debris in the trees about eight feet high. The rain wasn't very widespread though because it was dusty about five miles away.

Here is a picture I took once the rain started letting up.

The trees got watered.

And so did the garden.

The water tank by the shop was overflowing.

Here is a picture I took of our field east of the house showing how tall the grass is.

Here are some pictures of some cows and calves.

Another interesting thing was when someone Dad and I know buzzed our place in a P-51 Mustang.

We went to several brandings this spring. Here are some pictures taken at the brandings.

DJ and Danny,


Dad, Jessi and DJ,


DJ on Comet,


Danny and Dad,


Dad and Jessi,


DJ

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