The Frugal Farm Living life deliberately

(pretend that it hasn't been almost a month since I told the first half of this story)

So when we left our brave skunk-fighters, we had two plans. One was to try and poison the skunk with smoke bombs, the kind that you can also put down gopher holes. We thought we could block both ends of the pipe with a feed sack full of dirt and slip the smoke bomb in and let it do its work. But since I am such a fraidey-cat, I was afraid of getting skunked when I blocked both ends of the pipe.

Our other plan was to try and dispatch the skunk with a .22 rifle.

Frugalboy, who at the ripe age of ten has already proven himself to be an excellent marksman with a .22 when plinking at soda cans up in the mountains with Frugaldad, was recruited to be our sniper.  read more »

I know I still need to tell the rest of that skunk story. It was getting late and my brain was pretty fried. But I have to tell another one!  read more »

A couple of weeks ago I headed out to the blackberry patch to pick berries. There was a stand of long grass in my path so I stood on it to bend it down and clear the way. Every time I stepped on the grass, I heard a funny noise in the currently unused irrigation pipe close by. The funny thing was, I wasn't hitting the pipe every time I pushed down on the grass, but the noise coincided with the grass hitting the ground. The noise sounded like a frog jumping up and down, echoing a little in the 30 foot piece of plastic pipe. I kicked the pipe a little, trying to see if I could hear anything else. Nothing. I had the phone with me, so I called Frugaldad and told him about it, and he mentioned that he thought he'd heard a noise out there the day or so before.  read more »

Well, it probably isn't hot enough to consider these the dog days of summer, but we're almost halfway through summer vacation! Things are so busy that I go a couple days between online sessions (sorry if I haven't read your blog lately or posted on Facebook....I just haven't been online! If it's that important, call me on the phone!)

I have declared 2009 "The Year of the Raspberry" since we've already picked gallons and made jam and frozen crushed berries for jam. Don't let the color fool you, but those yellow raspberries might be the best things on the planet. We were excited to have enough for jam. Usually we just eat them all but this year the bushes are very generous.  read more »

We had a heck of a thunderstorm roll through this weekend. It came with hail over 1/2" in diameter and buckets of rain and lots of wind, as well. It made us decide that we'll pay someone to put gutters up on the addition before we pay anyone else to do anything else.

strawberries on ice

handful of hail scooped from behind the house  read more »