Today was Father Day! We had a leisure day, the guys didn’t work their butts off all day which is the first. We stay pretty busy so a complete day off is weird.
Yesterday the guys finished the goat house! It has a few finishing touches to fix but it’s fantastic! The goats are out of the drafty trailer. And the chickens now have more room to roost at night. Sig also has more places to hang out while he’s on duty at night because we can leave the big part of the trailer open. So everyone is moving up in the world just a bit.
Next order of business in the animal world is a guinea house and a lean-to for the chickens. Then the big red trailer will be completely out of the picture! While the trailer has been a place holder and housed the animals when we arrived, I have been itching to get them out of there. They have been sleeping and laying eggs underneath and we even had one of our roosters crawl under there and die. So that trailer needs to go! We can't monitor their health while the trailer is still present because they hide under it all the time. Right when we got here I found out that the chickens had lice! I was horrified. Still am....My thoughts are that they must've gotten it from the wild birds. They were landing in the pen a lot and hanging around a lot at first. Now the dogs chase them off, but in the very beginning the dogs were not in the pen full time as they were still not used to each other and were still becoming friends. But anyway, the trailer makes medicating them a serious hassle. I will be happy once it is parked elsewhere and I can go back to regularly monitoring them when they go to roost at night. I feel like we have eradicated the nasty infestation, but until they are all accessible to inspect from the roost each night I won't know for sure.
We have made huge progress on the garden! I posted in an earlier photo back in one of my first posts, the change has blown me away! This garden will be glorious and full next year. This year we are playing catch up. We have some soil issues. We did a little experimenting with the different soils we have seen on the property and overall we are neither impressed nor discouraged. But it has shown us that our compost game is going to have to be pretty hardcore. We currently have a compost for all the soiled animal bedding. So that will be ready for us next year as it is too hot to use right now. Mom has been the primary person in the garden. She has been working so hard!! I’m so proud of her, she has transformed the space in such a small time. Between classes with my kids, laundry and general cleaning plus animal chores it’s hard to get into the garden with mom as much as I’d like. Gwen has been busier than usual and keeping Amber really busy as well. So mom has been a one woman show pretty much. My husbands been in there working his butt off too. He built some giant raised beds that are 3ft deep and they are fantastic! It will be so exciting to see our crops pop up in that bed again and again every year. Today I took my mom an iced coffee out to the garden, like I said she’s been heading up so much of the work out there. I was trying to get Clay down for a nap but wanted to take her a treat since she was working so hard and I felt bad that I couldn’t be out there beside her. So I take her the coffee and tell her I’ll be out as soon at I can then I believed I complained a little about the the lengthy attempts to put my youngest to bed. She just laughed at me and said “ I did my time, now I get to play in the dirt!” 😂 Way to rub it in mom! Now I don’t feel so bad that she’s working in the hot sun and dirt… she’s clearly having a blast.
Something we have just had to accept in the last few weeks is that realistically we are setting ourselves up for next year. We will be grateful for whatever we get this year. But the reality is that we were unable to get all the garden things going in a timely manner so we are playing catch up. We will have a bountiful garden and later a year round subterranean green house that will provide for us into the winter months. We have broken ground on that and will be putting our corner posts in this week! We have been waiting for them to finish soaking, we are pretreating them to avoid rotting and hopefully this greenhouse will last us at least 10 years.
A continuous battle we face is a lack of lumber. Before each project we have to map out our lumber needs. First the tree is chosen. Then its falls! Garret fell the last one and it was a big boy! It was also rather near my trailer and our animals so I am very thankful it went right where he wanted it and not in any other direction! After the tree is down it has to be limbed. We have a pretty large pile of tree limbs right now, the goats have been enjoying the ones we toss into the paddock. We will have our wood chipper up here at the end of the month so we will be able to begin work on all the limbs, they will work nicely for bedding for the animals once they have gone through the chipper.
This bad boy went down a few weeks ago and has been supplying us with lumber for our garden projects thus far. (This is the above mentioned tree Garret cut down)
We attended the yearly potluck at the old school house up here on the mountain. We met a lot of neighbors, which was really nice. We were also made aware that people had heard about us and are betting we don’t make the winter. Whether or not they are betting against us coming out alive or just betting we bail for the winter season I’m not really sure. But they don’t know us…so their uncertainty on us making it does make a bit of sense. However I can’t help but be a bit shocked. We have been buried under a ton of snow and fared just fine in the past. We have removal equipment and are no strangers to snow removal… so their sceptaeism is a bit funny. (Hopefully I don’t have to eat those words later) Either way we got some phone numbers from our neighbors with the offer to let them know if we need any help. So that was nice! We also met some new neighbors, so we are officially not the newest people up here. The property that our easement for the road runs through was for sale for a while and was just bought. The new owners are from Washington and will be seasonal until next year.
We have found even more edible/medicinal plants in the last few weeks! Here’s a list!
- purple vetch (a part of the pea family)
- orange honeysuckle
- heals all
- stinging nettle
- yarrow
- mountain rose
- camas Lilly
- trout Lilly
I know there are more but I just can’t think of them all!
So far we are about half way done on the road. We can still make it to the top by winter at this rate. It will be such a victory!! Once up top a new race begins. A small barn and coop, move the guineas new house up top. Dig out some flat spots and then begin building covers for the trailers to protect us from snow. Then we need gravel. Lots of gravel.
Here’s a funny story for you. And I’m not sharing it to poke fun at my sister. I’m just sharing it to keep it real! Cause I describe this place in such a positive light. And don’t get me wrong it’s gorgeous. But we have snakes up here. Gardner snakes. Maybe others, but for sure Gardner snakes. Amber hates snakes. Ambers not a screamer by the way. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen her scream and spaz out about a bee or spider. But as luck would have it her kryptonite is snakes. And we have snakes! So today while all three of us girls were in the garden Amber notices Gwen holding something. She asks Gwen what it is. Gwen says it’s a toy!!! But this toy looks like a snake…so Ambers losing it standing in the garden. Finally I go over there and confirm it’s a toy. But Amber was worked up. Later we go to the pond while the kids nap and have some girl time and relax on our new floats and enjoy a drink. It was wonderful. I had a lovely time. Ambers afternoon ended with a baby snake jumping into her lap. We witnessed hilarity… all I know is we were talking and then she was screaming. Flew up out of her floaty and started swimming. I cackled like a hyena. I felt like a kid again because my mom scolded me for laughing at my sister. But hey! I come from a family of strong women and watching my sister levitate to get away from a weeee lil snake just killed me dead. So I got yelled at by my mom at 31 years old. But I watched my sister walk on water so it was a good old fashioned family fun time! Perhaps I will block my sister from this blog post. I do rather like living. And I think she may smother me for sharing this story. But come on! This is brand new information for me! I didn’t know she was that scared of snakes! 😆 So our pond has a few wittle baby snakes.
We have had a few pretty awesome storms lately! Last nights was a doozy. Jagged hail the size of quarters. And the light was just right so you could see the giant raindrops falling from the sky when you looked up. It was bizarre and beautiful! Bailee and I took the new quad for a ride and the storm began shortly after. We ended up parking under a tree to wait out the lethal hail!
Update on our truck! We get our truck back after over a month of it being in the shop waiting for a new engine. Ours blew while making the final trip up the mountain with my parents trailer. We are going into town Monday to pick it up. We will be registering it as well, so we are a little bit closer to being officially no longer Oregonians.
Bailee and Alex have a few projects going. One is putting a chainsaw engine in her quad. She’s had a lot of fun cleaning the engine up to prepare for this little experiment. I love watching her work. She is so focused and rippling with excitement.
Here are some homestead photos! It took me so long to put together this blog post. We have been so busy and I just couldn’t find the time. But here it is at last! 😆
This was a stool I made for Gwen for her birthday. I’ve been working on wood burning and decided to make this for her instead of buying a present. 😍 This is a sign I’m working on for the kids play house. It’s an old tree like the one by an old homestead a little ways away from ours. The finished sign will say Scully Homestead. The area we live in is on Scully creek. We have another broody duck! She’s sitting in 11 eggs. We have three broody ducks total. So hopefully one will carry out the deed and actually hatch some babies.
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