Summer school isn’t always met with tons of excitement, however, when you have fun interesting classes like Fascinating Biology from Fascinating Education that helps to keep the kids excited about learning. Brock has been reviewing Fascinating Biology and he has enjoyed the lessons!
This week I think we finally managed to figure out the solar water pump set-up. I am so excited! We added a second solar panel in a series and it seems to be doing the trick.
Adisyn has been busy making goat milk soap the past few weeks and even tried her hand at Kathi’s (at Oak Hill Homestead) shampoo bar recipe today. I can’t wait to try them out!
I have enjoyed getting the chance to read the posts that were linked up last week. Thank you to those who linked up!!
I hope you have a great week! Make sure to check back later in the week to see the posts that are linked up.
Blessings,
Jennifer
Rented pastures can be a blessing and a curse all at once. Many times the infrastructure is limited and as renters we hate to sink money into a permanent system. On the other hand, it is cheaper to rent pasture than to own it; so by renting we can increase the number of cows we can run without increasing our debt load.
This year we decided that we needed a second water source in order to better utilize a rented pasture. There are actually two pastures next to each other. The smaller pasture is about 13 acres and has a small pond and a well (that we know nothing about). The other pasture is 40 acres with no water source. We have two separate custom grazing herds (owned by two different owners) that we wanted to graze on the 40 acres. So the first thing we did was to divide the 40 acres in half with a single strand hi-tensile wire.
Next we needed to have two separate sources of water. There is a concrete tank behind the pond that we were in hopes that we could get to work. However, it appears that the line is stuck in the mud in the pond (gotta love Missouri mud!) We can water one set of cows in the pond (which is not desirable but with the current situation we have limited options), but we need a second watering location. Continue reading
Happy 4th of July! I hope all is going well in your part of the world.
We went from being very dry to being wet in the matter of just a few days. We received right at 9.5″ of rain in just over 3 days. This resulted in a lot of localized flooding. Some areas in North Missouri actually received substantially more rain than we did. I am certainly thankful for the rain we received!
I hope you will join me this week for the blog party. I always look forward to reading the blog posts you link up.
Blessings,
Jennifer
A few weeks ago a friend split one of his hives and gave us 5 frames of bees. He made sure to give us some comb that included some queen cells. Aren’t they beeeeutiful? Here I am installing them into the hive box. We have had trouble getting bees established previously with the top bar and horizontal hives so this time we are trying a traditional Langstroth Hive.
The pictures below are from from this week. We went through the hive checking them and then added a honey super on top. So far we don’t have any brood. The girls are working hard at storing up a bunch of honey though. Hopefully the queen will start laying soon. Continue reading
