Recently I had a visit from Flat Aggie as she was passing through Southwest Missouri. She decided to swing into the area to see what was new on our Agriculture front.
Have you met Flat Aggie? No? Well let me introduce you. Sarah who blogs over at The House that Ag Built is a 1st Grade Teacher who is trying to teach her students about agriculture all around the state of California and the country. They read a book called Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown and based off that is how Flat Aggie came about. Flat Aggie travels from farm to farm around the country learning about and experiencing Agriculture.
Now I keep saying “she” but if you look, mine looks more like a boy. The original Flat Aggie was a female but she got lost in the mail somewhere so Sarah’s class made a Flat Aggie troop. The troop included 2 boys and I got one of them, however before I clarified this I sent it back to her with she’s/her’s etc so don’t judge me too much 🙂
Flat Aggie came just in time to help us around here. The first thing she got to do was help brushog the field.
The tractor was acting up. So she got to help clean out the engine to see if they could find out the problem. She learned a very valuable lesson, if you are going to stick your hands in the engine of the tractor, make sure the tractor is turned off so you don’t lose any fingers.
Next she helped check to make sure the tractor had diesel fuel.
Once they got the tractor back up and running it was off to the field to brush hog the cedar trees down. This is a new field we’re getting ready to start putting into hay production and cedar trees can grow in the poorest of conditions and take over an entire field so they need to be taken down.
Once the cedar trees were knocked down, it was time to load the dogs up and head for the house.
The next day Flat Aggie got to help us put bees into our beehive.
First things first, you have to suit up so the bees don’t sting you. You have a helmet with a net. The net zips into your suit. The suit covers you from wrist to neck to ankles. Then you have large gloves to protect your hands. Make sure you wear tall boots so the elastic on the bottom of the suit has something to be snug against so your ankles don’t get stung either.
Two very handy tools are a Bee Brush which allows you to move bees out of your way without crushing them and a hive tool which helps pry the boxes apart and pull the frames out. The frames contain the honeycomb.
When you approach the Beehive, stay toward the side or back away from the entrance.
In the spring, especially when you are starting out with a new set of bees you want to start with a smaller hive. Let them claim the hive as their home before you start adding more rooms to it.
To enter the hive, you use a smoker to gently “chase” the bees away so you can get inside without them being upset. For the most part bees are gentle as long as you move slowly and don’t swat at them. They just don’t want to feel you are a danger to them.
This top layer is the bee feeder. You mix water to sugar in a 1 to 1 ratio. As the bees are getting used to their surroundings, it is good to supplement their feed with this sugar water.
The next level down is where the frames are located. These bees have been in their hive for about a day, so we were looking for the queen to make sure she was there. If a hive doesn’t have a queen, they will swarm and leave.
We found the queen, so we put the frames back in the box, stacked the boxes back up and placed the lid on top. In a couple of days we’ll have to feed them the water/sugar mixture again.
We got a phone call from some friends and they had three baby piglets that needed to be fed with a baby bottle so they had us come over to help feed them.
The piglets are so tiny that they are kept in a small box in the house under a heat lamp for now. Currently they are being fed with a syringe full of milk until they get a bit bigger and can nurse on a bottle.
We hope Flat Aggie enjoyed her visit to our farm. For us it is still a little early for most of what we do on the farm. For now, I hope she had fun, learned a little and is definitely welcome back anytime she’d like to learn more.
Saturday afternoon we gathered up my parents and took them down to Branson to go on the Showboat Branson Belle. We got there a bit early so we went on into Branson and down to the landing. Now if you might recall back on February 29, 2012, Branson got hit by a tornado. There was some damage and one of the restaurants we ate at one time is totally gone :(. But Branson looks like they are recovering. Although the Hilton there on the Landing is very sad looking.
While at the landing we caught the water show that plays every hour. Super cool. It was to the song “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas.
Then we left the Landing and headed for our hotel with enough time to check in, take our luggage to the room and then head to the Showboat Branson Belle Dock.
The dinner cruise left at 8pm. They start boarding the ship 1 hour prior to departure.
Don’t let my mom shoot me for including this picture please!!!
So we went in, found our seats
and then headed out on deck to snap a few photos.
Horrid picture but whatever, it’s one of the two of us 🙂
About the time we should have been departing we went back inside and were greeted with the musical wonders of Faith Academy Concert Choir from Mobile Alabama.
They sang beautifully. Now a rant on my part… They opened with the National Anthem, ok fellow Americans, when the national anthem plays, you stand, stop what you’re doing, face a flag if there is one, place your hand over your heart, men – take your hats off, and you honor our country and the men and women present & past who are defending your right to freedom. End rant.
Dinner was fabulous! A cornbread muffin biscuit thing, pot roast, chicken, potatoes, beans, and a frozen berry lemon tart for dessert.
Then there is a 30 minute break to roam around the ship, use the restroom, whatever before the show starts.
The show was spectacular, just as it was in November.
So if you ever make it to Branson, I would say, Go on the Showboat Branson Belle! 🙂
I really wonder if this isn’t the most in depth recipe I’ve made to date. It wasn’t hard, not at all, time consuming yes, but hard, nope. But it’s good to step outside your boundaries and challenge yourself. I learned new things along the way.
And truthfully, I made this because of the movie Last Holiday. I watched it enough and had fun listening to them say it, so I thought why the heck not!
Some days, just as we all do at times, I get down on my luck.
I think back and wonder, What would my life have been like had I done ______ instead of ______.
Sometimes my “bad days” get my husband down too, and that just makes me feel worse.
The great thing about mornings is, it’s a new start, a fresh start to a new day.
I guess that truly does make it “present”.
And on a day when I think something isn’t going to go just quite right…
I look out my front door to this beautiful sight that God has placed before me.
I can’t help but wonder, dream, stare.
Life truly is magical and real.
But very short.
And how do I know I made the right decisions with mine?
You know on tv shows where they do the “what if” posts…
Why can’t we see what our life might have been had we done it differently all those years ago?
Would we be upset that we chose the path we did?
Just another mystery of the universe.
By the way, I’ve shared with a few of you {yesterday}, I’ve started a second blog. Not because this one is so popular… LOL, but because my recipes were getting lost here. I’ll still post recipes here from time to time because that’s just what I do :)… but I started an all recipe blog. I moved all recipes from this blog {hopefully I didn’t miss any} over there so they’re easier to find, in case you ever want to check it out :). I only started working on this task last week, so it’s definitely a work in progress!
Truthfully, I had never flattened a chicken {and I guess you could still say I haven’t, hubby did it this time, someone had to run the camera} until last month. But I didn’t feel to bad because neither had he.
So we learned together!
We had been watching the movie, Last Holiday with Queen Latifa for quite a while, and yes I know it isn’t Christmas, but anyway she was making Poulet Tchoupitoulas in the beginning of the movie. I googled the recipe and we set out to make it. I’ll share that portion with you in another post.
But the recipe didn’t tell you how to flatten a chicken. So I had my trusty little laptop in the kitchen with us and I went to google, my best friend sometimes, and they taught us how, so I thought I’d share with you, plus It’ll help me remember someday if I ever have to do this again!
1.Start with a whole Chicken. Seems simple enough but…. 🙂
2. Turn the bird over on the front side {breasts down exposing the backbone} and put the top away from you {tail to you}. Locate the backbone and proceed to cut along side the back bone, all the way up the spine.
So the other weekend, hubby decided he was ready to start getting the tarp off of the pool and start cleaning the pool.
I’m not going to lie, I think he’s a bit early on the git go there, but we did kind of get the tarp on it late last year so it got a little dirtier than we would have liked…. And then putting the pump on top to get the water off the tarp, the tarp slipped in the pool and tried to drain the pool and it just wasn’t a good deal. So I guess it was time to at least get more water back in the pool so it didn’t pull down on the sides! Audrey wasn’t enthused, especially after Marlie knocked her on the tarp.
The pump did a good job of draining down most of the water, then came time to scoop leaves out.
This is the first year Marlie will really see our pool, so she’s not real sure what to think… that and there were a lot of tadpoles on the top that really claimed her attention.
She wasn’t real sure she cared for that net either.
Anytime honey would move she was out of there, or under my feet one…
There were a few areas of sever leaves, but over all it wasn’t too bad.
The bad part was it was chilly that particular night. This spring weather has been crazy!
I had a stressful day at work so when I got home, I kind of refused to work. My lazy bone took over… sorry hubby!
Suzy the Sock Monkey decided she wanted to help though. She tried to fill in my job.
She even voluntarily jumped on the lawnmower to help move the old nasty leaves to the burn pile.
But after all that strenuous work, she kicked me out of the hammock and decided she needed a rest for the evening.
And what did I learn? My sock monkey can’t do nearly the work I can… LOL 🙂
H to D: You know you ought to see how to get your cows up there at Talbot. They have it fenced off and you can run cattle as long as it isn’t hunting season.
D: Yeah.
….. {a moment of silence}…..
M to H: Um… How did you get there?
H: What?
M: How’d you get there from Stan’s cabin?
H: I can’t hear anything… I thought he said cows and I wondered why he drove all the way down here only once a week to check on his cows.
D: Hey I was just going with it.
Yes we got a huge laugh about this…
And now some cute pictures of cows 🙂 No they aren’t Stan’s cows… they aren’t our cows either… they are a neighbor’s cows, I just loved the white cows on the green grass with yellow flowers & gray skies!
