A great end to July

 My 1st home birth baby turned 4 this weekend.  She is growing up so fast.

 AR got to serve at the Baptism.  We are so glad he was a part of it :)

Welcome into the family of Christ my little one :)

Goats :)

These itty bitty babies are living in the old chicken coop (since no chickens live there . . . yet).  The children and I are enjoying bottle feeding them as they we wean WAY too early.  Help us name these cuties, please. :)

Can you believe our girls are so big already?

Diversity is key

Tip # 1: Buy a property with a good well.  I LOVE MY WELL, it saves me so much that it is wonderful.
As you know we are having a drought in this part of the world, not good if you're in need hay or produce hay.  I am not a fan of hay farming, frankly it seems way too uncertain but I'm chicken that way.  I am however a HUGE fan of haying your own property and selling excess when it is profitable.
Thanks to the drought, those who have hay have a great opportunity to enter the cattle market if they want to.  Cattle prices are crashing as finding affordable hay is almost impossible.  Hay producers are estimating that they will only be able to have 1/3 of what they usually get.  The prices are soaring as a result and people are getting desperate.  People are getting very hot under the collar about the higher prices but consider even if they were to double the usual price for hay they will not make what they usually would. (If they are used to getting 3000 bales and selling for $1 they would have $3000 by the end of the season, this year they are getting 1000 bales being sold for $2, giving them $2000 by the end of the season.  Believe me they aren't happy about this drought either.)
Anyway, the point is this is a perfect example of an area of diversity that each small farm needs to investigate to achieve sustainability.  Even if all you are able to do is feed your own livestock you would be ahead of the game and be able to build up your beef breeding/butcher stock. 

Old junk car

Well the little car died, now before you tell me how terrible Ford car's are let me say it was not the car's fault. My dh is a car's worst nightmare (love you honey). The poor car hit 2 deer and too many other little critters to mention and we hadn't even owned it for 6 months. Even after all that it still continued to run until it finally had enough, I mean how long is it supposed to run without enough clean oil or coolant? Dh is much like Wayne Szalinski, in that he is single minded in his purpose and the whole world can fall down around him or in this case the car, before he notices something is wrong. Anyway, he's working on it so hopefully he'll work it into his routine.


Well what do you do with a car that doesn't run and isn't going to be fixed? You can always strip it for parts, but who has that kind of time? You can try to sell it, but that is also quite a bother, who wants a wrecked car? For us the solution came in the form of a company called Kellycarbuyer.com (this is NOT a paid promotion or advertisement). I stumbled across an ad for them as I had several other and having heard the most absurd low-ball offers I was prepared for more of the same when they called. WOW was I wrong and did they make it easy. Now I live out in the boonies and their Kansas person was not able to help me but they were still willing to work with me and given my proximity to Oklahoma I was able to work with their Oklahoma buyer.


Thanks to the money they paid us (plus the little we had saved) we were able to buy another car almost immediately. It's not pretty but it runs and gets great mileage and wouldn't you know it (God and his humor again), He sent it in our theme colors, LOL!!! We have a little Toyota Camry and it even has a towing package, something I had wanted and hadn't even expected. Everything in His time, right on time :) Praise God.


In other news the pigs are doing great, the chicks and chickens are wonderful and the cows are getting big. It's time to get our little Eva bred and I'm very excited to see what her baby will look like. God Bless and try to stay cool this summer :)