Back to the house that
my first husband and I lived in in Thornburg, Virginia. Sorry that I do not
have may photos of that time. I gave all the albums to my daughters when their
dad and I divorced and his house caught on fire and they were all lost. I do
have the pictures in my mind though.
While living in that
house we had a small farmette or that is what I called it. It was really a one
acre parcel of land that the farmer was partitioning off because he was getting
older and could not take care of it all by himself. We used to visit him in the
summer at the top of the road where his house was. He would give us some of the
vegetables that he grew on his part of the land. His wife was very nice to us.
I called it a farmette
because we did have animals on it and a big garden and all kinds of things like
that. I loved it. It took us five years to get that garden started and to
produce well and then we had to up and leave it. While we were there though, I
grew corn, broccoli and lots of other things in my 40 x 80 foot garden. Why it
was so hard to grow anything and get it going good was because the ground that
we lived on was clay and our back yard was on a slope. My husband would till it
over with a shovel. You could walk out there after it had rained and literally
get your shoe sucked right off of your foot. It happened that way to all of us
at one time or another.
Our Farmette
On our farmette we had a Goat, Chickens,
ducks, rabbits, two dogs, four cats and a hamster. Yes, life was busy then and
my two daughters would help out, most of the time. They did let some of the
rabbits die though. I wish that I could have helped them but by the time that I
found that my two daughters were lying about feeding them and giving them
water, they were so bad off that there was nothing left for me to do. I was so
heartbroken. They had to learn though even if it was not the way that I had
envisioned them too. So I ended up taking care of all the animals. We survived
out there and I loved my farmette. We had fresh eggs every day of the week, we
had goats milk until Claire got mastitis a few times. That was no worry though
as my husband worked for a computer engineer who had his business from home and
he was a farmer too. He had a couple of cows and he taught me how to milk them
when I worked there a few months. He was really very nice. He let us pick corn
and put as much as we wanted into our very own freezer. We had fresh cow’s milk
for the girls and since it was fresh milk, I had to pasturize it myself and I
also got the cream from it and I made butter. I tried to make cheese, but I was
not that good at it. Fresh butter and cream was the bomb then. Too bad that was
only in a short period of our lives and we never did get back to that. We had
it made there with all the fresh foods. It was an amazing part of my life that
I will never forget and sometime I pine for that kind of life again, but it
isn’t ever going to happen. Too much has changed and we all moved forward.
Winter and Our Goats
The winters were rough there with feeding the
chickens and the goats. Claire had two babies one year but one died. They did a
necropsy of it and found that it was born without a stomach. The other one was
a boy and he was like a pet. He would follow us all over the place and the
girls named him Waggles because he always wagged his tail. He was the happiest
goat that I ever saw. Mom swore we let him live in our house, but we never did
that. Well, one year I went down to feed them and found Waggles on the ground.
Claire was making all kinds of racket when I went in her pen. I found that he
was shot. It must have been a very clean shot because there was no blood, just
a hole in his back flank. He was already dead by the time that I got to him.
See we lived on a very forested area on the back of that farmers land. Waggles
looked like a deer and I surmise that some kids were out shooting and hit him
because they thought he was a deer and ran off when they found that it wasn’t.
That was so sad.
The Rooster
Oh the chickens! The rooster gave my daughter
a run for it, up the hill no less! She was about 7 years old and she went down
to feed the chickens and gather some eggs. Well, the rooster got out and wow
you would not believe the talons they have. He flew at her with those talons in
front of him all the way up the hill. That hill was kind of steep and was about
200 feet in distance from the back of the house. The strangest thing about that
was, we found him dead in the pen the next morning. All we could think of was
that there was a fox living nearby or maybe the stray dogs got a hold of him.
The Rabbits
Speaking of stray
dogs…
The bunnies!!! We had some bunnies that we
were going to use as meat, but that didn’t happen. I fell in love with them and
they ended up having some congenital sinus problem and could not be used for
meat. So they became pets. Well anyway, about the stray dogs. A few times we
were woken up in the very early hours, say right around when it just was
turning light out, to blood curdling screams. I would look out the window and
the bunny cages were on the ground. No dogs in sight because they heard me
scream Bunnies are loose! We all got shoes on and bathrobes and what-not and
went out to catch baby bunnies in the woods. What a wake-up call! You bet after
we got things all put back together and all the bunnies accounted for and in
their cages we had a big breakfast. This usually happened during the summer
months because as I recall we didn’t have to go to school or anything. We never
got more bunnies after that and they all just passed on except for two. We took
them to Florida with us when we moved along with a couple of cats and a dog.
The Muscovy Ducks
The Muscovy Ducks were given to us when
someone was moving and they could not take them with them. They would talk to
me every morning and most of the day if I was around. They were a pair, one
male and one female. One came up missing a couple of months later and then the
other one died, with a broken heart I suppose. They say they mate for life and
I had no idea how old they were when they were given to us in the first place.
We also could not take them to where we were moving to either.
Bird Of Prey and Free
Lunch
I must tell you about Birds of Prey. They be
the quickest thing on earth that I have seen….er not seen because they were
that quick. I had some chickens that laid a few eggs and we let them hatch.
They were following their mom all around the yard, when one disappeared. Good
Golly Miss Molly we could not find it anywhere. Then a few minutes, like 2
minutes, another one disappeared and we did not see where that one went to
either. Mind you the mother hen was not being picked off but she was wondering
where the heck her chicks were going. In about 15 minutes time the 7 chicks
were all gone….Nothing, Nada, Ziltch…nowhere to be found. We never did see what
bird of prey took off with them, but they were a nice quick lunch for it.
Those were the good times, but as life goes
there are some bad with the good and that would be for another story.
© Debra K. Allen
a.k.a Lady Guinevere
I researched
and wrote this article. Please do not copy and paste any part of this article,
picture included for your own use. I will find you and report you for stealing.
It is my right to change any information
therein at any time and/or change the location of my article.
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