Road-trip and Update

There are only two pictures I think related directly to my tiny house but they are good ones!  Merete and Christopher stopped by to take some pictures/interview me and my tiny house.  I have proof!  The others are just some pictures, most not relating to the tiny house but definitely relating to the bigger goals of homesteading with this website… by the way, I am probably going to start posting more about that stuff soon and as my house starts getting more complete… :).

James and I went on a quick road trip this weekend to see my amazing cousins Sage and Mikel (check out pictures of the elusive Patrick the dog, AKA PQ who is an adorable rescue pup I have never met!), we had a blast winding our way up just above Yakima Washington to the tiny town of Naches Washington, which is spelled three different ways on the buildings inside of Naches.  Adorable little town though and very gracious hosts.  We visited the local farm for their fall harvest festivities.  We enjoyed fresh home-made donuts, learned about a lot of aspects of farming (apples, gourds,  bees and a plethora of other stuff, even some cows, goats and an array of birds) Watched some pumpkin/apple canon shenanigans and my favorite, walnut hunting! :).  Here are some pictures with some minimal explanations attached 🙂

I feel so famous! These people are ridiculously awesome. I am so fortunate to meet inspiring people like Christopher and Merete, personalities like yours make the world turn round and round!

I got interviewed again and I wasn't even racist this time! If you don't get this you can watch Theron Humphrey's interview with me for his wild idea (check out his whole project at thiswildidea.com, I am day 330) where I am nervous and apparently promote Idaho's racist stereotype... it wasn't THAT bad but I meant to say I was from 'typical white-bread America' What I actually said was I am from 'white america'...I suck, I swear though, there is not a racist bone in my body!! Either way, I think I did better interviewing for sure this time though I am still nervous and can't always think of good answers off the top of my head :). These two were great and work well together as a team. Very cool thing to experience :).

We got a tour of some bee boxes at Johnny Thompson's Farm, I am interested in raising bees, they had an unfortunate inncident this year in which they lost all their bees, big bummer but out of it came an opportunity for me to learn about bee-keeping up close and personal!

Here is Johnny Thompson Jr. giving us the run-down. I am certain there will be more posts down the line more in-depth about bee-keeping... for now its cool to see in some bee boxes!

The bees did a good job here! Johnny was telling us about how they spin the panels about this point to get the honey out. All of it is fascinating to me!

Here is a fresh and clean bee panel before the bees get to it, unfortunately the bees never got to this before they died... it is a really interesting thing about how the bees are having issues this year... Lots of interesting philosophies as to why... I wonder if it has anything to do with this being the first year Johnny Thompson had GMO corn... probably not but maybe...

The structures the bees make are fascinating, I want to study bees and their behavior more.

more bee stuff!

This was cool too, they have thre fans on their orchard that they start up right around this time of year. Johnny said that there can be big damage done to the budding apple trees if the temperature gets down to about 24 degrees and they are at a sensitive stage. They flip these fans on (they are powered by huge gas engines) at night when the weather starts hovering around the 24-25 degree mark. It pulls the air around and, because they are tall and the air is just a little bit warmer up that high it pulls down slightly warmer air through the trees and protects them. He was also telling us about how they used to have little heaters throughout the orchard that burned diesel fuel and used to do the same thing but since diesel is about 5-6 times more expensive that just doesnt make sense anymore. If they do just let the temperature drop it can actually kill off all the buds and kill their crop for the next year. Amazing how one single degree makes all the difference!

Here he is explaining about the buds

We were all fascinated!

And here is where it gets less 'tiny housey'...

Here s Johnny Thompson's home made pumpkin launcher

Don't mind that my eyes look like I am a zombie... here are the cows, they were very friendly!

me! James likes this picture 🙂

Huge!

For those of you who don't know, this is what a walnut looks like on the tree... I had no idea... it is cheating to pull them off the tree though, where is the fun in that! You have to hunt them on the ground!

They had some cool OLD washing machines and things, at some point this was a state of the art washing machine, it was very cool to look through all the things.

Cool image James took of one of the old Dodges

Another

Last year when I came out this thing was teaming with goats all over it, this year there were just two goats and I think they had been fed too much, they weren't too interested in moving much let alone climbing.

We started taking off JUST at the golden hour, also right when my camera SD card filled up! Luckily James' iphone takes great images, I love this man!

On the way up we stopped for breakfast in Baker City, on the way back we toured through this town a bit, there are some COOL houses here... We decided we needed to take another day trip back and get some good photos some day.

GMO corn, at least its pretty, I guess

They had quite the collection of old school farm tools. I want to get a miniature horse for my homestead and teach it to work with me in the garden. I think it would be awesome to design and weld up some tools for the minihorse to work the garden with me. And I want to build a cart for him to pull me around... and use him as a pack horse when we go camping and stuff 🙂

Pretty

Pumpkins and squash

Apples

Peaches

Me with my walnuts, these amounted to about 38 cents! 🙂

I thought I found my first walnut, turns out I was duped... it was just a shell

Mikel's a Nut

James's Nut

That's where he found it, hunting walnuts is harder than you think!

Me and my beautiful Cuz Sage, we're the only girls on moms side of the family

Apple canon

Pumpkin Canon

Walnut Canon?

One of the old washing machines or maybe apple crusher?

Another old Dodge

I wish I was more creative, this would be funny if I could think of a good caption

Goat 1

Duck Butts

there were a couple old Schwinns

I called him barky even though he never barked... He was our buddy at the farm and followed us around a bit

Goat 2

these guys were friendly

Pretty

Cool

Sagey and Mike

These flowers messed with my eyes, Dan (Mikel's dad) has one of the prettiest lawns ever, he seems to have flowers blooming all year long!