19
Jun
2021

May on the Farm

As May rolled around, we were quickly approaching the due date for baby #5.  Every time I went to my Midwife appointments in those last few weeks of my pregnancy, my Midwife would ask me if I was ready for this baby to come (expecting me to say yes like most women do at this stage of pregnancy) and I would always tell her “not yet!  I still have more things to get done before the baby comes.”

I wanted to get the garden fence done so we could get our seedlings transplanted to the garden.  We were also expecting our baby chicks to hatch (from the hatchery) and be sent to us about a week before my due date.

Luckily, Crosby held off and we really did get all of those things accomplished before he was born.  Putting up fencing and planting things is not that easy at 9 months pregnant.  Haha.  Jershon did most of the hard work but I helped as much as I could.

After many many hours and multiple Saturdays, we finally finished the garden fence.

Pretty flowers on one of our fruit trees

This bush was full of flowers for a couple weeks
4620 square foot (110′ x 42′) food forest garden space… mostly ready to be planted.
We have some super pretty sunrises and sunsets here. I love watching the sunrise out our bedroom window, overlooking the pasture.
Merv kissing the neighbor’s cows. Apparently he did this with each of the 5 cows (I wasn’t there…Jershon took this picture.)
Roxanne having her personal time outside with the kittens.

In early April when I thinned out and transplanted some seedlings into bigger containers, I had a bunch of seedlings that were leftover from thinning and Jershon decided to plant them next to the chicken run… not knowing if they would survive or not since it was still cold sometimes. He planted several tomato plants, a few flowers, and one broccoli plant. The only one that is still alive is this broccoli plant. It’s thriving! … and is even bigger now since this photo.
Discovered that we have a whole row of peony bushes! They are getting shaded out by a bunch of trees though so I’m hoping to be able to transplant some of them so they can do better next year.
A little over a week before my due date, we transplanted all of the seedlings. Because we had so many things going on at once, we hadn’t finished the wood chips yet so we ended up having to plant some of our seedlings in the grassy area…with the plans of coming back and putting wood chips around each of them.

Porter reading outside
Look how much Merv has grown in the last 5 months since we’ve had him (at the time of this photo)
One afternoon Roxanne ran up to my room and told me that there was a crab under the pergola. haha. It was actually a crawdad (or crawfish as some people call them). I don’t know where it came from since we aren’t right next to a water source.
On May 5, we got chicks!

We had a mini funeral for the 4 chicks that arrived dead from the hatchery.

Jershon bought a hibiscus plant to remind him of the island life… apparently they can grow in Kansas because we found this plant at a local farm store.
A couple days later there was another dead crawdad/crawfish under our pergola. Where were these things coming from?  Were the kittens catching them somewhere?
Trying to see if our lawn mower was powerful enough to pull some of the brush that we had cut down… it wasn’t. My friend texted me that morning (just a few days before my due date) and asked if I was in labor. I responded back. “yes. … the farm kind.” haha.
Remember that birdhouse that my dad had built for us and that we put up in the middle of our pasture back in February? One day Jershon happened to be walking past it and noticed some straw sticking out of it. He opened it up and found 5 eggs! Bluebird eggs.

One day back in January, we had some green onion roots that Jershon decided to plant in random places around our property so the kids could go on a scavenger hunt to find them and report back anytime they found one. Well, in May, we noticed that one of them was growing super tall!
foggy morning on the pasture

Merv and Aida became BFFs

Landon helped Jershon drive the lawn mower one day. Apparently he couldn’t drive straight. haha.

In the middle of May, Crosby joined the farm!

 

Looking at a squirrel through the binoculars.
Flower buds on one of the fruit trees
kale growing in the garden

 

strawberries!

 

just playing in the mud with the chickens

It was finally time for Agnes and Aida to get spayed. When I set up the appointment, they were booked a couple months out. We were a little worried because we thought that there might be a chance that they were pregnant… well at least Aida … because a male neighbor cat kept coming around. I was worried that they may be pregnant and that the surgery would abort the growing kittens. … but since we didn’t have any real proof of their potential pregnancies, we decided to go ahead with the appointment. About an hour after Jershon dropped them off, he got a call from the vet that he missed. In the few minutes between seeing the missed call and calling them back, we thought that maybe the vet was calling to tell us that Agnes and/or Aida actually was pregnant. … but instead, when Jershon called them back, they said “umm… Aida is a boy. Do you want to go ahead and get him neutered?” hahaha. Umm…that was a shock. Here, we had had these kittens for 6 months and had thought the entire time that they were both girls. After looking into it, apparently it’s not that uncommon for people to mistake a boy cat as a girl. I guess it’s not as obvious…especially when they are young. And honestly, I’d never even looked. My mom just told us they were both girls when she brought them to us so I just took her word for it. So now, we have Agnes and Mr. Aida. hahaha. We still call him “she” and “her” on accident most of the time.

 

Mushrooms growing in the wood chips
Another gorgeous sunset

We moved the chicks to the garage because they were getting stinky and still had a couple weeks left to go before being old enough to go outside.
Peony bloomed
Lots of vegetables and flowers growing in the garden…along with a lot of weeds

The pasture grass started getting out of control.
We had 3 weeks of rain nearly everyday. By the end of it, we felt like we were living in a jungle because of all the crazy growth everywhere.
Caught a swarm of bees!
Mr. Aida in the pasture

 

Crosby and I enjoying the warm weather
The kids found a couple of toads in our window well one day
And then that evening we came out to the yard and saw this snapping turtle.

In mid/late May, we started noticing fireflies! I love fireflies. They are one of my favorite parts of Midwest summers. It’s so fun to have so many of them right outside our door. If you look closely, you can see one lit up in the middle of this photo. I’ll have more firefly photos/videos in the June post.
Squirrel on the pergola

Found this cherry growing on our cherry tree. It’s gone now though. I don’t think we’ll actually get fruit on our trees this year… or if we do, probably not much.
Jershon started the fencing for the pastures.

 

 

End of May Egg Count: 324

2 Responses
  1. Melanie Mauer
    Reply

    Yay for fireflies – and for how darling Merv and Aida are together!!
    I read this quote and knew you needed it: “Most well-behaved women are too busy living there lives to think about recording what they do and too modest about their own achievements to thing anybody else will care…Women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records and when later generations care” -Laurel Thatcher-Ulrich

    I love that you live in a beautiful unexpected way, Shelly. Warmly, -melanie-

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