Rosemarie's Garden

I have been working on this garden on and off since early spring. I started by completely tearing out everything that was growing there. It also had a sort of decorative rock bed that I had to remove. I pulled 5 wheelbarrows full of this rock out of here. And whatever these plants were, they were terrible to pull out. There root system was crazy. I got everything out, had Alex till it up with our tractor. A couple weeks later more stuff was popping up, so I pulled everything up and he tilled it again. It was a process.

I also pulled the rock "wall" out and rebuilt it. This took me a couple days to do. I didn't do it all at once. And there were several large rocks that I didn't know what to do with. I ended up putting them in the middle in an attempted artistic looking way.

This is how it looked after all of that. A nice blank canvas.

Then I had to decide what to plant in this garden. I originally wanted to do an assortment of daylillies and some decorative shrubs. Then one day we were at our local Buccheits, and I saw a wildflower shade mix. I thought that would be perfect. So we got a box and I planted them.

Here it is about a month ago.

And here it is now.

The blooms are small and they seem to just be getting started, but it looks really pretty. It's hard to get a good picture of it. I plan on buying the same seed mix next spring and planting even more. It's a very beautiful perennial mix, and adding more seeds will only help it.

My uncle saw the post of all our gardens a few weeks ago and suggested that I name a garden for my grandmother. He suggested "Rosemarie's Garden." I had to think for a little while which garden I wanted to name for her. And this one has become quite pretty and the more I thought about it the more it made sense for me. This was that garden.

Mud Diving Pigs

I changed out their pool water today and this is what they did while I filled up their pools with fresh water.

 First there was nosing in the mud.

 Then plopping down.

 You can see he is covered pretty well here.

Now this is cute. They started taking turns diving into it and almost sliding across.

It really was cute. I wish I had filmed it instead. I'll have to do that next time.

The mud is really good for their skin. It helps keep them from drying out and it keeps the bugs from bothering them so much. The bugs have really gotten bad here in the last couple of weeks. I know that this fresh water won't be fresh for long though. They will swim in the pool and wash all the mud from their skin. I've been changing their pool water out at least once a week, but often twice.

Guinea Hogs!

   Well, we've always wanted guinea hogs for our farm. On Sunday we took a road trip down to Tennessee to get 3. We brought home 2 girls and a boy. They're all related, so we won't be using the boy to breed. We're thinking we'll use our mini pig, Drake, to breed with them. He's the bigger of our mini pigs and we have read on other sites about people doing this.
Guinea hogs stay short and get chubby. I keep telling Alex that they remind me of Wilson when he was a piglet. They have big cow eyes like Wilson.
    Anyway, here are some pictures.

    Unloading them was a bit stressful. Alex pulled the little boy out of the truck and handed him to me, and when I turned around to put him in the pen one of the girls jumped out of the truck and ran into the woods. We were worried about her of course, but thought she'd come back since the other 2 were here (and she did). Alex sliced his finger on something in this process and now has a huge gash on his index finger. While he was washing it and dressing it, I grabbed some sweet feed for the boy (who was alone at this point) to see if it would calm him down. Next thing we know, Big D had crawled under the fence and was now in the pen with him. She didn't like him eating with her. He got into their space and ran out into their electric fencing and I thought we were gonna lose him too. We got him back, and got Big D back where she belonged. We unloaded the other girl and I filled up a pool for them. (I had to take Della and Wilson's pool. Don't tell Della, because she really likes to swim.) They jumped in the water almost right away.
    Yesterday, I had to work, but Alex found that the girl who had run off was hanging around. He was able to trap her and put her in with her little family. They're doing well today. They're starting to come around to us, but they're still very shy. We'll work with them. Hopefully we'll be rubbing their little bellies in no time!