Around the Farmette

Yesterday was Sunday and I just took it easy.  Went to church, took a nap, spent some time with the Baby Dog. In the afternoon, I took the tractor out and just rolled around the farmette a bit to see how things were looking in the semi-fall we are having.

Here's what I saw.

There's still some greenery left

But the woods are full of falling leaves

The persimmon trees are beginning to ripen

And the drought has claimed a few victims this year

It also claimed the hornets, which isn't a bad thing

And back in the barnyard, the chickie babies are disappearing behind a wall of leaves on their yard fence.

So all in all life goes on as it should and the seasons move along.  Life is good.



Fall......Kinda, Sorta

From what I understand for most of the country, fall has arrived.

Well here at the farmette, that might be debatable.  It's getting cooler, somewhat.  The nights are even coolish.  The days are still a bit hot though.  Still up in the 80s, although its finally in the low 80s.  After the high 90s all summer, we thing we're doing well to get 82.  "They" do say that it's going to start going down more next week.  We'll see.

In the meantime, we haven't had rain in so long that instead of the leaves turning colors, they are simply dying and falling off.  I hate it when that happens.  We are getting a touch of color here and there though.

But work on the farmette continues no matter what the time of year it is.  After we dug up the garden at the end of the growing season, we proceeded to throw out all the mustard, collard and turnip seeds that we could find.  Add a couple of sprinklers and we are beginning to see a payoff.

We'll be canning them up soon to last us after the cold weather does actually show up.  Good eating on a snowy day with a pan of cornbread added to the mix.  Yum.

A Trip Back in Time

It was a really neat day today.  After church, Sister and I went to Lake Guntersville to the marina.  Docked at the marina were replicas of the Nina and Pinta ships used by Columbus to discover the New World.  We went on board and saw the way they lived on ship during the time of Columbus.  It's  very tiny.  I can't imagine being stuck on there for three months with a whole lot of people and not having a serious personality conflict with some folks.

The Nina was to scale, but the Pinta is actually about 50 percent larger than the original.  It's still way too small to spend that much time on.  And it got worse.  The Nina was the only survivor of a hurricane in the West Indies and after picking up survivors from the other ships it sailed to Spain with 201 people on board.  The ship is slightly over 1900 square feet and not all of that is available to the crew.  That had to be one uncomfortable trip.

It was an interesting way to spend a warm Sunday afternoon.  Now I've got to do some relearning my history lessons.

My New Toy

I’m totally speechless. I have a tractor. A John Deere tractor. My sister got it for me. She found it yesterday and just bought it for me simply because I needed one. Apparently there was an 80 year old man in the area that wanted a JD tractor even though his children opposed the idea. So he bought himself what he wanted and then found out it wasn’t. The children then had their way and the tractor got returned. So our local tractor company then had to resell the tractor as used even though it only had two hours on the engine. What an awesome deal!

So it was delivered this morning, all bright and shiney. I immediately spent a couple of hours working on landscaping in the back. It’s a learning experience, but oh how much easier than doing it with a shovel and a rake.

I think I’m in love.