Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

Farm Show 2012

Posted on January 8, 2012

After a long day at a wrestling tournament in Lancaster County, Tina and Lars stopped at the farmshow on the way home. The main purpose was to visit the food court for dinner 🙂 Our annual favorites continue to be the cheese cubes, milk shakes, blooming onion and honey waffles with honey ice cream. (Funny that we had a blooming onion, as Tina had volunteered at the PA Vegetable Growers booth and spent 5 hours peeling over 350 lbs of onions – the other volunteers peeled just that many in that time frame – we had garbage cans full of huge onions, and the smell of those seemed to linger for hours). We also took home some of the tasty maple candy.

We did have enough time to catch the end of the high school rodeo and saw the bullriding. We visited the butter sculpture, some of the fruit and vegetable exhibits, and looked at the quilts and other handmade items. This year’s 1st prize gingerbread house was pretty awesome. We also watched a little bit of the lawn tractor-pull, and did a quick tour of the animal exhibits. We were among the last people to leave the farmshow that evening.

Fixing the Old “Tree House” First Project of New Year

Posted on January 2, 2012

It started out as a walk around the pond, enjoying the warm weather on the first weekend of the New Year – when we reached the old “tree house” (it is no longer a tree house, since we moved it to a new location on the ground). We got the sudden urge to finally anchor the play house to its platform and fix the railing around it. Anja, Duff, Lars and Tina, with the help of a Come-Along, managed to reposition the structure to the edge of the platform, then anchor it down with screws. Missing siding boards were replaced and we connected the upper and lower deck platforms. We also salvaged the old railing from it’s actual tree house days and attached those around the playhouse. All the old leaves, pine needles and grass were removed – with some major raking effort and we build a small fire pit in the clearance in front of the house and restacked the firewood behind it. Now all we need is another warm day to attach the door and decorate. We had so much fun doing this – what a great way to start the New Year!

New Year’s Day rainbow that evening was amazing

Diverting Rain Water from Barn Roof

Posted on December 18, 2011

The final phase of diverting the rain water off the barn roof is finally complete. Jens, Jeff and Lars worked on this most of Saturday and Sunday. They finished digging the drainage ditch, laid the perforated pipes, dug a hole which they filled with gravel, and then covered everything up. The ground was still soft enough to work this late in December – lucky for us. Still needs to get some “finish work” done, to smooth it all out. We’ll plant grass on most of it, but decided to make a gravel drive-way from the road to the barn … to avoid future mud pits 🙂

Holiday Decorating Continues

Posted on December 18, 2011

One of the little troubles with moving to a different house is making your holiday decorations fit the new rooms. This is our second year at the new house and decorating was a lot easier. Our living room continues in the complete “country” style, but in the dining room we tried for something a little more traditional, as the “country” style just does not fit the room. Each of the 5 large windows (with deep window sills) is decorated a little different, but each one has 3 gold balls hanging by gold ribbons and a single (electric) candle to set the tone.