Monday Garden Club Giveaway

Get your gardening gloves and knee pads ready. It's time for another installment of Monday Garden Club.

The garden is slowly dying off and plans for next year are already being discussed. The (4 wheel drive) Gardener has been scouring the Internet for a used one bottom plow to pull behind the ATV. He is the real brains and muscle of the whole operation. He does all of the tilling and power tool related chores while I do the picking, cooking, freezing and canning of all of the vegetables. Which reminds me that I promised a giveaway for today.

Recently my family has expressed their love of preserved foods. I make pickles and I get special requests for the jalapeno dills. The salsa is always is hit but it's the peaches this year that have my mom and brother calling me saying that they have "dibs" on a pint. Since the peaches were delicious and especially bountiful this year, I am feeling generous and would love to offer up a preserved pint of peaches (say that three times fast) to one of my fabulous readers. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post and I'll choose a number randomly and announce the winner next Monday. The contest will be open until 11:59PM next Sunday night, October 4.

Disclaimer: I have no license to be selling any kind of food product but I can assure you that I take utmost care in making sure that the food I preserve is safe. I sterilize all of my jars and process the filled jars in a boiling hot water bath for the appropriate amount of time. By entering this contest you agree that I will not be held responsible for any illness caused by my canned peaches. Basically I don't want to get sued.

Last Night At The Farm...

Oooh, that just sounds like trouble. Before you read this, may I suggest that you make sure all of your doors are closed and there is no chance that wild animals can enter, bite you and give you rabies. Seriously, do it.

Last night I went to the farm for my twice weekly feed, milk and pitch shit session on a very cold and windy evening. This isn't a post complaining about the bitter cold, although school has been cancelled today due to extreme temps, but rather a post about how I am not a farm girl. Just because I live in an old farmhouse, out in the middle of a large farm field and work on a dairy farm, does not mean I was born with the farm instinct necessary to deal with what I witnessed last night.

I was ready to bed the heifers, so I ran up the barn hill and into the upstairs hay and straw storage area to drop down a bale of straw to spread in the pens. As I approached the straw bales, I saw what I thought was just a farm cat leaning up against the very bale I needed to disassemble and toss down through the hole in the floor. As I got closer I realized that this was no cat. No, the tail was too fluffy, and bigger, much bigger than the skinny farm cats, and the mask around it's face??? Then all of a sudden this ran through my brain:

Holy shit! It's a raccoon, probably has rabies, is totally gonna bite me, I'm not carrying a pitch fork and my raccoon eradicator friend, Bonnie is nowhere to be found!!! all of this runs through my head as I stand there motionless hoping that the dirty, miserable thing doesn't see me. I catch my breath, calmly walk back downstairs and announce to the farmer, Ms. D. that "There's a f*cking raccoon upstairs; and this is where I draw the line." She chuckles and says, "did you at least get your bale down?" "Um-no, there's a raccoon standing next to it!" Then she says so matter of factly "Take Peppy (the hyper farm dog) along... and here this too" as she hands me a pitchfork. Reluctantly, I coax the dog outside and up into the barn. We get up there and the dog doesn't notice the raccoon. As I'm pointing with my fork from a safe distance, the dog finally sees the thing and of course as I suspected, all hell breaks loose. Biting, snarling, screaming. The dog had no intentions of just chasing the raccoon out of the barn; that crazy dog was out for blood. After about 10 minutes of screaming and thrashing, equal parts me and the animals, Ms. D pulls open the hay chute and yells,
"did he git 'em out?"
me: "Um-no, they're still fighting, and AAAAHHH!"
Ms. D: "I'm comin' up"

She comes in the barn to cheer on the dog and assist by using the pitchfork to lift the thrashing raccoon with dog still attached out of the barn and into the snow, where the dog could finish him off.

I catch my breath, make sure that I haven't peed myself, then chuckle and admit that "I am no farm girl!" Ms. D agreed as I took the pitch fork from her hand, threw down my bale of straw and left the barn.

After chores, I went out to start my truck and noticed that the raccoon was still lying in the middle of the driveway, motionless and well on it's way to being a frozen raccoon-cicle.

I know this is a fact of life living in the country, but at home, my hubby takes care of these things. It's common to see mice or the occasional rat at the farm, and I have even stepped on a mouse and called the cats over for an afternoon treat, but this was over the top.

Oooh, that smell.

Warning: This post is not for those with a weak stomach.

This morning just after 7:00 I opened the door to the stairs to go and wake my children, when all of a sudden I was overcome by the most familiar foul smell- at least to this mom. Vomit. My first question was, "Who threw up, and how long is this going to take me to clean?" I first suspected Mae, because last night while playing with daddy she cracked her head on the arm of the sofa. OUCH! So my first thought was concussion, vomiting is associated with head injury, right? Well thankfully, it wasn't her. It was Binny, I walk in her room and

I say "Mornin' Bin, how are you today?"

Binny: "fine"

Me: "but Binny you threw up, and stop rolling over in it!"

Binny: "huh?" while looking at the puke on the sleeve of her jammies.

It must have happened while she was sleeping (is that even possible?) because she didn't even know what had happened. I'm just hoping she's not sick, and that this was just a fluke puke. Last year we all came down with a nasty stomach bug that left all of us hunched over the toilet, and we only have one bathroom.



Just what I wanted; more laundry.