Moving to the Farm
Moving to the Farm
In case you missed it, we officially moved the farm and have been living here for over a week. We spent Easter weekend at my parents house, and when they flew out to California to help my brother and sister-in-law start to move back, we packed up the rest of our stuff and moved.
(Rylee with her Pippa and Pap Pap)
We had a great time Easter weekend. Rylee got to open her easter basket for the first time (that she remembers), we colored easter eggs (she had colored hands for days), and we took Easter pictures. I'm wearing the dress that I made, and Rylee is wearing the dress that Nene made.
Before moving to the farm, we actually helped Trulee and Brett move into their new house! (Trulee and Brett AND Tyger and Rachel both closed on new houses the week before Easter). Our dump trailer came in super handy, and after a couple days of moving stuff, we relaxed at T&B's new house and played some Kubb. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's a viking lawn game that entails throwing femurs at skulls to knock down all the skulls on your side before aiming for the King's Head. It's super fun, though it drags out because we all have really bad aim. We made the set ourselves a few years back.
The only picture we could get of the cousins hanging out together in the wagon.
We had hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner and the boys even started a bonfire. It was very relaxing.
Then a few days later WE decided to finish moving. Let me just say that we have way too much stuff. We are still trying to unpack boxes to this day. The cousins were a lot of help moving the last bits of furniture and belongings to the house and even let me direct them as to where to put the boxes. I'm sure they hated me after telling them to take box after box upstairs while I got to sit in a chair and direct traffic (sometimes contractions have their benefits).
This particular moving instance was a feat to behold. They had to bend the mattress to make it shorter by about 12" in order to shove it up and around the stairs. Sam clearly missed the "smile for the camera" memo, haha.
We fed the boys pizza for lunch and they hung out with us at the pond to relax before dinner. Brandon even caught a fish!
Rylee was so tired after a full day of moving that she fell asleep in the five minutes it took us to drive to Nene's house for dinner. We tried our best, but she refused to wake up to eat.
Squishy-faced, baby!
We stayed at the house for the first time Wednesday night, and Thursday we decided to tackle one of the more immediate problems on the homestead--the pond drainage.
The problem: the pond was overflowing into the barn lot, flooding the yard, and draining all the way down into the barn lot entrance, making it difficult to get a tractor up the drive let alone walk to the barn to let the chickens out.
The culprit: the edge of the pond has eroded away over time. Nene and Dad tried to dam it up as a temporary fix, but that didn't last long.
So Sam designed and assembled (with help from Nene, Rylee, and I) a drainage system that would (ideally) continuously drain the pond whenever the water level got above the threshold level that we set.
Here's the intake pipe.
Nene taught Rylee to throw rocks into the water.
Such a cutie!
Sometime in the midst of all the moving mess, we caught this little buddy in the attic. Anyone keeping count? Raccoon #5.
And then, because we are crazy, after two days of loading, unloading, packing, unpacking, yard projects and what-not, we decided to remove the bees from our house. We had finally finished painting the bee-hives, my gloves had come in, and the weather had gotten cold enough again that it was really the perfect time to move them. If you read the last blog post, you know what an incredibly amazing experience that was for us. If you didn't get the chance, we highly suggest hopping over to at least skim through the pictures. You can check it out here.
Many of you already know that come Saturday morning, about 50,000 of the bees had returned to the old location. We moved the hive closer to try and encourage them to move to the new hive, but we knew something had to be done. Sam spent the day designing and constructing another bee vacuum (this one a little more legitimate than the put-together-at-the-last-minute vacuum we tried on the end of Friday).
It still didn't work as well as we would have liked, and Sam ended up scooping the clumps of bees off with a paint scraper and scraping them into the vacuum box. The box had only one exit so the bees would have to travel all the way through the hive if they wanted out.
This seemed to work for the most part. We kept an eye on the bees in the old hive over the next few days and estimated their numbers to be 2-3,000. Much lower than previously. When Sam discovered they moved into the wall of the garage a few days ago to escape the cold, he did another scrape session. We are fairly confident that at this point we have moved as many of the bees as feasible. We've been looking up how to move the hive (without having to move it a foot a day, which would take us 300+ days to get it to the spot where we want it) and will probably be inspecting the hive for the queen or presence of queen cells as well as moving the hive this upcoming week. Details to come.
That weekend I processed the scrap honey comb that could not be framed because of size. Just from the three bowls of scrap, we got 6 jelly jars of honey!
I also attempted, and was unsuccessful, at extracting beeswax from the leftover comb.
However, I was successful at waking up my sour-dough starter after a week in the fridge,
and transforming it into a beautiful, delicious loaf of sandwich bread. I'm very grateful that I can actually fit a bread loaf pan into the tiny pizza oven which is currently the only oven we have.
The rest of the week has been fairly quiet. A slow stream of unpacking, random bits of outdoor projects, fishing, and baking.
I'm becoming a master baker using the pizza oven (when I remember to turn it on). Yesterday, I made an apple and pear (mini) galette (aka an open-faced pie). Paired with vanilla ice cream and drizzled in fresh honey, it was heavenly. And so simple! So much easier than a normal pie!
We are relaxing when needed and enjoying the beautiful land that God gave us.
Right now our land is absolutely covered in Creeping Buttercup (or a similar species). It's almost magical pulling into our driveway and passing by the sea of yellow.
Life is good. It has its moments of busyness before it slows down. I'm relishing every day I get to spend with Sam before the job markets open back up and he has to leave Rylee and me for work. We've been incredibly blessed to have him to ourselves everyday for so long--giving us ample opportunity to work together to transform this farm into our dream home.
Upcoming projects include: moving the baby chickens out to the coop, removing fence posts around the barn lot in preparation for a new fence, trying to hunt down a coyote that's been slowly killing off our teenage chickens, getting Sam's new saw in which will allow us to start clearing brush more easily, fishing, probably more baking, looking for the queen bee or queen cells (which grow new queen bees), moving the beehive to it's new location, planting the Brussel sprouts and broccoli, and hopefully finishing unpacking so that we can FINALLY start demolition on the main floor. I can't wait to start taking down drywall!
(A video of Rylee and the puppies playing together to make you smile.)
Pax Domini cum spirito tuo temper sit,
Torey, Sam & Rylee
Do you or someone you know live near Harrodsburg, Kentucky?
Do you want to eat farm-fresh eggs from happy, healthy hens? ($3/dozen)
Check out our shop!
Do you or someone you know live near Harrodsburg, Kentucky?
Do you want to eat farm-fresh eggs from happy, healthy hens? ($3/dozen)
Check out our shop!
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