Photos from my phone

I know I'm not the only one who randomly will go through all of the photos  in their camera roll on their phone and reminisce about all the good times had over the past year. 

I was scrolling through these last night and was just laughing out loud at some of them, and thought it would be fun to share them with you all. I'm sure you've probably seen most of these at some point or another on my blog, but hey if I didn't remember the pictures, surely you guys won't remember some of them too. That's my hope anyways...

Calving shed from last March...love all the icicles!

Helping my hubby load grain. That was probably the first and last day I'll go with him for the entire day...he said I asked too many questions :)

A weekend trip to Billings for an FFA state officer 10 year reunion and the PBR rodeo. In the grand scheme of things, Baby Hackley was about 3 weeks old at the time :)

My handsome boys after their annual spring haircut!

My backyard fire pit...my favorite place to spend time in the summer...

Branding...

Ohhhh and the dancing cows!! How could we forget that?! I literally crack up laughing every time I see these pictures!

Miranda Lambert concert...only my 3rd time seeing her :)

My MIL's birthday present...patriotic pallet flag that I made!

My friend Chay and I at the Wolf Point Stampede rodeo.

Good friends wedding....don't mind the giant goblet of booze my friend Emily is holding...it's a sorority tradition :)

My garden!!

Back when I had a teeny tiny baby bump, and looked more bloated than pregnant. Pretty sure that shirt would fit about halfway down my stomach right now, ha ha.

So I just realized there are way too many pictures to share with you for one blog post! This is the first half of the year, so I'll save the second half for another day!

Happy Wednesday friends! I'm working from the comfort of my living room in sweatpants :) roads were crappy and my boss didn't want me driving on them, oh darn :)

Weekend Rundown

Oh boy friends, it sure is Monday! Woke up this morning and started getting ready. Let the cats in, let the dogs out. Not 10 minutes later, discover one of my cats has peed inside on the rug. Awesome. Clean that up. Finish getting ready, go outside and see that I forgot to put the trash in the bin last night and the neighbors dogs had come over and ripped it all to shreds, and it's now all over my yard. Happy Monday morning! I'm determined to not let my morning decide the rest of my day!

Despite the crappy morning, I had a great weekend! Started it out with Farmers Market. I had a bunch of dead corn stalks in my garden and decided to do something with them and sell them. I went and bought some cute ribbon and put about 10 stalks into a bunch. I sold about 5 of the bundles, with people asking to have them again next week!

The lady who always sells next to me had a bunch of pumpkins and gourds, so we made a little display. 

The rest ofSaturday I spent just hanging out around my in laws and my MIL showing me all of the baby stuff she got while shopping on her last work trip. This kid isn't even here yet, and is spoiled already!

Sunday I enjoyed a lazy morning in bed, which hasn't happened in awhile. The rest of the day was spent cleaning house, picking more beans from my garden and just getting stuff ready for the week. 

I bought more little gourds from the lady at Farmers Market, and decided to do up my dining room table for fall. I think it turned out cute!

I also spent some time in Patricks "office" with him. 

Only about 200 more acres as of today and they'll be done, so probably sometime tomorrow. It's such a good feeling having harvest done!

Hope you all had a fabulous weekend as well!

Childhood Memories

Friends, I had one of the BEST weekends last weekend that I've had in a long, long time. About 2 months ago, my childhood best friend messaged me on Facebook, saying that she would love to come visit me in Montana. Of course I'm always up for a visitor, so we went over a couple of dates that worked and she booked her flight! Mind you, we hadn't seen each other in 20 years!! (Side note: there are a lot of things I don't like about Facebook, but THIS is one of the reasons it's so great!)

She got here last Friday, and that was the beginning of an action-packed, fun-filled weekend. Friday she helped me get ready for Farmer's Market, and Saturday morning we set out bright and early to sell all of my goods. And this week was particularly exciting, because I sold out of everything! I did not have a single loaf of bread or muffin left! That's never happened before so I was pretty excited.

 Saturday evening we got a phone call from the neighbor that the Schwann's man had called him and was stuck on a county road that had been washed out. (For those of you who don't have it, Schwann's is like a home delivery service for frozen foods-ice cream, pasta dishes, anything you can deep fry, pot pies, etc. They come around every 3 weeks I think). So Patrick loads up in the giant tractor and my brother, friend and I followed behind cause we were NOT about to miss this!

Well, let's just say this man wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. You have a heavy truck with no 4-wheel drive, and you just attempt to drive through mud and washed out roads. Genius, I swear. He was obviously not from here, and didn't speak English very well. When Patrick was hooked up and dragging the guy out of there it became apparent that this guy REALLY didn't know what he was doing. He was trying to steer back onto the road and was going all over the place. Fortunately, Patrick does know what he's doing, so he just gunned it and drug the guy into the empty field where it was dry.

Hey, at the end of the day we got a free gallon of vanilla ice cream. And that made this preggo lady pretty happy, because we had bought a fresh apple pie that morning at the market :)

The rest of the weekend we had to herd some cows, haul some barley and grain, and just run around the farm doing fun stuff.

It was a fantastic trip and we all had a lot of fun! We also re-created this picture from when we were 2 years old...

Now it's back to my regularly scheduled baking for next week's Farmer's Market...

My First Farmer's Market

Last week I spent hours upon hours baking loaves of bread and picking and washing veggies to get ready for the first Farmer's Market of the year.

Typically we have a very small market, but this week we had 16 vendors selling stuff! It was great! Here is what I started the day out with:

Banana Bread: 8 loaves
Beer Bread: 7 loaves
English Muffin Bread: 8 loaves
Chocolate Zucchini muffins: 12
Green Beans: 9 quarts
Peas: 6 ziploc bags full
Lettuce: 10 heads
Beets: 2 bunches
Carrots: 5 bags
Squash: 2



















It doesn't look like a lot on the table, but it takes a long time to get everything ready!

And what I came home with? 1 loaf of beer bread, 2 heads of lettuce and 2 squash.

That's right, I sold out of almost everything!! Which leaves me scared because that means I have to bake almost another 30 loaves of bread...this week. Plus get all my veggies ready again. Yeesh. I'm gonna be one busy, baking fool!

On another note, last Friday when I got home from work there were some giant grain bins going up in our yard.

They hold 4,000 bushels each. A bushel is about the same size as a 5 gallon bucket. This harvest, our grain is going straight to the elevator in our little town, so we will use these to store fertilizer for next year that we pre-bought.

On the very top there's a small opening. There's a rope connected to the lid, and the rope reaches all the way down to the bottom of the bin. So instead of having to climb on top of the bin to open it, you just pull the rope and the lid opens. We'll have to auger the grain from the bottom of the trucks up to the top of the bin to load it in there. And when we go to unload it, the bottom is called a "hopper bottom" and it will empty right back out into an auger and into a truck to take it wherever it needs to go. The point of the hopper bottom is so that you don't have to shovel any grain out of a flat-bottomed bin.

They're pretty big and will take some getting used to seeing when I walk out my front door, but that's all part of farming I guess!

Family Time Visit

Last week I was a little bit MIA on the old blog, because some of my family came into town to visit and we were too busy having fun!

My mom, niece, grandma and brother's girlfriend all made the 10 hour trek from western Montana over to the Eastern side of the state. The first night we went out to show Kendall the cows, because that's all she was talking about! We let her pick out her very own cow and she named him Bingo.

I mean, I may be biased, but I happen to think she's one of the cutest kids around :) I mean, look at her hair! Those are natural curls!

The first day they were there we spent a lot of time outside in the garden...Kendall was helping water at first...

And then Uncle Patrick distracted her and they were playing on the little tractor.

Grandma was excited to eat fresh beets from my garden. Oddly, this was the only beet that was big enough to harvest, so she only got one while she was there. They all helped me pick green beans, and we got about 2 large trash bags full. We also picked and shelled peas, and did a LOT of weeding! My garden is almost caught up on the weeding, which is such a great feeling!

Oh, one other great thing about grandma? She's from the south...which means she makes some mean fried chicken and mashed potatoes :)

The county fair was also going on at this time, so we went and had great, greasy fair food (cheese fries, nachos, fried donuts, homemade corn dogs, fried pickles, pulled pork-no I didn't eat ALL of it!) Uncle Patrick took Kendall on some of the rides and she was a little scared at first, but then she loved them!

 My bro and his lady :)

  I mean...no words...so precious. He's gonna be a great dad :)

We had a great visit with the fam, and I wish we could have spent more time with them! This was my grandma's first trip out here and I think she really liked it.

Happy almost Friday, friends!

Finally, My Garden!

I know a lot of people have been waiting awhile to see pictures from my garden. Last year I didn't post any, because well, it was a weed garden basically. See, when we dumped a truckload of cow manure 2 falls ago, no one mentioned to me that the cow poo is full of weed seeds, and it would be like planting a bunch of weeds in my garden. Well, that it did. So last year I spent SO many hours weeding, to no avail. When you looked into my backyard, all you saw was weeds. You could only see the produce if you dared to venture through the weeds and start digging. It produced a lot of food, but looked terrible.

Fortunately, this year we were on top of things a little bit better. We put down some weed killer pellets, then rototilled. Then rototilled again. Then planted, and I've been weeding about 3-4 nights a week. Last weekend my FIL was kind enough to take some weed killing spray that we spray on the crop ground and kill off what weeds were left, then we rototilled the empty spots again. It looked great enough to finally take some pictures to show you guys, so be prepared for garden overload!

This year I have planted peas, green beans, corn, carrots, red onions, beets, green leaf lettuce, squash, cucumber, pumpkins and strawberries. I planted zucchini, but for some reason they didn't grow at all. Which is super weird, because usually they grow like a weed. So here we go!

Here's a picture of the whole thing. Yes, it is gigantic.

The corn. I still have some weeding to do here. This section alone took me 8 hours to weed.

 Peas! And a Harley photobomb

You can see some of the pea pods in this picture. The peas flower once and produce the pod. Once the pod is picked, the plant dies and you're left with a bunch of dead plants. These will be ready to pick in about 2-3 weeks.

 Green beans!! And Harley photobombs again. This is A LOT of green beans. I'll get probably 50 lbs or more of green beans off of all these plants. Unlike the peas, these continue to flower and produce. The first picking will produce the most, but I'll still get beans off of these for the entire summer until the frost hits.

Little baby beans are growing! These will be ready in about 2 weeks.

The lettuce...ooohhhh, the lettuce! This stuff can be picked any day!

Poor picture quality, but these are the carrots in front, and beets in the back. The beets didn't do very well either. I might have about 15 of them growing. Sad :( These were one of my best sellers at the Farmer's Market.

Onto the other side of my garden. One thing about the cow manure, it did add these wild sunflowers into the garden! When Patrick rototilled, I made him keep these that were growing along the edge. I think they're gorgeous!

Behind the sunflowers I have the squash, cucumber and pumpkins. Each of the stakes has 1-4 plants growing on a mound. There is so much room around these plants because they have vines that grow like crazy.

Especially pumpkin vines! Those suckers can grow up to a foot per day. They've started to vine out, so any day they'll start taking over everything. And I mean everything.

 Looking up to the house at the cucumber mounds. And Harley, again.

And last but not least, my strawberries! I planted just three little plants in each tub, and they are doing amazingly well! Next year I'd like to get some boxes built so they can grow and expand even more. I've only gotten 3 strawberries off of them, but the first year they don't produce much anyways.

So that's it! I definitely have my hands full taking care of all of this, but I wouldn't have it any other way! In just a couple weeks I'll be able to start taking pictures of all my delicious veggies that I harvest, so I'll be sure to share those too.

Thanks for hanging in there through all of the pictures!