Beauty Farming Life

This is Brisbane and Sydney...they were laying on some pillows in the window one day when I snapped this picture.  What's funny is that I took the picture (several actually) and I went to pet Brisbane and he hissed at me! All I could think was "look but don't touch", ha! It's Friday!  Weekend almost here!

Scarecrow in garden, image courtesy of Southernliving.com OK.  Silly inspiration but hey, if you've always wanted one, then that makes it valid, right?  So for  the longest time I used to have a fascination with scarecrows.  Loved seeing them as a kid.  Some kids are scared of them but I guess the ones I saw were never scary.  Anyway, as I grew to adulthood, I never gave it much though.  And to be honest, even once we bought the property, and I was dreaming of gardens, I didn't think about it still. Then one day I saw this picture on a gardening website and I told 2nd Man, that's it!  We need a scarecrow at the farm!  I'm not sure if they really work, but they look great and I've got a big spot in the future garden that one would look perfect in.  Now I just need to figure out the easiest way to make one.  Looks pretty simple to me.  A cross of some sort and some old clothes. What about you?  Ever had a s...

OK, I was roaming around on the property recently and stumbled across this.  I have never see it before, so it's grown since the last time I was over there on that part of the property.  Kind of strange how something like this can just pop up.  I guess maybe it WAS there but smaller and I just didn't notice.  Still, with not a lot of plant diversity on our property, I like something different and unexpected. Not sure what type they are, but we'll keep them! Well, the cooler weather is gone, just as quickly as it came, ugh, but we'll be out at the farm this weekend anyway, checking things out.  Probably still no Big Green Zen Machine time, though the 4" of rain last weekend might have created some growth for this weekend.  And of course, there are those BABY CHICKS to see!

Vintage Valentine's Day postcard image 2nd Man... Thank you for our wonderful life. Thank you for always being there for me. Thank you for helping make the farm dreams come true. Happy Valentines Day! And of course, Valentines wishes from both of us to all of you, thank you for your online friendship.

When I left the house in town, this was the radar image.  Nothing was in the direction of the farm so I thought I might get there before the rain. Well, below is a photo of the road on the way to the farm.  Obviously, I didn't make it before the rain did.  Sigh.  We need it but how about during the week instead of on our weekends? So it's a day (possibly a weekend) of inside projects yet again. Probably for the best, it is still hot and humid and there is plenty to do inside.  There will be plenty of good weekends once the cooler weather gets here. Hope your weekend is good to you!

https://www.lehmans.com Recently, I blogged about Lehman's Non Electric being, other than seed catalogs, our favorite catalog to receive.  In the comments section of my post, several of you brought up concerns about "made in China" products.  I know that often, people don't go back and read comments later on.  In this case, there was a later comment made by one Galen LEHMAN, president of Lehman's. Because I felt his response was important, I asked him if I could use his note as its own blog post and he graciously allowed. "Thanks for your great story! I appreciate your kind words. The next time you visit, let me know. I'd love to meet you! I would like to respond to the concerns that were raised about products imported from China. We are committed to selling USA made products where ever possible. We have a written policy on this and it is very simple. We will never displace any USA manufacturer with goods from another country. Th...

Vintage "Help Harvest Cotton" poster, image courtesy of US National Archives This poster image is from WW1 and comes via the United States Food Administration.  As usual, with so many men serving overseas, the work at home still needed to be done, both for the allies and for the country.  Here they were urging people to help harvest cotton.  I like the tag line at the bottom of the poster; "Lock your desk, closer your door and do your part". Cotton was almost, if not just as, important as food harvesting.  Remember this was from a time before artificial textiles and widespread use of blends.  Cotton was truly an important crop that farmers were growing. Hope you are having a productive weekend.  Ours is a wash out so it's inside projects for us.  And eating.  Why does it seem we eat more when stuck inside?    LOL!  Oh well, we need the rain and on the upside, I don't have to water the fruit trees.  Now ...

Turn That Gas Down, vintage WWII poster, image courtesy of Britain's Imperial War museum With more than 60% of the country still covered in snow this weekend, here's a great poster from WWII Britain that reminded everyone to "Turn That Gas Down".  Energy savings for the war effort of course.  Pretty neat poster actually.  That image actually makes me want a nice cup of hot tea right now, ha.  Is it OK to turn the gas up for JUST a moment? Hope you are having a good weekend, yesterday was a shopping day for the irrigation supplies and today as you read this, I'm at the farm digging a trench, a long trench, if all goes according to plan of course.  More later!

More rain clouds Today was rainy again, from overnight to morning to midday.  These are the clouds are over downtown Houston.  2nd Man pulled  a muscle in his back (apparently while he was sleeping, go figure) and so we opted to stay in town.  Not much got done this weekend actually, except some cooking, a bit of  cleaning, and  some reading. I did get a great new book in the mail the other day that I spent the weekend reading through.  I'll write about it this week.  Otherwise, we just didn't do much of anything at all. Part of me feels guilty but then again, sometimes those are the best days, aren't they?  Hope you had a great weekend.

NO, not ours, but we'll still get to have access to her anytime we want.   So I was at the farm this weekend and I get a message from 2nd Family (they live on property at the front of ours).  She says "oh oh, guess what we found?". So of course I had to run to their house and see... Behold... CLOVER the kitten !   She was stuck in some brush near their house.  They looked for a mama kitty but they couldn't find her.  Poor thing cried for two hours while they cut away brush to get to her. Kitten playing under table Once they did, now she's home, finding the dining table in their house to be the most perfect jungle gym for exercising. Clover, the world's cutest kitten She's probably also wondering about this crazy man down on the floor crawling around making goofy noises, with sudden flashes of light coming from some strange machine.  I s this not THE most adorable face ever?  Sigh. In spite of this adorabl...

Last Summer, I blogged about our DIY seed storage bank or vault idea.  Recently, I realized we needed more space for our seeds, not to mention a way to make them more organized.  So  I took that same idea and multiplied it by four.  It was a rainy weekend and this gave me something to do. We love these cans.  They are  Empty Paint Cans . You can buy them just about anywhere they sell paint or, using link above, via Amazon.  They are very inexpensive, these were $3 each.  So for $12, I was able to get four so that I could divide our growing seed collection.  I came up with  Veggies, Herbs, Salad/Greens , and Flowers. Here is a shot inside showing the seed packets and moisture absorber. Rather than repeat the particulars of how I did this part, you can  CLICK HERE for the original post on it.  It's very simple to do and a great way to organize your seeds and protect them.  I put some labels on them, ...

What is this? Some might call it a "necessity is the mother of invention" moment. I might be more inclined to call it an "oh crap, I can't find what I need" moment. Homemade dibber type garden tool I used to have one of those tools for the raised beds that are called "dibbers", which is basically a pointed stick that you use for making holes in soil to plant bulbs, seeds, seedlings, etc. When I was getting ready to put my garlic and shallots in late last year, I couldn't find my dibber.  Curses!  I think it got thrown away accidentally when I was clueing out some boxes in town.  I dug around in a kitchen drawer and found a rubber wine bottle cork we had saved for some odd reason, and a long wooden skewer from a package of skewers.   I figured they might do the job. I pushed the skewer into the cork and it was done.  At first, I was going to use it like this by j ust using the skewer to push the cork down into the s...

There is a great new book coming out TODAY! It's called Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life . As many of you know, we have our Julia wall in the kitchen at the farm and we're even going to put up a framed picture of Julia for inspiration in the kitchen.  We love Julia and everything she represented. The author, Karen Karbo , was looking for bloggers to participate in living life as Julia for a week.  Unfortunately, due to other commitments, I didn't participate, but I still wanted to give her a shout out for asking me to do it and write a blog post in the spirit of the theme anyway.  Remember, I'm a guy, and she still asked me.  That meant a lot.  And of course Julia loved everyone .  While we didn't get to fully live like Julia  every day for a week, we did think of her during a recent visit to the grocery store. We were watching a cooking show and they were cooking with parsnips.  I told 2nd Man that we've neve...

I figured I better post this before it's in the 80's and 90's, ha.  Plus I thought those of you in the North and East might get a kick out of our 'snow'.  So the other morning, on one of our 'warned' days of freezing weather, most of Houston woke up to this.  Odd, little, white balls of Winter stuff.  Snow?  Sleet?  Hail?  Dippin Dots? (more on that later).  No, this is something called " GRAUPEL ".  What?  I know, us too, we've never heard of that. What the heck is graupel? It's apparently a Winter precipitation phenomenon that occurs when supercooled droplets of water collect and freeze ON a snowflake.  Who knew? Graupel closeup Tiny little white balls of hardened snow. It was actually kind of neat to see. Graupel in Houston As you can see above, when they started collect in one spot, it did look more like an odd type of snow...or maybe it looks like... Dippin' Dots Ice Cream, image courtesy ...

Many of my inspiration posts involve seating.  I'm not sure why, I guess I just feel like yards and gardens and just about any outdoor space, need spots to sit and relax.  Or observe.  Or rest.  Or doze off.   With our heat, we can't really have a metal bench, at least all metal, because it would leave blistering marks in the Summer.  So I've always been partial to this style.  Not sure what it's called, I've always said it was 'vintage style' or 'classic style'.  Now, I need to find a place that has lots of these for sale (and for not so much $, LOL) so I can put them all over the yard before next Spring. Hope you are having a great day, I'm going to catch up on comments tonight from the last few days.  Computer access has been limited, my apologies. Be inspired!

OK, this is not really a recipe per se, more like sharing something unusual that is truly a Southern dish.  Southwestern too.  We have it on occasion when we want to do something that's easy, it's cold outside, and we just feel like throwing caution to the wind, ha. It is called "Frito Pie".  What?  Never heard of it?   CLICK HERE  for the Wiki entry all about it.  No one knows the true origin but the 'recipe' always consists of at least Fritos, chili and cheese.  Anything else you want to add is entirely optional.  I myself grew up eating it just like this.  2nd Man grew up eating it at his brother's sports games where it was served IN a small bag of Fritos!  It can even be baked like a casserole.  This though,  is how we enjoy it most.  Sure you can go all fancy and make your own chili, and we have done that on occasion but really, after a long day at work, and a cold drive home, nothi...

Hobart the cat Here is Hobart, doing his best Darth Vader impression. He's is the funniest little (or not so little) cat, he just sits and watches.  Watches everything we do.  We call him the 'watcher' and say that he's trying to learn how to run the house so he can take over some day.  He also follows us (me usually) all over the place. He'll get up when I get off the couch and run along beside me and follow me into the kitchen and sit there.  Then he follows me into the bedroom and sits.  Then he follows me back to the living room and lays down by the door.  In those moments we call him "Lassie". Silly kitty! Smile, it's Friday!

Flowers around the fence, image courtesy of Southernliving.com Now that we have the fence around the garden, once I get the rest of the garden up and running, I'd like to do something like this.  I saw this picture a couple of years ago and saved it.  Now we have a fence to do this with! While we love the stone border, I'm not sure how practical that would be right now.  We'd need lots of stones and they would have to come from some outside source because there is nowhere on the property that has stones like that. Perhaps someday, but in the near term, I think I'd like to put some flowers like this around the fence, annuals such as marigolds (which grow like crazy here) some roses and a few perennials scattered amongst them.  Be inspired!

Cold front image courtesy of KHOU.com OH happy days, a cold front, our first of the season, is coming! Today, right  now, it's still hot and humid, but tonight we get a cold front and lows in the 50's and tomorrow is supposed to be an absolutely beautiful and wonderful down...cool and no humidity.  I have a long list of of outside things to do, I'll see how many I can get done. The garden area is overgrown with grass, the last few weekends of rain have meant I couldn't mow inside the fenced area so it's out of control. Also need to edge. And plant. And clean out the old beds. And trim some branches. Wonderful farm sky But I think the best part will be to just open all the windows and let the breeze blow.  There is nothing better than that on the first cool day of the season. M aybe I'll do less work and enjoy more of this first nice day. Have a great weekend and we hope you have nice weather wherever you are.  Updates as th...

Hobart, the hypnotizing cat This is Hobart, staring me down. He spends a lot of his time, when he's not sleeping of course, watching us.  We call him "The Watcher".  We figure that he's either a) trying really hard to influence our decisions, or b) he's watching to see how to do things so that he can eventually take over. You ever have one of those pets that just stares at you? More later this afternoon!

Sink a Sub, vintage poster image courtesy of Houston Public Library Wow, here is one that is sort of right in your face. As with all things during the war, conserving resources and recycling/reusing materials was of the utmost importance.  This one follows in the the save your scrap theme and is geared toward farmers.  Bring in your Scrap so you can help "Sink a Sub from your Farm".  Then they add "Brave Men Shall Not Die Because I Faltered".  That would sure make me save my scrap. Amazing that it's so hard to get many people to recycle these days.  It's getting better of course, but it could be way better. Reduce/Reuse/Recycle! Hope you are having a great weekend.  Ours has of course taken a turn we didn't expect, there was ZERO rain in the forecast, just cool weather... ...well the cool weather is here (low 60's) but look at this radar image...the red dot is the farm.  It is POURING rain this morning!  NOOOOO!  ...

Come, sit a spell on the porch with us... It might be the middle of "Polar Vortex" season, er, Winter, but let's time travel back to some warmer weather pictures to remind us of those warmer days. I was sitting in the rocker, enjoying the breeze one Fall day, when I decided to take some pictures from where I was sitting to share the view... This is the view turning to the right and looking at one end of the porch and the mudroom door... Then here it is, looking off the porch in the same general direction.  A little bit beyond that clump of trees is where the future barn and chicken area will be... This is looking straight ahead from where I was sitting toward the driveway and beyond the tree  (that I now notice needs to be trimmed now that Spring is around the corner, ha) is 2nd Family's back pasture... This is turning to the left somewhat, where you can see the garden area (and our usual parking spot).  You can also see the edg...