Homemade Bread

Here is a bread recipe that I just love. I don't have a bread machine, so I have to do the mix it, time it to let it rise and then use bread pans and time it baking in the oven. This recipe is simple which makes the rest of the work not seem so bad. Anyway this is the recipe and directions......
1/2 cup milk, 3 TBSP Sugar, 2 tsp salt, 3 TBSP butter. Heat first 4 ingredients in pan to dissolve sugar. 1-1/2 cups warm water, 4-1/2 tsp yeast. Dissolve yeast in water. Mix water/yeast with the milk mix and add 4 cups flour. Start mixing with your mixer using dough hooks. Add 1/2 cup flour at a time (up to 2 cups) until dough starts to ball and look a little elastic. Put dough in greased bowl and let rise to double in size (about 1 hour) punch down and divid dough into two greased bread pans and let rise until dough reaches top of pan (30m to 1 hour) Bake @ 400 degrees for 30 mins. remove from pans and cool on wire rack. Time from start to finish 2-1/2 to 3 hours.

I have not messed this up yet. Sometimes the dough looks sticky, but bakes fine. Sometimes it looks dry, but still bakes fine. So to me, its a no fail recipe. LOL!

Bird Nest Update

I wanted to post this picture of our little bird nest (I blogged about them about two weeks ago) that we have on our porch. The eggs hatched last week, only 14 days after we found them. They are about 9 or 10 days old right now. We did the internet search (of course) and found that both parents will take care of the babies and yes we have seen both of them. We also found out that the babies start leaving in as little as 15 days old. I can see 4 of the babies in this picture, but there was about 7 eggs originally. I will try to count them as they get bigger. More later.....

I am coming back to edit this post with a new picture. I just went out this morning and found the babies hopping out of the nest. Two were caught by the cat and one I put back in the nest with the other 3. So I guess there was 6 birds altogether. Here is the last picture. I am sure these babies will be gone by morning....

July 4th

At the risk of repeating myself. I would like to say how much I enjoy the 4th of July fireworks.

 We go to see the fireworks right here in our hometown. We have a little community park and the Edom VFD puts on the show. There's always a live band (which is a local group) we say the pledge and we get to visit with ALL our neighbors. We park our trucks right on the park green and have a basic hometown tailgate party (family friendly, of course). When it gets dark the fire department puts on an awesome firework display set to patriotic music. As grand as any big city. Then we can head home, just a mile down the road. What a perfect way to spend time with the family.

Last Day of June

I wanted to get one more post in here before the month ended. Today is June 30th and I better hurry.

Our garden has kept us very busy. Some plants have matured faster than others. The potatoes have been harvested. I don't really have a way to store them, so we are just eating good tasting potatoes nearly each day. I ended up with about 40lbs out of 2 rows of them. Pretty good. The Roma tomatoes (good for canning) are just now turning red. I am still getting bell peppers too. The green beans gave me a good harvest, but are now dead, because of an underground critter that bit the roots off. Still waiting on the cantaloupe. Still getting squash and cucumber. The corn seemed to grow ok, put I didn't have that much planted, so we have gotten 3 meals worth out of that.

That is my update for the garden.

Summertime on the Farm

We have really been enjoying the farm this summer. Usually we are off on some trip to somewhere and I guess we miss a lot of the wildlife here. This tree frog is one of many that we have here every night. They seem to like meeting each other at our pool. So Bobby went and picked a few up so the kids could play with them. Later he put them on the rail to take pictures of them. To our surprise their croaking and barking sounds brought up a snake too. We did not take a picture of the snake.

This flower basket is hanging at our porch and we walk past it every day.  A house wren has made a nest inside where the plant is. Seems like it wouldn't want to be that close to us. But it is.

Here is the nest.....

Here are the eggs in the nest. There are five eggs so far.....

The girls found this little guy near our shed. I thought we had bunnies under the shed, because I had found their "door" the other day. Which is very near our garden and pear trees. This is just a baby. Here I am holding it in one hand and taking a picture with my other hand. We did let him go back where we found him. But he really needs to stay out of my garden.

Garden Update

Its June and since the sun finally came out things are really growing in the garden now. Cucumber, potatoes, green beans and squash are all giving us food now. The corn is still growing and so are the tomatoes. Bell peppers are getting flowers and we even have little green cantaloupe on the vines. Our sweet peas didn't make it and the okra (which usually does well) is pretty sad looking. We seem to have the bugs under control. The little green bugs are gone and we have plenty of ladybugs, so they must be doing their job. The grass growing in the garden is another story. We can't keep up with the hand pulling. I did expect to have a problem with this, since the garden is in a new location and this area use to be part of the horse pasture. So the grasses just grow and grow. It won't grow in the lawn at all, but it'll grow in the garden. Go figure. Anyway, I have reached the point that I am keeping the grass pulled from around the plants, but letting it go everywhere else.

Another problem that has come up is the gophers. First the bunnies eating the tops of the plants and now the gophers are eating the bottoms of the plants. So, I have lost a few young plants. Maybe we won't miss them too much.