RUG UPDATE AND GARDEN

 I've been on my knees every chance I got in between rain drops last week and this week we had beautiful sunshine and I finally finished digging the weeds in my vegetable garden and planted the whole thing with daylilies.
I've planted  rows on rows and planted them very close together between rows just so I wouldn't loose them. I plan to give some away next year and they will be much easier to dig up since they will not be big.

Not a very good picture but you can see the little stubs in the distance.  If I remember correctly, I have about 22 rows of lilies and around 10 lilies each row. I'm glad that job is done.

 As of now I no longer have a vegetable garden and will have to plant my veggies at the farm if I want some.

This is where I'm at on my rug. I have a loaf of homemade bread with a big bag of Robin Hood flour  but somehow I don't think that it fits there very well and  when I was putting my memories down I thought of home made bread but I should have drew my mom making bread. She made big batches of bread every day when I was young and I learned young to make bread.

Do you think that I should draw this scene with mom making bread. I could pull all those loops out and put another scene there. I'm not sure what to do. Help...

My misplaced bread and Robin Hood flour.  My dad bought Robin Hood flour by the 100 pound bag. An outdoor well with crank and bucket and some chickens and a rooster in our yard.

Monday was laundry day on the washboard and tub. There was always baby cloths on the line. We played Ally Hoop over the roof top with a rubber ball and I love to pick apples.

Me looking at the clouds and seeing all kind of amazing shapes, my one room school complete with sheep that would stray in the yard once in a while.

More scenes from my childhood.

My husband was going to the lighting store and bought me this energy efficient light  that shows the true colors of my wool when I hook at night. It takes 75 % less energy than the tri-light  bulb at the right. It works nicely for me.
Have a great weekend and stay safe and warm. I enjoy reading  your comments.   JB

MORE CALF ADVENTURES

There are many adventures with calves that I don't blog about simply because I don't always have time and then forget about it.  This time I thought I would share even though I don't have pictures.

What the heck, I'll just put an old calf picture for the blog for now.... This calf is big now and is with the heifers outside now.

Adventure #1
October has been galloping along and is almost at the half way mark... Working with calves sure has contributed to making time slip by fast. I don't know if that's good or bad.

I can't remember the day last week but I was finishing my work in the morning and my husband had already left the barn  to go to breakfast. I knew that a cow was getting closer to her calving date and I went to check to see how she was doing. I needed to have a pen ready for the calf.

She was laying down and upon getting closer I saw that the calf's head was out and so was his two front feet. I would normally just let nature do its thing but the mother was pushing and her tongue was sticking out about a foot and she was moaning but the calf wasn't coming out. I waited some more  and since I was alone I decided to try to help the mother deliver her first baby myself. I could always call for help. A new born calf weigh around 90 pounds on average. It would be difficult for me to lift dead weight of slippery calf since I only weigh 110 pounds myself.

I grabbed some dry hay and put around the two front feet  for traction because they are very slippery and started pulling  but it wasn't coming out  so I began to lift up on the calf and letting it down and I repeated the procedure until the calf was free inching her way out.. It was breathing so I pulled it out of the cow's way  to make room for her to get up. She was so tired that it took her about 3 minutes to get up. Once up, she cleaned her calf.

The calf was named Carolyn in honour of a blogger friend named Carolyn since I was thinking about her at the time. If I was thinking about you instead, I might have named the calf after you, hahaha...

Adventure #2
This is another day.
I was finishing off the late afternoon chores when my son came in the section of the barn I work in. I told him that his father had brought all the pregnant cows in from the pasture as it was getting close to freezing now and the cow in the pen may or may not have calved but he didn't see any calf in the field.

My son check the cow but couldn't feel any calf inside so he decided to milk her to see if her milk had come.
She had milk so we decided to go check the far pasture for her calf near the wooded area.

When we came to the culvert over the swamp, we saw little hoof prints and big dog foot prints in the mud and our hearts sank. We prepared ourselves for what we would find. We continued to walk as fast as we could. The fields go back a mile long from the farm to the river and is pretty wide. The pastures are divided with electric fences that can deliver quite a jolt.

After a while we spotted the baby calf sleeping in well hidden  corner of the field against the fence by the wood. As soon as she saw us she galloped at full speed diagonally across the field and within a minute she was out of sight behind a knoll and finally we spotted her by the brook resting. As soon as she saw us again she took off at full speed again. She slipped between the post where the connection are hooked to a current and avoided being shocked. Smart little ass...

I had bursitis that day from all the weeding so I had to slow down a bit and my son told me to keep walking slowly toward a tree in the distance and he would go get the tractor at the farm so he could get her tired out. It was our only chance.
Darkness was coming fast and there was no time to waste. I look back to see if the tractor was coming at a distance, when I turned back to where I last saw her, she was nowhere to be seen.

I kept walking toward the tree and then I saw a sliver of white in the tall grass. She had laid down. I kept my eyes glued on the spot even though I could no longer see the white.

Finally the tractor arrived and up she went at full gallop again. This time she was going in the right direction toward the farm but again she made a diagonal to the field where we first found her. She was getting tired but wouldn't give up.

My son left the tractor and proceeded to chase her on foot. We were afraid that if she got under the wire fence and went in the wood we would loose her. This time she was going in the right direction.
My husband arrived to help after milking and took the tractor back to the farm and reconnected the electric fence that my son had to take down to get through. I kept walking toward the barn. It was almost dark by now and the rain started.

When she saw the small heifers outside by the silos, she went and hid between them but we could see her little short legs. At this point I have one foot on the cement platform by the barn and one foot stuck almost to the top of my boot in mud, going nowhere. My son is busy with roping the calf and can't come to free me.

My son armed with a halter swings it around and lassoed her hind foot and down she came and he quickly wrapped the rope around her two hind feet  rodeo style and stopped her long enough to put the halter around her neck.
 Yippee he said, I roped my first calf....lol

My husband came and weeded me out of the mud, hahaha. The calf  was put in a warm bed of hay for the night and she refused to drink the milk. Her number and name is written on her stall . My son was going to call her John Deer  as we had to use the John Deer tractor to chase her and she ran like a deer but since she was a girl, Jane was more fitting than John. So we called Jane Deer.

I was pretty tired when I hit the sack that night and was not such in a hurry to get out of bed in the morning and just realized that in almost 4  years from now, I'll be 70. Will I still be chasing calves then?

Thanks for reading my adventures with the calves these past two weeks. I'll try to have pictures of the two calves in question soon.

I've been planting more daylilies in the very wet vegetable garden as it's getting very late for planting and I don't want to lose them. We had our first frost this morning.
Have a great Sunday everyone.  JB

THE WEEDING IS DONE

Just a few pictures to show that after all this time I finally finished digging weeds and replanted this perennial flowerbed.
It has rained so often and circumstances got in the way so it took me much longer than I had planned.

 It won't look grand next year but with time it will look nice. The border still has to be fixed but that can wait till much later.

 In the centre instead of an assorted varieties of daylilies I planted tall red daylilies. They will bloom after the yellow flowers are done. I hope that they survive the winter and that we don't have a flood again this coming spring because they will all float away since the roots are not anchored down yet. Hopefully they will grow. The grass is so long and thick since I haven't had time to cut it but at least I have grass.

More weeding in the works.  JB

WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO LATELY

I've been away from my blog not because I didn't had anything to share, I've been a bit preoccupied, busy, obsessed with digging out my overgrown daylilies and farm work,  office work and running a household and all it encompasses.

This is a picture of the bed in question.  The yellow flowers are Evening Primrose. It had 21 assorted clumps of daylilies planted in the center of the bed and although it looks short, you can gage the length by the large patio block path on the right. One of largest the clump on the end is more visible but as soon as the flowers are finished blooming I usually cut them down and the daylilies spread their leaves out and bloom. You can't even see the weeds but believe me they were there hiding under the flowers.

That bed was dug up in 1999 by lifting the sod and shaking the soil off and adding some compost manure and sand and planted and I've never divided my perennials since.  Slowly the bed got overgrown  and since the flood in 2008 I had no weeds in that bed and then all hell broke loose. Even grass with long white spreading roots took hold and creeping charlies.

Now that the flowers have gone to seed and the daylilies were done blooming this is how the bed looked. Because of the heat and other reasons I never cut back the flowers this year after blooming and creeping charlies and grass took over for me.  I'm sure they meant well but...  You can get a better perspective on the size of this flower bed in this photo.

This is the first step I had to take before digging, cut every thing down. Again the bed looks small in this photo.

Can you see the matted weeds  and the obnoxious creeping charlies?

There were 21 clumps of daylilies removed from this bed.

I broke my fork on the big nasty clump at the end of the bed. It was deep and matted and the most difficult clump to dig up and divide. They were so matted. I had to make a trip uptown to Canadian Tire hardware store to buy new forks. It's easier to divide clumps of daylilies with two fork to pry them apart. Lucky me, the forks were on special that day.

Some of the clumps were small and some were big. Look at that creeping charlies in the grass.

This is what the first divided clump looks like. A lots of divisions. I wash the roots to make it easier to divide.

The end of the weeded flower bed. The bricks will need to be removed and more sand put under to raise them up since the flood deposited some sediment around the bed. That's the easiest job but still a lot of work. My job is far from finished.

I took out my Childhood Memories rug out and I've been hooking about an average of ten minutes a night before I go to bed. I have no idea how the rest will look. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Since my piece of left over burlap was smaller than I needed I stitched some worsted wool remnants to add some edge to make it easier to hook near the border. It will simply be remove when I'm done hooking.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING to all my Canadian friends.

 Thanks for stopping by my blog everyone and have a safe and happy week...   JB