Our Farm-2 Years Ago to Now

[baymule]

@sumi asked me to post pictures of our farm. She said we had done so much work to this place that she would like to see some before and after (during) pictures. @MoonShadows said Yay for pictures, so here they are.

Our house the day we closed on it September 23, 2014

This is our porch being added. Picture taken on December 1, 2015. The porch is 12 feet wide by 54 feet long and is screened in. We love it.

This is the porch completed except for the screens, taken December 23, 2015. I can't believe I don't have a picture of it with the screens and gutter on it. I'll have to dig a little bit to see what I can come up with.

 

[baymule]

Because the house had been vandalized while we were in the financing process, after it was ours, we wanted to secure it. Thieves had broken in, stolen the furnace, the outside AC unit, Crawled under the house and cut out all the copper wiring they could yank out and ripped out the breaker box and all associated wiring. It cost us $10,000 to repair it all.

We weren't in a hurry to move, I wanted to redo the inside of the house before we moved in. But the first thing was to put a gate up across the driveway. So on one of my first trips up there, I stopped and got a gate. I got creative tying it down.

Our son in law helped me dig and set the posts. It was October 4, 2014. I know that for a lot of you, October is cool if not downright cold, but this is Texas and it was HOT. Plus it hadn't rained so it was HOT and DRY. Digging those 4 holes like to have worn both of us out. The ground was hard and we had the long handled post hole diggers. We even put water in the holes. We used a shovel as well. Finally, victory! First post in the ground!

We worked our tails off for almost the whole day to get the posts set, H brace, and hang the gate. I was proud of our hard work. Check out the back ground in these pictures. It doesn't look like that anymore!

 

[baymule]

Now for the garden. This picture was taken October 3, 2014. It is hard to believe how far we have come in just 2 years. We closed in September of 2014, but didn't move in until February 14, 2015 our 19th anniversary, spent packing up and U-Hauling it to our new home. I spent the time from closing to moving, painting and doing the floors in the house. Now back to the garden.

So we moved February 14, 2015, this picture was taken February 25, 2015.

Scarcely a few weeks later, we were working on the garden area. But we had to stop for a little fun too. See the tractor on the right? Mowing down the brush and weeds. On some of our first passes, our son in law walked ahead of me in the neck tall weeds, looking for garbage, but I still ran over a bed spring unit with the bush hog. We wound up finding 5 bed spring units! The two oak trees by the side of the driveway are where we sit in the shade, drinking iced tea, taking a break from our hard work.

After mowing, we started digging. There were lots of green briars! We made piles of them and burned them. The next two pictures were taken March 19, 2015.

Finally after weeks of hard work, The garden was disced up and ready for planting. This picture was taken March 25, 2015. We were so proud of our smooth, pretty dirt!

By April 12, 2015 tiny green sprouts were beginning to show, we put up the green plastic fence to keep the dogs big feet out and I had a fancy pallet gate. I was thrilled. My first year garden. I carefully tended it, it was an abysmal failure, everything either did poorly or gave up all together and died

 

[baymule]

The 2015 garden was a total bust. But there is a horse event center 10 miles from us on Interstate 20, so I called.....Yes! We could have all the stall clean out horse poop-pine shavings we wanted! So we hitched the trailer! These two pictures were taken 8-15-2015.

Our daughter even wanted to come help. This I had to get a picture of--our girlie girl, college professor, non-dirty daughter shoveling horse sh!t!

We made a couple of trips that day, thrilled with our treasure. Our friend and neighbor Robert helped and we made a load for him too.

My husband had gone for tests because he needed knee replacement surgery. He flunked his stress test, so he was sent for heart catheterization and flunked that too. Some people will do anything to get out of work! He had a triple bypass 8-21-2015

Good thing he had those tests run. He was a walking heart attack. Thank God it was found in time and he got all fixed up. The next couple of months were tough on him because he had to watch me on the tractor. But he finally got back in the swing of things and we got back to working on the garden. We went back for more pine shavings/horse manure from the horse event center, but this time we used a dump trailer! Oh yeah! We were stylin' fer shure! Robert went with my husband to "help" (really he did all of the work and DH drove the truck). Workers at the horse event center scooped the poop with a front end loader and dumped it in the trailer. While they went back for another load, I spread it with the tractor. We made many loads for ourselves and for Robert. Both of us have beach sand for soil, so the shavings added humus to the sand. This picture was taken October 2, 2015.

We decided to put up a permanent fence around the garden. Robert helped me with most of it while I fussed at my husband to keep him from doing too much. We got a 12' gate hung.

We made a lot more loads from the horse event center.

We started rolling wire.

My husband did a lot of supervising and holding wire out of the way while Robert pounded T-posts. I came along behind them, clipping the T-posts. Picture taken on October 17, 2015

We finished the fence, built a Hawg Hut and brought 3 pigs home to live in the garden for the winter. Picture taken November 3, 2015

Pig soup. Reckon they knew?

 

[baymule]

On August 4, 2016, we checked the cull rack at Lowes and found a bonanza! Plywood, 2x12's, 2x4's, 2x8's half a dozen roof edge metal strips, but the absolute best was the treated twenty feet long 2x6's!! There were 11 of them, a builder had special ordered them, then returned them, leftovers from a job. Since our Lowes didn't carry them, they were on the cull rack. Regular price was $26 each and they were marked down to $10 each!! We unloaded the trailer and stacked everything in the barn.

In January, my husband said he was ready to start the feed and tack room in the barn. All our stuff is crammed in that portable building we moved here and I can get to the back of it if I turn sideways and step carefully! So I was more than ready for the feed and tack room! First we spent a day cleaning out the barn. In the front pasture we had piled up various piles of dead fallen tree branches so I came up with the idea of covering them with horse manure. We got the tractor and the Kawasaki Mule. BJ scooped with the tractor bucket, but I had to finish filling it with the shovel. While he went to go dump it, I filled the back of the Mule. We relayed both until the barn was scraped clean, then BJ used the tractor to scoop wood chip mulch and dump it in the barn while I spread it with a rake.

The second day, we got the 2x6's screwed to the posts, outlining the feed and tack room. Then I measured and screwed in place the metal 2x6 hangers for the floor joists. Robert came a few days later and the 3 of us got the floor joists cut and screwed in place. It sure hurt our feelings to cut those 20' 2x6's into 12' lengths, but we spliced the cut off ends together to make floor joists and used them. We had a stack of 3/4" plywood under the carport and we got the floor laid. We were pretty proud of our work!

This picture taken 1-23-2017. Joe is giving his approval.

We had never built walls, so Robert came over to help. We got the front walls built and raised. While BJ and Robert built the walls, I put up 2x4's on the end wall, against the metal. We left space to hang two 4' doors, as we'll probably divide the area into two rooms. The last day we worked on the feed and tack room was 2-7-2017, BJ had shoulder replacement surgery the next day, February 8.

Every piece of wood with the exception of the plywood floor, came off the cull rack at Lowes. Our joke is, If it is crooked or curved, it's OURS!

This picture taken 1-31-17.

 

[baymule]

My piles are in the carport, but they are getting much smaller! At one time, I only took up half the carport and parked my tractor under there too. A hail storm was coming and DH wanted me to take the tractor out and park the car in the carport, but I refused. My car could get beat by hail, but NOT my tractor!!! I parked the car under a tree.........

 

[baymule]

The pigs had a date with freezer camp. I sure didn't want to chase pigs all over the place to load them in the trailer, so we backed the trailer in the garden, blocked it off so they couldn't chew the wiring and put their food and water in there.

They loaded themselves.

My husband pulled the trailer out and I went to work on the moon craters they dug. I dragged the disc around and around, criss-crossed, dig figure 8's and moved some dirt. A couple hours later, it was pretty smooth. Picture taken 3-17-2016

We love a good pork roast!

Bring on the 2016 garden!! DH helped me build tomato cages, basically cow panels 18" apart. So if one row would be good, why not put up another and make 2 rows? I prepared the ground with sheep manure, laid cardboard over it and we put up the cow panels. Then I scooched down the rows, cutting holes in the cardboard with a machete, scooping out dirt and planting tomatoes. Picture taken 5-1-2016

Painted Mountain Corn. It did ok. The fertility just wasn't there for it, but it sure beat the ZERO I had in 2015.

2016 garden sure beat the nothing I got in 2015. Half of what I planted didn't come up or died shortly thereafter. Half of what came up didn't do diddly-squat. The other half produced well. We got over 240 yellow squash, got 3 zucchini. I picked enough peas for us to enjoy and put some in the freezer. Same with butterbeans. My green beans did ok. The tomatoes did great, we ate lots of fresh, I dehydrated and canned them. Then it got hot. As in I don't give a durn about pulling weeds hot. The weeds had a field day, so we turned the sheep in to clean it up. They sure enjoyed it and did a great job.

2017 will be an even better garden year!

 

[baymule]

It was so exciting to see the barn take shape. This picture was taken on 1-4-2016

The next two pictures were taken on 1-20-2016. Progress!

Joe, our cremello Quarter Horse, checked out the barn. Funny story, while the barn was being built, the horses hung out among the poles. Once the roof went on, they went back to their grove of cedar trees. It was pouring down one evening and they were standing under the cedar trees! I put on my coat, pulled up the hood and went out to talk to them. "We are having this nice barn built for ya'll so you don't have to stand out in the rain! What are you doing here under the trees? Go get in the barn where you'll be nice and dry. Get out of the rain!" They looked at me. I went back in the house. A little while later I looked out and saw them standing under the barn roof. LOL

Russell and Tim worked on most of the weekends, building on our barn. They riffled through my scrap piles, used lumber, Lowes reject lumber, to find what they needed. We had to buy 29 brand new 2x6's 20 feet long for the rafters, there weren't enough in my pile of treasures. We also bought new OSB for roof decking, and brand new R panels for the metal roof, sides and the metal trim work. This picture taken 2-28-2016.

The barn is 36'x36' and the alley down the middle is 12' wide and 15' tall. When I was a kid, my best friend and I would go to her grandfather's farm. We rode a barn sour old mare, bareback, and she would only go so far before whirling around and galloping back to the barn. We had a choice of jumping off or bashing our brains out on the low barn rafters. So I insisted on "ride through" room for our barn, adding that if I wanted to drive a cab tractor through the barn, I could. Well, we don't have a cab tractor, but Russell does and in July we had him set the round bale in the cool of the barn for the horses. Look closely, you can tell the used lumber from the new. LOL

 

[baymule]

Fantastic barn!

Thanks! The insurance guy came out and appraised it for $30,000 replacement value!! We sure didn't pay that for it, thanks to my scrounging of things nobody wanted. If you have a big project in mind, start scrounging and stacking up materials, it will pay off.

 

[Mini Horses]

Yes, show the tractor some love!

Nice job on the barn.

Your projects are getting done faster than some of mine BUT -- eventually. I go by the cull piles at my Lowe's even if I didn't want to shop that day. I've gone home for my trailer if something "farm good" is out there! Figure I "always" need something.

Today @TSC, I spotted a drive belt for my mower deck for $9.99 vice $39.99....you know I bought that!