To dear mehh

To the individual with the signature "mehh", who responded to a two year old post of mine yesterday (and who identified herself, no less) I have this to say:

You, my dear, are a potty mouth. As evidenced by your trash talk, it proves that the fruit did not fall far from your family tree. Thank heavens, there is quite enough of you to go around.

Allow me to acquaint you with the facts concerning the incident. I'll wait while you look up the big words, okay?

Ready?

Ok, here we go. The horse was boarded with me originally after the purchase. The horse was not "rescued" from AC by the owner. It was purchased from a private party locally. Horse arrived about a CS 3.5 (Please dear, do look up Henneke Condition Scoring and learn about it, it is a valuable tool for all horse owners) and proceeded to gain weight easily. Horse remained in my care for over a year, and left slightly overweight, sound, and blooming with good health. What reasons the owner had to leaving are not mine to question-an owner may do as they chose with their horses.



From my place she arrived at your family's "facility". Six months later, this is what I saw with my own eyes at AC:






Now, for educational purposes, here is the same horse just a couple of days ago:




Now, do tell everyone just how it is, that a robust, healthy horse can go from plump to skin and bones in your care? What defense can you possibly imagine would be effective? You claim you "fed grain three times a day".....I'd venture an opinion there, but the photos speak for themselves.


Explain for us, your mother dinning the owner for board, after the horse was impounded by AC. Instead of fessing up and letting the owner know she was in trouble, your mother lied, and lied, and then tried yet more lies with the AC officers. Do you think she has paid any of the many fines assessed by the court over the years?

And too, you did know that court matters are public record? And that anyone can look up anything about anyone?

But you know this quite well, don't you? After all, your mother has around 70 records in the local court. How is that eviction going for you, anyway?

Now, look again at the pictures.....notice a difference there?

And so it goes

We're in full summer mode here, even if the weather is not very summer like. We've had quite the stretch of cool and cloudy days, punctuated with plenty of sprinkles. Sure cuts down on the watering the lawn and vegetable garden, but tends to bring me down with day after day of gloomy skies. I am sure we'll have a return to warmer temps and sun, eventually.

This year, we are tackling the firewood chore earlier than usual. The idea is to get it all cut, split and stacked before the silvers start running, lol To that end, my hard working husband has a large pile of logs already cut-and we've gotten the woodshed partly filled already. Tonight the plan is to split and stack as much as we can. After that, there is a pretty big pile of very gnarly looking stuff that has a fairly large diameter...I am pretty sure that once it's cut, I won't be able to even pick them up to get them on the splitter!

The garden is perking along, the only disappointments being the carrots and beets. I just have to plant those some other place because they just don't germinate or grow well there. I have plenty of bean plants up, and most everything is starting to get some size on it, thank heavens. A couple weeks ago, my son and I created a small bed out of some leftover material, and stuffed some greens in it-it's really taking off there and I am pleasantly surprised. Over the weekend, I realized I had about two flats' worth of miscellaneous veggies to do something with. Pretty danged small of course, from being in the flats so long. On a whim, I ran off to Home Depot and picked up some bagged mix. We put down a few inches of old horse manure and then topped it with the mix and stuffed way too many plants in there. If they live, great-if not, oh well. I couldn't bear to throw it all out, so anything that grows can be fed to the chickens. The new spot is where I intend to move some raspberries to next year anyway.

In the greenhouse, I have baby fruits-peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers. We just need some sun and warmth to really get it going. My one specialty basket of nasturtiums in there is doing very well-I can't wait until it gets a little bigger with more blooms so I can take a photo to share-very unique plant. Last weekend I finally got the greenhouse arranged and tidied up, which was a bit of a project in itself. Things tend to get pretty jumbled when you are potting up and planting like crazy :) Also over the weekend, I noted three honey bees actually inside the greenhouse, I was thrilled. And not so thrilled to find a wasps' nest there too. Not sure what to do about that, I think I'll leave that for my wonderful hub to deal with!

In between the gardening, we managed to get some red salmon in the freezer (yay!) and hub made some delicious smoked salmon to enjoy. He is very very good at making smoked fish, everyone loves it and it's gobbled up like candy. We tried making dog treats using the trimming from the fish (thin belly strips and etc) and it was a total failure. We'll try again I'm sure, but that was a big disappointment.

My replacement layers are getting some real size to them, my gosh they are getting big. Last night when I arrived home I found all the chickens out and about had a heart attack-you can't imagine how much damage chickens can do to a vegetable garden until you see it for yourself. I was fortunate they had not ranged far from the pen, yes indeed. It was a real Kaystone Kops episode, getting them penned back up-it took my son and I nearly a full hour. We did figure out where they'd made their escape and got that repaired easily enough. Silly birds, always something. The Yokohama hen has gone broody and we've given up trying to stop her-if she choses to sit on a few eggs and hatch a couple of chicks, so be it.

This week I hope to contact a few hay farmers, see how the crop is shaping up. Since we've had no rain at all in May here locally, I figure it's going to be a pretty late first cutting. Now the real question is, will my hay last until then? I am sure lots of local horse people are in the boat as I am, lol

It's slid into June already!

The last two weeks have been a blur of busy, and then some!

Let's see, the new greenhouse was dismantled and is at home-in piles on pallets. We finally got a quote about moving the wood frame green house and that was way over our budget. So, on to plan B or C or whatever. My primary purpose immediately became: Get gardening anyway!

First, I had to get moved into the greenhouse. Which meant moving a whole bunch of stuff out that we stored in there over the winter. Once that was done it was transferring all the plants down there, and continuing with hardening off the outside things. I cut way back on the number of plants compared to last year, as it was pretty overwhelming, lol From 28 tomatoes to just a dozen. From 18 peppers to a dozen. And so forth. Everything is looking very healthy and I have buds or flowers on many plants already-yay! Heck even the green beans in the planters are trying to come up, imagine that :)

I managed to get my pumpkins into the ground last week-fully three weeks ahead of last year. The garden got rototilled, thanks to a very generous neighbor and he did a stellar job of it too. It was some kind of work, but the garden is planted, yay! More beans, less cabbage this time, haha. My neice came over and helped too, could not have done it without her help over the past weekend.

Last night, with yet more help from a neighbor and two extra boys, I finally got my chickens corraled up for the summer. The adults are not very happy with their jail, oh my. The baby chicks are no longer small-they are darn near the size of my Yokohama hen. And boy can they eat! They have food and water 24/7, even if that means I loose some to waste. The added bonus is that I will now be able to find the blasted eggs! We have found several stashes of eggs around the property and have had to toss them all out of course. Silly hens, I have that laying box for a reason, lol

So the lawn is looking pretty decent, and I am full on into summer mode. Water baskets and bowls at the house in the morning, water everything else after work, and using the tractor sprinkler every other evening.

Yep, summer is here! Complete with sunburns, skeeter bites, and assorted bees, wasps, and hornets ;)