Spring is late

So this picture was taken on April 9th 2011, while the picture in my header was taken April 3rd, 2010. It is the same area of the pasture although not quite the same angle. The trees in the background are the same - budding out in the header picture, but not quite yet in yesterday's picture. See how late our spring is?




But I'm ready! When it finally warms up, I've got the flowers, peppers, and tomatoes started!

One month left!

Wow, I noticed that it's been well over a month since I last posted anything. Sorry about that, but I'm not really doing all that much with my horses right now. In fact, the summer has been so hot and uncomfortable that I'm not doing much of anything outside right now.

As of yesterday, I have exactly one month until my due date! So I guess, baby girl could come anytime now! I should post some updated pics, but I haven't taken any lately. I think I need to remedy that. I am definitely getting a big belly, but it's not too out of proportion yet. This picture is from a trip we took to go cherry picking and hiking in Door County, WI last month when I was about 7 months along.

I've seen some pregnant women with hugely protruding bellies. But, this is my first, so my stomach probably holds her in a little tighter. I promise I'll post some pictures of my current belly and of my growing horses soon!

I visited Cody at the trainer after she'd been there for a month. Cody looked great. She was fit and had settled into the training routine nicely. The trainer showed me everything she'd been learning, including how well she was doing with riding in the arena with other horses. She is also neck reining okay. Neck reining good on one side, but having a little difficulty sometimes with turning to the cue on the other side. Even though I didn't really want to keep her there another month, the trainer was very persuasive about wanting to keep her and further her more. Finances were the biggest reason I wouldn't have wanted to keep her there...I really wanted to just get a month on Cody, then possibly send Griffin to her in the fall. But my husband and I discussed it and since Cody is a forever keeper horse, while I am looking to most likely sell Griffin at some point, it is more economical to invest in Cody, since we know we will use her, she's already a great horse. But with Griffin, we are not even likely to get the cost of training back out of him if we do sell him...so, the decision was made to keep Cody there another month. Griffin's training will be delayed another year, since we still have not managed to get the round pen up this year anyway. And when we do, I've decided that I will do all his training, instead of sending him off. That should be do-able, since I won't be pregnant anymore by the time I get back to him! And now, it is almost time to pick Cody back up. She gets to stay an extra 5 days though because the trainer called me last week and said that Cody had caught a cold that was lingering, so she was going to give her 5 days off. This year has been a really bad year for respiratory infections...I've seen several cases of pneumonia in cows when I've gone out with the dairy vet. It's just been so wet and warm this year. Thankfully, Cody doesn't have pneumonia, but she does need her rest.

I feel bad that I haven't spent much time with my horses lately. But I see them everyday. I try to give them all scratches when I fill their water tank, but sometimes they are not all down at the barn. However, lately, I've noticed that they are spending a lot of time in the barn trying to stay away from flies, and the few times I've seen them out the pasture, they've been really irritated by flies. I've been trying to avoid putting fly stuff on them because it always inadvertantly gets on me too, and I don't want to expose my unborn child to pesticides. I have wiped fly stuff on them before the farrier comes though. But they were being driven so crazy that I decided I needed to get out there and get them all wiped/sprayed right away. I decided to try spraying them because it's faster than wiping and easier for me, since I don't have to bend over to get to their legs (hard to do now that I'm so big), However, I always fear that spraying means more exposure to me, especially if the horse dances around a bit while I apply it. I decided to risk it anyway. None of these horses have been sprayed since last summer, and Catlow can sometimes get a little dancy about it anyway, so I was concerned...but they actually all stood perfectly! I know that they knew the spray makes the flies go away. I did Catlow first, and she did jump at the first sound of the sprayer, but then stood perfectly still, and I did every inch of her whole body. By the time I was done, she was standing in complete relaxation with her head low and her eyes half closed and didn't even move an inch after I let her go (I caught them all in the barn and sprayed them in there). One by one, I got every horse. And I swear when I got to Griffin's turn, he was waiting for me to get to him because he approached me, I haltered him no problem and he didn't move a muscle the whole time I sprayed him. Kachina was last, and even she didn't move around at all. Darn smart mustangs. They impressed me today. They didn't forget a single thing about being sprayed with fly spray from last summer. After everyone was thoroughly coated, I was so amused by the look of utter relaxation and bliss on their faces. For the first time in a while, they had no flies biting them! And I don't think I got any spray on me. I made sure to stand upwind, and since they were all standing so still, I didn't have to worry about getting on the wrong side of the wind.

We've been working on quite a few projects around our house this summer.

The garden is giving me tons of tomatoes now.

I've started canning. So far I've canned lots of green beans...

..,some jam (jalapeno-apricot jam is so yummy), and a batch of stewed tomatoes, including cherry tomatoes.

Next I am going to try canning salsa. I've already dug up all my onions because they were finished growing. Most were kinda small because the soil is not the greatest in our garden. Broccoli is giving us lots, carrots are big enough to eat, although I want to let them keep growing till fall. And we have a couple ripe squash already! We ate a delicata and a japanese curry squash just the other night and they were awesome. I need to get some pictures up of my giant hubbard squash. I haven't tried to pic any of them yet, but they sure are huge!

Another project that goes along with the garden is our cold room in the basement. We started that this spring, and with the hot muggy weather, it became fun to work on it in the cool basement again, so we just finished it this week. It will be a great place to store all our squash, potatoes, onions, carrots, and canned goods!


The garden has been a big project, but we also put in a flowerbed with a retaining wall near our deck. It turned out to be a huge project because we got some advice from a professional landscaper friend, but we are finally done with it! The yard was really tore up for a while. All this equipment is part of Todd's irrigation business, but it came in really handy when we were digging out the wall and filling the bed!


Finished product!


Because we put in the flowerbed, we then had to reseed in our yard because it got all tore up, so we are currently in the process of getting some better topsoil in from some of the cow pastures so that the grass will grow a little better than it had. We'll get some good topsoil for the garden too before we plant next year.

Another project that turned out really well was putting a door on the back side of our house to go into the laundry room. We had a local contractor do that and also build a small deck off the back door. This door will be so convenient for entering with dirty/manure-y clothes. Plus, the deck is big enough to put one of those circular clotheslines on so we will try to save energy by line drying a lot of our clothes. And I want to do cloth diapers with the baby, so the line will come in handy with drying those too! And all just out the back door!

The back door will also be convenient for accessing the chicken coop that we are still working on getting finished. The chicks and turkeys are rapidly outgrowing their little pen and are ready for their permanent coop. We just need to get that done now.




And of course, the last big project that we are working on is getting the baby's room ready! My sister's are throwing me a baby shower this weekend, so that should be a big help in getting ready, but we do already have a crib, a changing table, and some dressers.

So, I promise to get some pictures of my 8 months pregnant belly, and some of the horses up soon. Griffin has grown so much, both in size and in his attitude toward me - he's actually become quite trusting of me without me even doing anything with him. I'm really excited to work with him, once I'm no longer pregnant and the weather cools off. I'll also try to remember to get pictures of Cody at the trainer when we go visit her next.

Poppies and "Turkey Walks"

I think my poppies are at their peak now. They are so beautiful, even if they are not quite what I expected out of my wildflower seed mix.



Here, my baby turkey's forage in my garden. When I let them out of their box, I call it going on a "turkey walk", because I walk, and the turkeys follow!


To illustrate, a visiting friend and I took them out. Here, they are all flocked up and walking with my friend!


My cats come along for the walk too. The turkeys used to be afraid of them, but they are getting very used to them and are almost close to ignoring them. The cats are not interested in the birds. They just want to follow me around.

I know my mustang blog has not been about mustangs very much lately. But I think this happens to all of us who get into blogging. We start off because this is a great outlet for one of our passions, horses, but at some point, we make blogging friends, and then want to also share other things going on in our lives. I think it's a natural progression. I'll get back to the mustangs when I get time and the ability to work with them, but for now, my horses are perfectly happy getting the summer off, getting fat, while I am also getting fat (pregnant). Life is good.

My big news this weekend is that Todd and I were married last Friday! We had a very small, intimate, special ceremony. It was wonderful. Because we are busy getting ready for baby, we are postponing our marriage celebration for next year, exactly one year from the date we were married. That will be when we invite our friends and family to celebrate with us. At that time, we will be more settled into our baby life and have time to plan it! We are definitely looking forward to it!

In other news...I finally got my garden weeded. It was terrible before. We'd had lots of rain, and the weeds just shot up, and I hadn't been keeping on top of it, but I made it a priority this week and I'm finally done! I will post new pictures soon, because my garden has really grown so much! I'm so proud of it!

I ended up losing one more baby turkey, so now I'm down to 11 (from 15). The rest are doing great though (cross fingers) so I don't think I'll lose any more. I think that two days of shipping was just a bit too much for them to recover from. Turkeys are different than chickens and I think they just don't handle it as well. I haven't lost a single chicken (yet), and they had even sent two extra (for 32 total!). Both the chicks and the turkeys are growing like my weedy garden. I had the turkeys out following me around the yard a bit today. It was so fun. I love turkeys. I will get pictures of that soon, too. I keep forgetting to take pictures.

Life is really good right now. :)

Flowers and new chicks!

The last catch-up post is about my flower beds and new baby chicks. First off, if you want to see cool growth, check out teh first post I did on my flower bed on May 13th. I had seeded some beds in with wildflower seeds, and then spot planted a few annuals and perennials to add flowers until they would come in thick. On May 13th, there were little green sprouts, but they were still tiny little things then.

Check them out as of last week!


And this week, they are even taller and starting to flower - just a few poppies and the perennials I'd planted right now, but I expect that in a few weeks, the bed will be vividly bright with color! Almost every tall plant now has flower buds on it and they are totally overshadowing the annuals that I had planted. I will have to take another picture of them now...I'm waiting for a sunny day to show them off now.

The bed in the back of the house is even more grown up than the front bed.


I had also put together some planters with various annuals, and now, a couple weeks later, they have just filled in with flowers and really look beautiful.



I have the best time checking on my flowers daily.

And my other project has been the arrival of our baby turkeys and chicks that we'd ordered in the mail!

The turkeys arrived last Thursday.




I ordered 3 each of 5 varieties: Bourbon Red, Royal Palm, Naragansett, Black Spanish, and Broad-breasted White. All 15 of them looked perky and healthy when they arrived, and I made sure that each one had found the water and drank. But the next morning found one turkey dead, a broad-breasted white., I looked them over, and the rest looked okay that morning, but I had to leave to ride with the vet. When I returned home that afternoon, I found two more that looked very weak: one of which was actually losing his balance and falling over onto his back. The other just looked really lethargic. I immediately started feeding them both electolyte solution from an eyedropper. By evening, the royal palm that had been falling over was actually looking better (he wasn't falling over anymore, but he was still looking lethargic). The bourbon red that was very weak, seemed the same. I was able to get a lot of electrolyte into him, but I could tell by the wrinkled skin on his feet that he was just too dehydrated. I couldn't get enough water into him. Then I noticed that one of the black chicks was looking lethargic too, so I immediately started giving him electrolyte. I thought I might be able to save him because it seemed I was catching him early enough before he got to dehydrated and he started out actively taking the solution from the eyedropper. In the end, the bourbon red and the black chick succumbed and died. The royal palm with the balance issue miraculously made a recovery and he is doing much better, although still not quite as active as the other chicks. But he's now eating and drinking on his own. So I lost three and I'm now down to 12. I think the rest are going to make it. The healthy chicks are extremely fiesty and think that I'm their mom. They come running over when they seem my head peer into their box and they voraciously peck at my fingers looking for insect treats (I feed them caterpillars and horseflies that I find).

The chicks arrived a day after the turkeys on Friday. My mom picked them up from the post office, since I was with the vet. All 30 chicks were perky and healthy and as of today (5 days later), they are still going strong and healthy and growing like weeds! We ordered 5 each of 6 breeds: two meat breeds that are the slower growing cornish crosses (5 are white and 5 are red), Welsummer (a dark brown egg layer), Cuckoo Marans (another dark brown egg layer), Gold Campine (an attractive white egg layer), and Blue-laced Red Wyandotte (a beautifully feathered light brown egg layer).





The chicks are not quite as tame as the turkeys, but then, I've never had chickens become as tame as turkeys do. Turkeys really imprint on their handlers, while chickens don't seem to do that. To tame chickens, you have to actively hold them and get them really accustomed to you. Turkeys seem to imprint on you by default. Because of that, they are so fun to play with. They respond to your voice and when you let them out to forage as chicks, they'll follow you everywhere and inspect everything you get your hands on. They are so fun.

The chickens really seem to have more of a fear instinct with strange noises and people...strange, since I think chickens have been domesticated longer than turkeys.

The chickens that we end up keeping from this batch will make a really nice egglaying mix with our current flock of mixed brown and green egg layers. It is so fun to get eggs that are all colors of the rainbow in your egg carton. And there is really nothing like home raised eggs in comparison to store eggs. Once you've actually had farm fresh eggs from chickens that are fed a varied diet (not just strictly formulated chicken feed), you will never go back. Their eggs have such great flavor. In comparison, store eggs have no flavor at all, and store yolks are usually pale yellow, where as our chickens have rich yellow-orange yolks that are not at all artificially enhanced.

We love our chickens and their eggs.

Garden is growing!

I have been terrible about posting lately. I would post more often, but the internet connection at our house is very weak and lately I haven't been able to get internet there at all. We share with my sister who lives next door, but I think the distance is just a little too great sometimes, especially when it's rainy outside it seems.

It is summer, and there are so many things going on that I'd like to post about, but I feel very behind, so I might do a few posts to break it up by topic and make catching up not so overwhelming!

First of all, my garden is growing! I don't have any super recent pictures, and the ones from even a week ago seem so outdated already!

These pictures are from a couple of weeks ago now.



The last couple of nights, we've had fresh lettuce, radishes and young onions from our garden, along with hamburgers from beef that Todd raised. A real home grown meal!

My horses are so fat and happy. I wish I had more time (and wasn't pregnant so I could ride and really work them). They don't mind that they only have to be pasture pets for now. You can tell that Griffin and Kachina are both still growing a bit. They are the only horses of mine that are not overweight on the lush spring grass!






I'm really pleased with both Griffin and Kachina's progress. I recieved their BLM title applications in the mail. The vet that I'm riding with will stop out next week to sign off on the forms, so then I will officially own them! Even though I hardly do anything with them, except go out to visit them in the pasture, they have both calmed down so much. Being with a stable herd of tame horses has especially done wonders for Kachina. She would always follow me around, but her hyperreactivity to things is slowly fading. She used to get snorty when she would try to follow me, but I was carrying something through the pasture (like a big bowl full of scraps for the chickens). Now, she is still leary about sniffing the bowl, but she will at least let me scratch her when I'm carrying it! And this is all without doing anything with her expect showing up and petting her whenever I happen through the pasture. I know it is not ideal. I wish I could work with them more often, but I also think that this calm slow approach is working with both of them. Even skeptical Griffin really lets me approach him and will even approach me out in the pasture to get a good chest rub. Griffin is quite full of himself usually. He's very polite with me, but he will try to chase and stomp my dogs (they know, and they stick super close to me, or stand outside the fence to watch when I am with the horses). And he's always roughhousing with Chico and Kachina. It cracks me up that Kachina likes to roughhouse with the boys. For such a petite little mare, she has some spunk and sass!

Exams are DONE!

AhhhhhHHHHHH! Finally! I'm done with school for the semester!!!! I just took my last final today! I think I did well in all my classes but we'll see when I get my final grades. So, now begins a summer of pregnancy, gardening, horses, and volunteering with a local vet. I'm also planning to take next year off school to be with baby and return the following year.

A lot has happened at our place in the last couple of weeks. Some good. Some bad. We had to put one of our dogs down because she attached our neighbor's dog. That was very hard, and it is still hard to believe that she's gone. Thankfully (for me) Jasper and Sage were not involved at all and so are still with me! I don't think I'd have dealt very well with having to put one of them down, even if they'd done something horrible.

We also picked up our little pony mule. She's doing great. She is so cute and very friendly. I don't have any pictures of her yet, but don't worry, there will be some soon. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to really like living with the cows. I mean, she's doing fine and hangs out with them just fine, but I can always hear her braying/neighing to my horses across the valley. She'd like some horse companions. Anytime anyone goes up to the barnyard, she comes running down for some attention.

We got our garden prepped and some of it planted, but I need to finish planting now that school is done. We got the cold weather stuff in two weeks ago.

I took the following pictures last week but I haven't had the time to post them.

Here is my herd hanging out with the neighbor's herd. They are conversing across the fence. They have a 12 foot space between them so they cannot actually interact, but they like to pretend.


Here is my front flower bed. It looks a little sparse now, but all those little green things sprouting are a wildflower seed mix I planted, so by mid-summer this bed should be absolutely exploding with color (at least that's my hope).



Here is our side yard that we recently planted in grass seed. The grass is finally starting to sprout. We had our doubts for a while, but I think it just needed to get warmer. Behind the hay mulch is our garden, and further back you can see the horses in the pasture.


This is the only part we got planted - these are onions, lettuce, sugar snap peas, beets, and radishes.



My herd has plenty of pasture now, but we still have a lot of hay left, so to reduce their pressure on the pasture, we keep the feeder full. They come in to eat out of it periodically throughout the day. They've become quite the close knit herd. Kachina and Griffin crack me up all the time - they both have so much energy and are always playing with eachother, rearing, running, just messing with eachother. Chico often gets implicated in these episodes too. But never Cody or Catlow.


They are almost all shed out now. Chico has dapples again this year. He had them last summer too, but I never saw dapples on him in Idaho (I never saw dapples on any of my horses in ID).


Kachina has shed out her dull faded winter coat into a bright peachy red summer coat. She looks very pretty.


But Cody's spring dapples beat every one elses! They are so vivid! Cody is a dark dark sooty buckskin and she now gets these dapples every spring as she sheds out of her dark winter coat into her lighter summer coat.


So, Griffin, Kachina, and Catlow do not get dapples, but they are beautiful none-the-less. Here Catlow shows off her lovely flaxen locks.

Spring rains

It finally rained here this weekend! We needed it badly. The pasture had halted growing and my flowers and our new grass seed were just not coming up! But now, everthing should get moving again!

While it rained softly, the horses hung out under some budding maples. They won't leave their green pasture for anything. In fact, when I call them in to their main little pasture to give a taste of grain and check on them, they come in willingly, but as soon as they are finished, they gallop back out to the pasture. They have hay in their feeder, and that main pasture has actually longer grass now than the big new pasture, but they think that the new pasture is the place to be!


I have had major spring fever this year. I think it had to do with the depression I was feeling in March (seasonal depression mixed with morning sickness and major hormone changes!). As soon as the local garden stores started carrying seeds, I bought my whole garden worth and made a schedule for when I could plant each one indoors to get them started.

These are my current seed flats. The biggest guys here are all tomatoes (heirloom varieties, a red bigboy type tomato, and a cherry tomato mix. I'm going to have so many tomatoes! But that's what I want! I LOVE fresh garden tomatoes and I can hardly bring myself to purchase the icky store tomatoes. I want to do a lot of canning this summer and make a lot of salsa. These seed flats also contain peppers (sweet, pepperocini, mixed hot peppers), broccoli and a few sunflowers I wanted to start early. In a few weeks, I'll get my squash and others started. I can't plant the started seedlings in my garden here until the end of May - the danger of last frost is mid-May.


I visit the garden store every week to browse. Just this last week, they got a bunch of vegetables in. I was disheartened to see how big their veggies are, while mine are just tiny tiny little sprouts still. But, I don't have to plant mine for a while, and the big plants would also have to wait till end of May, so it's silly to buy those now. I have plenty started from seed anyway. However, I DID buy a few flowers! I'm still going to wait to plant them out till later, but I couldn't help myself.


And here is my mean rooster, Rusty. Here he shows off his spurs to me. I think I might trim those spurs soon. I don't want him poking my dogs eyes out as he's trying to protect me from the wicked rooster. His eyes are fine - that's just his third eyelid showing because of the flash.