This site is about my life as a farmgirl, wife, mother and grandmother. We have a beautiful granddaughter and the cutest grandson. We own two farms in Craig County Virginia, leasing one and raising beef cattle on the other.
February 2021 found us married for 49 years and still going strong. Our baby girl had her 44th birthday and her big brother still loves her very much!
We had eight days of snow and sleet this month in 2021 and nine days of rain. We sure hope to get that moisture again in 2022 because we are in a drought at the moment.
Some of my seeds for the greenhouse and garden arrived on February 22nd and now I’m ready for warm temps. We got some new lumber for new shelving in the greenhouse and it was a great start for growing.
Crushed egg shells for the garden to get rid of Colorado Potato beetles. It works I promise you!! Just sprinkle in the rows with the fertilizer and drop your potatoes on top of the crushed egg shells. I saved them all year!
February was a slow month and very cold and that kept us hauling in firewood and feeding all the animals extra nutrition.
Sun is shining in front of the house and fog is rolling in behind the house.
There’s a front rolling in here this morning around 10:00 or 11:00 so the cattle are being fed before the farmer is. He wanted to feed the cattle their hay and grain before it’s covered with rain and probably ice because it’s 32*.
The number on the top left is outside, on the right inside and in the middle is the wind speed. We love our weather machine!Rolling out bales of orchard grass for one herd of cattle.
While hubby is taking care of the stock I prepared breakfast.
French toast using our chicken eggs.Crisp bacon that we buy from the Cattleman’s Store in Lexington VA.
My French toast recipe is six eggs, 1/2 cup of milk, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of cinnamon, all beaten together until frothy. While I’m beating this up, I’m also melting a half stick of butter in my electric skillet. I dip slices of bread into the egg mixture and lay them out in the melted butter, growing each side. This makes a dozen slices of toast and when they’re done I fry the bacon in the same skillet. Everything is done and setting on the table when hubby walks in the house.
Normally we would use our own maple syrup but Mother Nature hasn’t been kind for two years, so we use Mrs. Butterworth’s until we can harvest our own. If all goes well we’ll be tapping trees and making syrup in the sugar house in late February or March.
Maybe not breakfast of champions but close!! 🙂
At the end of the meal when I’m cleaning up the kitchen I also clean up those used egg shells. Once they’re washed out, I put them in a pan on my dryer to dry thoroughly. The next day I drop them in a clean bag, crush the shells into small pieces and store them until garden time. We drop the shells around our plants in the each row of the garden to get rid of any unwanted creatures eating the plants and to add calcium to the plants. Last spring our garden was “almost” bug free!!
Cleaned egg shells waiting to dry.Crushed egg shells waiting to be used in the garden this spring.Sadie waiting patiently watching the cows being fed and for Dad to come in for breakfast.
This is the blog for our little farm in Skagit county. Here we have Shetland sheep and Nigerian Dwarf goats. In addition we have donkeys, cattle, pigs, chickens, geese, and peafowl. The blog describes the weekly activities here.
countrygirl-lifeonthefarm 