Even our cat, Mittens, is coming in for an afternoon nap during the heat of the day. I’ll admit that Will and I are also observing the traditional siesta! When the CAT thinks it’s too hot to hunt varmints, that’s HOT! By the way, she’s turned out to be a wonderful hunter, catching mice, voles, and even rabbits every day. Squirrels are too tough so far, but Spencer and Mittens are teaming up on ground squirrels. She helps surround them and Spencer dives in to grab them. No more ground squirrels eating our sprouting corn. Hooray!
We finally had our first baby pigs from our Red Wattle gilt. She had five but one was born dead. We had hoped for more as eight is an average litter. But the four we have left are doing well. One little boar was shoved out of the nursing and was getting thin. So now I’m feeding him milk and eggs three times a day, plus what he’s getting from Mom. He’s fattening up nicely and is now elbowing right in there to nurse.
We drove down to pick up our new-used big round baler that we’ve been paying on for months. Today, Will is going to put it on the field. I’m crossing my fingers that it’ll work well. That will make us much more independent in making hay. Prior to this we’ve had to hire our round bales baled and it wasn’t cheap. The big round bales make haying go so much faster and we don’t have to lift bales onto the wagon and stack them in the barn. So we old homesteaders with bad backs do much less grunt work.
Meanwhile, we have another field cut yesterday to square bale. Even with the round baler, we want to fill our hay mow with square bales and stack reed canary grass bales below, in the storage barn, for bedding this winter.
The garden is wonderful this year — the very best ever. The corn’s up to my shoulders and we now have most of it hand-weeded between the plants and mulched well. Lots of tomatoes set on the shoulder-high vines and the potatoes are just getting ready to bloom. We are watching our potatoes as today I spotted Colorado potato bug larva on the leaves! We squashed all we could find, then sprayed the plants with Captain Jack’s Deadbug Brew. We’ll sure keep a twice-a-day watch on all of the potato vines so they don’t get ahead of us. It’s the first time we’ve had potato bugs since we moved to this homestead, seven years ago. I think it’s the exceptionally hot weather. But we can’t complain. I’ll sure have plenty of potatoes to can up in a very short time!
Mary ann,
Thank you. God truly smiles on us. And we do all we can to help Him make our lives what we want it to be. Homesteading takes lots of work and prayer!
Jackie
Brad & Rhona,
No it’s a commercial product, available at many garden stores, now put out by Bonide. There are other varieties of Spinosad (the active ingredient) available.
Jackie
Jackie,
Never heard of Captain Jack’s Deadbug Brew. Is it something you made up yourself or can it be purchased?
congrats on the new piglets
Thanks for the updates Jackie. Love both of the pictures and will look forward to watching the piglets grow in future photos. Too bad on the potato bugs. Daily patrol is routine for us here in Michigan too, but finally they are starting to slow down.
Your mama pig and babies are beautiful and seem so contented…Bless you and Will ..Father God surely has given you a wonderful life…MA
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