Since I just posted Farmhouse Reality Show yesterday, I thought I would add to the reality of it by recording the past couple of hours of activity on Green Acres in order to give everyone in my hometowm a glimpse into the daily complications of farm life.

The Outdoorsman and I have been burning the candle at both ends lately at the farm so we decided to stay home and tune in to my home church in Houston, Texas online this morning. It was a thought-provoking service led by Dr. John D. Morgan, who founded Sagemont Church, over fifty years ago. I was literally brought to tears just by the sound of his voice when he began to speak. He has led me on an amazing, and sometimes difficult, spiritual journey since I became a Christian while I was in high school. It was so wonderful to see the faces of so many people I knew and loved singing and preaching on the live stream of this morning’s service.  (I highly encourage you to watch this morning’s timely message and other messages via video on their website at sagemontchurch.org.)

Now for Farmhouse Reality Show Part 2. After a wonderful, stress-free morning, The Outdoorsman and I needed to go outside to take care of a couple of things concerning our animals. First, we needed to take pictures of the piglets we have for sale for several inquiring customers. Then we needed to push our heifers into another pasture to graze. We took the pictures and decided to let one of the momma pigs out to get some extra grass and nutrition.  She made a bee line to the place where the pecans had all recently fallen out of the pecan tree near our house. It was like she had some kind of sonar-pecan-abilities or something. I literally ran to the porch to get a bucket to beat her to the fallen pecans because she was mowing through them quicker than you can imagine. Thankfully, The Outdoorsman helped me save about a bucket-full of pecans before she got to them.

Then we headed over to the other pasture and shoo-ed off the donkeys and opened the gate for the cattle to come through. Once the cows were through the gate and in our pasture, I counted them and realized we were missing one. We figured out we were missing our pretty Jersey heifer named Bambi (pictured above) and walked all of our fence lines looking for her. We saw a weak area in the fencing across the back so we looked in the pasture behind us since our cattle have ended up there several times in the past year when the fence has blown down or been compromised somehow.

Unfortunately, we didn’t find her today, but referring back to my blog from yesterday, I was sweating like crazy…here in Mid-October…by the time we got back to the house. When we got back in, I was trying to cool down and reading over my blog from yesterday and I kept hearing our dog, Daisy, barking like something was wrong. At first I ignored it, but she persisted so I got up and looked out to see our momma pig, Hammah Montana, standing on the front porch mowing through her 3rd bowl of dog food of the four bowls we had just filled for our dogs. Daisy, our oldest dog, was sitting under the bench guarding her bowl with her front paws and barking loudly at Hammah. (That’s what the ruckus was all about!)

I quickly tried to shoo Hammah off the porch, but she’s a pig.  She wanted that dog food. I had to grab a walking stick and push her with it to make her turn around and, finally, walk down the porch stairs.  I then look frantically around for something to block the front porch steps and, luckily for me, we have procrastinated on cleaning up a broken bench near the stairs so I grabbed the seat back and twisted it off of the screws and put it across the bottom step so Hammah couldn’t get back up there.  I then walked her to the barn to find her piglets oinking and going crazy wanting her to feed them.  She deftly ran past the gate going into the pig stall and ran into the sheep pen and quickly dumped the sheep’s bucket of water over and started rolling in it.  At that point, I decided to just open the inside door between the two last stalls in the barn so the piglets could come in there to nurse Hammah.  I quickly grabbed the wire door, bent the wire that was holding it open,  and it handily sliced into my finger and caused blood to start spurting out.  While trying not to look at my finger (I’m a fainter!), I had to get out of the corral, move a huge board that is holding the door open for the sheep and keeping the cows out simultaneously, untie the sting that is holding the door back, and shut the pigs in there while the sheep and dogs are all watching the shenanigans. I quickly walked to the house and washed my finger off really well after thinking about all of the filthy animals and barn items I had touched and decided this would be a good addendum to my Farmhouse Reality Show blog from yesterday. This, My Friends, is a completely normal retelling of only a couple of hours of a day in the life of a farmer.

For a moment there, it actually felt like I was being videotaped for the first season of The Farmhouse Reality Show.  Ha. The joke is on me.