January

January brings cleaning my Mom's house out with husband Bob, son Dana, brother Mike and sister-in-law Dale. We are almost done with sorting and moving 84 years of memory's and stuff! Lisa, my brother Steve's wife took pictures of all the rooms before we began. Great idea Lisa.

Having more time at home brings cleaning my own house so I can fit in all the treasures I brought home from Mom's and facing a barn that has had no attention since October. Yeeeks!
Benefit from cleaning the barn...

a well mulched vegetable garden. Oh, if only the people mentioned above were as willing to clean out my barn. :-(
Fun stuff in January I was able to do some crafting. But first, last November I purchased several tons of meadow grass hay. Each bale weighs about 120 pounds, was delivered and stacked in my barn, with my help, for the price of $6.00 per bale!! This is wonderful green grasses and a few types of clover at an unheard of price plus delivery! Well as wonderful as this hay is, as my friend Jeannette put it, this hay is not user friendly. The flakes of hay have a way of falling apart as I carried them to the sheep. Hay was everywhere and it was taking many trips to the barn to get enough feed to were it was needed. So necessity being the mother of invention gave me the idea to make a hay holder. I'm sure I'm not the first to come up with this idea but I did use the things I have around the barn

making this an original. In "the day" when feed came in burlap bags I saved several of them as things changed to our now plastic and paper sacks. I cut one open, sewed in  two survey stakes from our fencing project last winter across the tops with my hand spun Shetland yarn and braided paling twine for the handles. The twine across the bottom is a handle so when I put the loops at the top over my shoulder and can hold up some of the weight with my hand.  It opens up, I stand several flakes of hay in the center, fold it up around the hay and can carry more than twice as much hay with no spilling in less than half the trips to take hay were I can feed the sheep away from the barn for less cleaning on my part. I'm in love!

Now the picture above I would like to introduce Ginger in the front and Nutmeg (Nut Megan) in the back. Two Mini Lamancha dairy goat kids. Ok, I was never going to have dairy goats again, yeah right. Well with the country the way it is and the want for "real" food and my love for goats what could be so bad about having two small milkers to supply our milk needs. I can't breed them till this coming fall so we're just having fun getting to know each other for the next year. They came from Paula my friend and neighbor up the road. Check out her web site "Creamcup Minis" the link is to her 2009 kids page were you can see another picture of my new girls!