The Rabb's Farm Life Adventures

Well, it happened.  The worms tried to escape, in the living room!  Yep, we all knew that this day might come, some of us feared it more than others.  Some of you warned me.  You were right! The worms have been doing very well.  They have been working hard to make dirt for us and doing a very good job of it.  We save all of our food scraps and to be honest, the worms are just not keeping up!  We have even resorted to freezing some of our scraps to save for a later date.  Today, however, John used the scraps we had left sitting on the counter all week, in an ice cream container, covered.  Let's just say they were a little putrid.  I prefer not to smell putrid first thing in the morning so, I left the room when he pulled out the Ninja to chop up the food for our worms.  I was getting ready for the day and when I came back into the living room I found him, on the floor, leaned over the worm bed,  apologizing and warning me that ...

We finally have walls going up!  We knew it would happen, we have just had to be patient.  We have so much going on around here, but the framing of the walls for the new laundry room is finished.  We need a doorway closed in on the left side of the room that goes to the old living room and we need a wall between the kitchen and the laundry room, this will extend the hallway through the house a bit more.  We will end up closing off the front door in the living room and that room is going to become a bedroom.  We will then have three bedrooms and the former master bedroom will become the dining room in the future.  Right now it is a catch all/storage room.  We plan to move some of the cabinets from the kitchen into the laundry room to give added storage space and then the new cabinets will arrive on the 20th of September.  We are so excited.  I have lots of memories of the dining room, the room that is becoming the laundry room.  It isn...

When John brought home all the muscadines and scuppernongs the other day he also had a few small jalapeno pepper in the bucket too.  He said he wanted to make some pepper jelly.  I have never eaten pepper jelly so I wasn't sure what it tastes like, but hey, I'm game when it comes to canning.   John likes hot stuff.  He loves peppers, of all sorts, any kind of pepper or hot sauce.  There have been times when we had a collection of different varieties available in our pantry.  There was a period of time when we went grocery shopping he would tell me we were out of hot sauce and we would discuss it a bit and I would give in, knowing that we had some at home, but not wanting my husband to have to do without his precious hot sauce, inevitably I was right and we would end up with 3 or 4 jars at home when we got there.  It has become a running joke when we go shopping now.   Some of the places we have lived have had plenty of room for extra stock...

Have you ever had a muscadine?  How about a scuppernong?  I hadn't either until earlier this week.  John went with my dad to a friends house and he had a full crop of fruit that he wasn't going to harvest.  He told John to help himself, so he came home with a 5 gallon bucket almost full of muscadines and scuppernongs.   The dark ones are muscadines and the lighter ones are scuppernongs.  Muscadines and scuppernongs are wild grapes.  Muscadines are like concord grapes and scuppernongs like white or green grapes.  You don't eat the skin, it is very bitter.  You pop the fruit open and your mouth is filled with a sweet jell like ball, oh, and watch out for the seeds, they are very bitter.  I didn't want to freeze that much fruit so we decided to use the day to make jelly.  We ended up with about 27 jars (mostly 1/2 pints) of delicious jelly.   It was a long day, there are many steps in making jelly.   We have a lo...

I always loved coming to the farm to visit my grandparents, when I was a kid.  There seemed to be so many cows.  This farm was a dairy farm for quite a long time.  I remember going into the milking room and being fascinated by the operation.  The cows walked into the milking room and went to the feeding troughs and got ready to go to work.  Well, I understand now, they just wanted the feed.  I also remember my granddaddy dipping an old plastic measuring cup into this huge refrigerated box thing, where the milk was stored until ready for delivery I guess, and sharing the most delicious milk on the planet with me.  I didn't drink much milk as a child, I didn't like store bought milk, but when I got to drink the milk from the farm out of that measuring cup, I was very happy. The milking room. We don't milk the cows anymore.  They aren't working cows, they have a great life, a very relaxed life. I enjoy watching them wonder through the pasture ...

Geese that is.  I think we understand a lot more about geese now than we did a few weeks ago.  The terms, "lost as a goose," and "goosed," have a lot better meaning to us now.   No, we don't own or raise geese.  A few years ago some geese began coming to the farm and enjoying the front pond.  My parents are truly animal lovers so they began feeding the geese corn.  For several years now, the geese have returned.  Some have even raised babies here on the farm.  Some years there have been a lot of geese and some years not as many.  This year we have had  a large flock.  We have begun feeding them closer to the house near the large oak trees that the cows absolutely love.  Zach went outside last night and convinced a group of the geese to come all the way back here from the front of the pasture to eat the corn he was throwing out.   I am not much of an animal lover.  I would prefer not to have a dog in the ho...

The first wall has been tackled.  The latest project is turning the old dining room into the laundry room. John removed the sheet rock from one wall, and revealed the original framing.  We weren't surprised to see that there isn't any insulation in the walls.  Our first electric bill reflected that too!  This room used to be at the end of the house and there were two windows on this wall.  My mom remembered that there was one window bud didn't remember the other one.  She said they used to have a fan in the window fan in the one on the right to pull air down the hall to keep it cool, especially at night.  I can't even begin to imagine living in Louisiana in the summer with no air conditioning.  Mom said that it wasn't too bad when they had never experienced AC, but when the stores began getting it and they had to come home to window fans and all that mugginess, they really knew what they were missing.  We did get an estimate to install centra...