A Slice of Life

Living on a farm is very different than living in the suburbs or city.  We thought it would be fun to share a little “slice of our life” with you here.  In addition to our love for our wonderful herd of Egyptian Arabians, we also have other passions and other critters who live her at Al Ameen.  We hope you enjoy reading about life on the farm and look forward to having you visit us so you can share in all the fun!

We love having visitors to the farm.  Recently we had our good friends Frank and Nancy Conrad over for an afternoon of fishing in our pond and relaxing on a warm spring day.  The fishing was good with many bass and blue gill caught but the big catch of the day was certainly this monster carp caught by Frank.  It was a team effort to get him to shore and almost a team effort to get this photo!  Congratulations Frank on your giant catch!  It was certainly a great day having fun in the sun with good friends down at the pond.

So I have to do a shout out to our chickens now that I’ve shown you the ducks.  Here a few of our hens on a mission to find a new spot to lay their eggs.  We have a very nice coup but they prefer the wild outdoors for their egg laying.  This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “Easter Egg Hunt”.  In fact, the type of chickens we have, Araucanas,  lay beautiful green and blue eggs much like the ones you color at Easter time.  We love the freshness of the eggs and lots of people who visit our farm leave with eggs and always seem to come back from more!  So here’s to the chickens….we love them too!

Our farm is also home to a few feathered friends.  This is “The Gang”.  They seem like ordinary white farm ducks, but…they really do have personalities and know how to use muscle to get what they want.  They are always quacking away and running the chickens around the yard.  They dance and sometimes it sounds like they are laughing.  They always travel together, hence the saying, “get your ducks in a row”.  Well no need to tell them ’cause they are always walking in a perfectly arranged line.  We love our ducks!  They are fun to watch and they lay the nicest, biggest eggs that are so good to eat!

Everyone always asks us, “can you ride your horses?”  Well the answer is most definitely yes!  We have enlisted the training talents of Vanessa Koper of Sweet Olive Farm and she has been a God send!  She knows how to evaluate each horses unique ability to learn and using patience and years of knowledge working with a variety of breeds, gets them to understand riding with a human is fun and rewarding.  I’ve been watching and helping Vanessa these past three months and it is very rewarding to see our horses “get it” and want more challenges.  This is a picture of me riding one of our mares, Asils Emira, out of the arena for the first time.  Calm, happy, and inquisitive are just a few of the adjectives that came to my mind while riding.  We had a great time and I look forward to continuing our riding experience.

My husband Bill loves his 1950 Chevy Pick up.  “Arrest me Red”, is the color and you certainly see it coming and it definitely gets attention where ever he goes!  It’s not what I call a reliable ride but, it sure is unique!  Pictured here with Bill and Big Red is one of our mares, Noir Desir (Desi).  She’s not exactly happy about sharing the spotlight with this hunk of metal because she loves her daddy and would rather have all his attention but she should be happy because I’m not even in the picture so Desi is getting more face time with him than I am!!

Meet one our many other critters who lives here with us on the farm.  This is our latest addition – Mr. Q-tip.  He came to us via a hay delivery.  Tiny, cute and scared to death, we took him in and now he is large and in charge!  As a matter of fact, he is growing into a very substantial cat.  He loves to play outside but when he gets tired, he wants the warmth and security of his favorite chair in the house office.  Q-Tip – because his tail if big and fluffy just like a cotton Q-Tip–has definitely found a home here and I think he’s settled in nicely.