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| Dexter cows are excellent browsers, which is a good thing since not all of our 80 acres is open pasture - lots of tree covered hills, with plenty of rocks growing amongst the grass. |
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| Three young polled girls and an older horned gal. |
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| Peaceful sunsets. |
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| Paddock #1 behind the house. |
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| Yes, we still raise sheep. |
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| Sunshine and rain at the same time! |
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| K1 and kids came for a two week vacation. |
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| It was a working vacation. They visited a local "you pick" farm for strawberries, and K1 made lots of jam. |
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| She also made lots of chocolate chip cookies! |
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| Rainbow over kids on trampoline. |
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| I am a mean Dad and Grand Dad. I won't let a bunch of kids eat in my van, so after buying lunch at Sonic, we stopped nearby at our Church so they could eat and play. |
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| Free lunches don't come free on the Wanch, kids have to work. |
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| Team work |
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| Annual Fish Day when we re-stock the ponds. This year we only added some black crappie, minnows and a few grass carp. |
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| Still have plenty of large mouth bass (and babies). |
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| K2 in his shop. |
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| Using a tool that his Grand Dad gave him, an engraver... |
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| ...which he used to put our name on every tool! |
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| K9 also likes tools. |
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| K1 introduced a new game to the family. Once they started playing, all those serious faces turned to happy smiles. |
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| Never ending story on The Wanch - picking up big rocks and building burn piles. |
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| Cows and sheep in paddock #2 behind the house. |
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| We got 51 big round hay bales during first cutting! |
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| Gate girls opening... |
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| ...and closing. |
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| After our big 4th of July fireworks show, the kids helped clean up the pasture and we burned the remains - looks like someone forgot to light a few, because we had lots of colorful explosions coming from the burn pile. |
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| K12 after building burn pile using charred logs... |
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| ...at least she had fun working. |
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| We build lots of burn piles throughout the year... |
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| ...in various locations around the farm. |
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| Some piles are so big they have to be burned more than once. |
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| A few of our kids and their spouses joined us for our 44th wedding anniversary. |
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| K2 and his 3rd cousin April. We gathered in southern Illinois for my Uncle Carl's funeral. He passed away at age 90. A good long life. We had a mini family reunion. |
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| I would love to buy a skid loader, but reluctant to shell out the big bucks, so I will continue to occasionally rent one to do various jobs. K6 is in the driver's seat here. |
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| K9 was pretty excited about the skid loader too. |
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| We see a lot of deer across the property throughout the year. Here is a new born fawn that could not follow it's mama over the fence when we came out of the woods and surprised them feeding. |
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| Summer sleigh ride using a feed trough pulled by rope behind the side by side. |
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| K2 dragging me out of a mud hole. I alternate between renting skid loaders with tires and tracks. The tracked ones do not get stuck in the mud! |
