another photo-less post.

i'll tell ya what, i've just lost motivation to do much of anything lately.  between getting over the flu and dealing with the dogs and the chickens, i'm just over it.  i need a vacation.  people that don't farm don't understand the importance of the seasonal nature of our work.  i don't want to have tomatoes available year-round.  i need the time off.  these chickens are really annoying me because we have another month or two of hauling them around, trekking out in the rain and checking on them, and damnit, this is sierra time.  october to march should be my labour-free time off.  i don't want to deal with chickens, and i don't think they enjoy being out there in the drizzly, cold fall weather.  so there.

but anyway, dexter is getting over his foot pretty well, and wouldn't you know it, now it's oliver who's hurt.  last night his face puffed up and i'm thinking he has an abscessed tooth.  great.  keith is with him at the vet now (because we can afford that bill).

i'm just sitting here, wasting time and browsing christmas ideas on the intratubes.  what a time-suck.

something just came a-crashin' down outside in the wind, so i guess this is all for now.

xoxo - sierra.

busy, busy.

sorry, dearest internets, for not updating this beast.  i have plenty to write about, but have been so busy i haven't had the time.

this is just a brief update; i hate posts without pictures.

i've been working on my business plan for my bakery business that will start this coming spring.  very exciting! 

dexter is now in a cone because of his foot, and i have tons of adorable, hilarious photos to prove it.  it has made life very entertaining.

the farm is doing well, greens are growing and the chickens are looking good.  we unleashed the henlets to freerange (plus our gorgeous new rooster that we got with them), and they don't quite get it, but they're working on it.  the older hens and kickass do not approve.  we spaced out the remaining roosters into the empty pen, so there's about 39 in each and they're pretty happy.  they're now getting two scoops of food per day, which is really a lot more food since there are less roos in each pen, and they get more forage space also.  i hope they start packing on weight because they look a little thin, honestly.

my church--the church we've been going to off and on--has a quilting group (read: old biddies) and i'm going to look into joining it to learn.  who better to learn from than a group of old women that grew up doing what we're trying to learn to do?  they're hilarious old birds too, i'm kind of excited.

okay, well, that's probably enough for now.  i'll try to get photos edited and whatnot to post on here, i hate text-only posts!

xoxo - sierra.

oops, i craft my pants.

so lately i've been crafting a whole lot, i mean a whole lot, while helping my friend/sisterwife amanda get ready for her first craft fair (good job on that, ma'am).  i've been bedazzling bows for her, since i'm normal-bow-making retarded apparently.  so this post is picture-heavy-ish.

this is the only tree in my yard with leaves (that are pretty, anyway), but isn't it gorgeous?  i took these on one of the super nice days we had this week.  before the wind blew it to smithereens too.

did i mention i've been making bows?  oh.  well i have been.

hobby lobby puked on my table.

i started out downstairs on the kitchen table, but it got a little crazy when it was time to eat.  so i moved upstairs, to my gloomy, crappily-lit craft room of sorts.

what you can't see is the mess on my other computer table, and the rest of the floor.  speaking of floor, god, doesn't it look terrible?  it's an old floor, get off my balls.

this turned out to be even more cramped, so i spread out across the all of the room.  i'm lucky to be able to roll my rolly chair from one desk to the other.

turns out i'm kind of a badass at making felt flowers and fabric rosettes.  ignore the blurriness of the picture, 'cause it's the best you're going to get.

so tiny.  so, so tiny.

i'm making holiday bows.  i like them the best.  but i wish i had more, because i thought i had more and i only ended up with a handful to decorate and i am so bummed.  i'm just going to make more centers, unless amanda-panda comes sooner than i thought to pick them up.

so flashy.  thankful fall bows.

i seriously have been listening to christmas music all day.  tra-la-la-la-la ..

i don't know why i didn't take a picture of the other three bows close up, but whatever.  they're probably the cutest though.  i dug out all my christmas-card-making trinkets and they're fun.  and i found tiny bells, so they have jingles, too.  what little girl wouldn't want to wear a bow that jingles?  not this one, that's who.  i love jingles.

but anyway, i guess i should get to bed or go downstairs and be sociable with db, because he's being a brat today and maybe he just needs some attention or something (i hope it's attention).

xoxo - sierra.

pictures and pictures (again).

so i guess i've kind of accomplished stuff today, but not really.  i accomplished a lot of time wasting as i sat on the intratubes downloading songs.  but i also scrubbed down the bathroom, canned some more tomatoes, did some laundry, picked up the basement and made some pumpkin stencils.  yeah!  did you realize that halloween is like a week away?  seriously.

well anyway, i also edited some pictures to post.  so here they are.

 

the apple calender i've been working on.  it was a funky stained wood before.

dexter and oliver, how cute right?!

some canned green beans.

keith and oliver.  he loves the dogs more than me, and they love him more than me.  it's great.

ketchup.  super delicious smelling.

my saucemaker.  seriously, it's totally worth 60$.

tomato puree from today's batch of spaghetti sauce.  looks toxic, right?

i like sauce made with heirloom tomatoes, but they're kind of watery so i add romas to thicken it up.

okay, well.  hopefully i'll get these pumpkins carved tonight (or at least one).  they look rad.  now to just get keith to take a picture with me so i can carve one of us too!

xoxo - sierra.

blogapalooza

i need a place to post these for when i totally forget about them.  seriously.  i like to rediscover blogs, but it pisses me off when i can't remember ones i used to check fanatically.

applegarth farm is my favourite blog, hands down.  it's my ultimate goal for our household and farm--she's so self-sufficient, they're raising their family sustainably, and it's just great.  plus, her golden retriever just had puppies and i like looking at pictures of roly-poly pups, so it's basically win-win.  she also raises goats, rabbits and chickens.  minus the rabbits, i could see myself doing exactly what she's doing.  it's nice to see that it's attainable, you know?

now that i posted that, i can't remember the others.  what the hell.  oh well.

maybe posting some pictures lately, i have a butt-ton of things to do around the farm today (plus cleaning up the kitchen from my sugar cookie massacre yesterday afternoon before the weenie roast).

xoxo - sierra.

Along came a spider--

so i really wanted to update this every day, but i haven't had time.  i've been a canning queen again--ketchup, more spaghetti sauce and green beans, with salsa verde and more spaghetti sauce waiting to be done (i refuse to seed and cut the jalapenos and habaneros, and keith still hasn't done it).  so my week, or the beginning of it anyway, will be busy.

another thing i haven't done (in at least a week) is really clean the house.  so i did today--at least this morning, before the brown weenie roast.  i scrubbed the floor and dusted, cleaned the kitchen (finally got those dishes out of the sink), lysol-ed everything, and got the laundry done.  keith played video games, isn't that sweet of him?  i guess it's really winter, because when it gets time for the farm to officially shut down, he just starts playing video games all the time.  the most annoying, grating video games.  currently it's some ridiculous motocross crap and a racing game, and they're both one player so i can't even join in, i just get stuck watching,.  yay.

but anyway, so i was really grossed out by the state of the house and took to cleaning it.  i really hate cleaning.  i really hate cleaning.  i mean, what a waste of time.  it's just going to be instantly dirty again; if not for the dogs, then for the fact that we live in the country and everything is instantly dirty all the time.  now, don't think our house is filthy.  it's tidy.  there are just always tumbleweeds of dexter hair in the living room and mud clods in the kitchen because we're always in and out and we have hairy dogs.  it's frustrating to spend all day scrubbing down the house and then bam! it's filthy again by the time that you hang up the broom.  well, and i've never really been super thorough at it, which pisses keith off, to which i tell him to do it himself or get over it.  so there's that.

but anyway, i found a website called totally together journal and she has this magical thing called the daily 7, which is really just common sense but to see it so clearly typed out it's like, "oh!" and it all makes sense.  so i printed it out and it's posted in the kitchen where i can see it, and it's a reminder of what to do so i (hopefully) don't have to spend every freaking waking moment of my life cleaning and can do other stuff, like sitting on the couch watching disney movies.  because that's way more fun than cleaning.

and so this afternoon was the annual brown weenie roast, in which keith's family gets together at his dad's house and roasts some hotdogs and shoots the shit, and it was a pretty good time.  it started out really great out but as soon as the sun dropped, the temperature was just wham cold and thank god there was a fire or i seriously might've died.

and i'm just tired now, and that's why there aren't any pictures or anything really exciting in this post, so sorry, dear intratubes, if i've bored you.

xoxo - sierra.

a day in the life--sorta.

so yesterday i went and exchanged my saucemaker at rural king because the spring that leveraged the spiral to feed food through kept popping through the little metal contraption that is supposed to keep tension on the spring.  WELL.  i go to use it today and there isn't even a shaft and spiral in the new one!  wtf.

so i guess i'm not doing that until i get another one, because i am not using my chinois on tomatoes.  it was hell making applesauce in!

i really just want to sew, but i'll post pictures of what i've been doing instead.

please ignore the messy stovetop in the first shot, i've been busy okay?!

the doubledecker pressure canner i'm currently borrowing, the seal on mine is shot.

the "pantry cabinet" above the 'fridge.  lookin' good, right?

all the other cans stashed in the basement, along with winter squash.

oh yeah.  i've become a canning master.  i started last year but didn't do much because frankly, i just wasn't that into it.  i made a few jars of salsa verde, burnt the hell out of a large batch of spaghetti sauce (and used it anyway), and i think that was about it.  keith and his aunt canned some pickles, but they were soft and i didn't like them much.  oh, i made pickled beets last year, they went over hugely with keith.  he ravaged them before i even got to try them. 

this year, i've made some hundred-fifty-odd cans (i think?  at last count anyway) of a ton of different stuff.  lots of jams.  amanda and i went to some orchards and got some fruits, and i made a lot of jams and syrups from them.  and then a ton of applesauce.  and a bunch of greenbeans.  just a lot of food, you know?  sweet stuffs, savory stuffs, stuff for soups, stuff for everything.  and i bet keith wipes it out the first snowfall.

this gaillardia makes me so happy.  it's so bright and perky.

this is actually still blooming, but it's an old picture.  isn't it just gorgeous?

heirlooms ftw!

these are some gorgeous heirloom tomatoes that i made a few batches of tomato sauce out of.  aren't they beautiful?  i swear i didn't mess with the colours in photoshop or anything.  the window caught a bunch of flash though--and please ignore my messy storage containers.  and my note to remember to take the bay leaves out of the tomato sauce, even though i forgot to anyway.

but anyway, today i canned four quarts of green beans that really needed to be canned a few days ago, but i popped them in cold water and they snapped right back into shape.   the miracle of cold water on tired vegetables, y'know?

i feel like ther--

oh yeah.

i have some neat crafts for the next few days, if i ever get done canning to get around to them.  keep your eyes peeled, internets.  whomever you are.  i hope you aren't some crazy stalker, seriously, because i just can't handle that sort of attention.  especially if you're from decatur.  you creep.

but okay, i really think that's all for now.  so.  bye?

xoxo - sierra.

so, here i am.

i'm not going to bore everyone with an introductory post.  well.  by "everyone" i mean "myself," since i don't particularly expect followers.  i just need an outlet.

i started this blog to keep track of what i'm doing, getting done, and what i ought to be doing (or at least what i think i ought to be doing).  and who i am right now, which changes a lot--i hardly recognize myself anymore!

i chose the name 'one fierce farmgirl' (it was going to be f'ing fierce farmgirl, but you never know who may end up at this thing) because it encompasses my current identity: me, a city girl, "fierce,"and the farmgirl i'm slowly but surely transforming into.  but you know what they say, "you can take the girl out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the girl."  so true, so true.

so anyway, i think it's bad form to start multiple sentences with 'i,' but this is all about me, so i guess i can be selfish.

my big brother matthew is expecting a baby in march!  i'm so excited!  it gives me a reason to really start hammering away at sewing, because i'll have a tiny baby to sew for.  i'm jealous, really, having grown up the "oldest sibling"--

a little backstory on matthew and i.

matthew was adopted out when he was born, and i was told when i was eight or nine (or ten) or so that i had an older brother, but never knew if i would meet him.  and oh boy did i want to!  and then in the winter of 2008, i met him, on his birthday no less!  and he's awesome.  we're just alike, i swear--baking and artsy and awesome, and it's weird, because i finally have someone i can relate to!  he lives in springfield and even though we're a half hour apart, we don't talk nearly as much as we should, which is something i'm working on with (most of) my siblings.

well anyway, i'm jealous because i was raised the oldest and thus expected to do all these things first, and here he is, getting married and expecting a baby and buying a farm and whatthefuck (i cuss a lot, probably just get used to that), that's supposed to be me!

but i'm happy for him and excited to be an aunt, so i won't complain (except for here; i can say anything i want in sierraland).

okay, well, this ended up being a satisfactory post.  tomorrow i'll post what i've been up to lately, and i am pretty darn impressed with myself.

xoxo - sierra.