Wanted: Egg Washer

Wanted: Egg-washer in the Western KY area to wash multiple eggs given by these pretty ladies each and every day.

Job may be seasonal depending on the mood of the ladies! Sometimes they refuse to work when it's cold.

Benefits include spending your free time playing with these youngsters

Or cuddling these babies

They are just too cute and fluffy!

Or sleeping like these two.

Can't get any egg washing out of Biscuit and Bessie. The hardest work they do is occasionally chasing a butterfly (usually in their sleep) or barking at the deer and turkey that frequent the feeding area out back.

Or you can sit in the rockers on the porch and enjoy the roses

or clematis on the lamp post....

Hurry this job opening will not last long!

Fine print: These benefits may end on Saturday with the arrival of our milk goat. Goat milker will be added to the title of egg washer and full time employment will be established!
Just don't tell Nellie that she has competition coming!

Sunshine and Cosmos

When I walk outside with my husband and Jake in the mornings to tell them goodbye for the day I always see something that needs its picture taken. The sun had just made it's way up over the trees that line our property and these pretty pink gals were soaking it up!


These were taken from the backside of the flower, looking into the sun.


I love pink! Blue is my favorite color on most days but today it is pink!


No one ever said you couldn't change your favorite color from day to day!


Yep, definitely pink today!


Hello beautiful pink lovelies! I will be collecting seeds so I can bring these beauties back to life again next year!

But just so blue doesn't get jealous!


I hope your day is as beautiful as flowers in morning sunshine!

Not a Wildflower

but hopefully this will do!

I still need to "weed" (ha! ha!) through pics and find the good ones so I'm sharing my butterfly on zinnia photo that I took in my garden yesterday when we got back from our ride!

And just one more. I have cosmos taller than my head this year!

I hope you enjoy them!

A Morning of Wildflowers

My mom called this morning to see if Luke and I were going to make our daily trip to visit Papaw. Work was trying to get a hold of him to drive the delivery truck which he does when needed. Guess who she calls when she can't reach him?? Yep, me! But that's okay. We like to take the 4-wheeler and cut through the fields and the woods to Papaw's house. I just happened to leave my camera there this past weekend so I grabbed it as we headed back home. The wildflowers were yelling at me at every turn, "Take my picture!" "Over here!"...you know how it is so I started snapping. Luke was a great tour guide, he was pointing out the flowers for me.

I am researching each of these wildflowers to find out their names. This is a Pink Wild Bean also known as a Pink Fuzzy Bean. The blooms remind me of my purple ones on my Hyacinth Bean plants.

This is a Field Thistle (my Dad always called them bull thistles). Sticky little boogers! My mom had to pick a few of these stickers out of my hands, feet and other various body parts while growing up!
I believe this is a Long Bristled Smart Weed. If I'm wrong please let me know!

and this guy, I took a pic of from across the field with my zoom lens. I've been seeing it lately but we have none of it growing on our property. I stole a pic from Curious George's land.
It is called Tall Ironweed.

I have more! Check in tomorrow for the 2nd Installment of Kentucky Wildflowers!

Jimson Weed

Hallucinogenic, poisonous and growing behind our barn! I had no idea what this was even though I have seen it in the fields here during the summer for as long as I can remember. I finally did a little digging on Google and found out that it is Jimson Weed. Now that I have taken pics of it, I think we'll chop it down. I wouldn't want any teenagers sneaking behind our barn to take hits off this "locoweed" or a barn full of delusional hallucinating goats and chickens! The blossom is a beautiful, trumpet-shaped white flower with a purple middle.




After blooming it produces these large green spiky pods. You never know what you'll find growing in your backyard! My husband also found passion fruit vines growing on our fence in two different places. They also have beautiful flowers. They are next on my list of things to take pics of.

What I Should Be Doing

and what I am doing are 2 different things this morning. I should be packing. We leave for Florida Saturday morning for our first official, more-than-a-day-away vacation with the boys. They are so excited to be going to the beach for the first time. I should be cleaning my house so it's nice and tidy while were away. I have to work Thursday and Friday and we have a doctor's appointment tomorrow. I should be making a list of things I need to pick up to take with us but instead I have been outside, with my camera, playing. I did at least pretend to pull some weeds from the onion row in the garden, that counts for something, right?

While pulling those weeds, something bright red caught my eye. The Bing cherries are starting to ripen, looks like lots of canning again this year despite the broken limbs from the ice storm back in January.

You can see the effects of that in this post....Ice Storm 09.

I continued my walk and found one of my Stella d'Ore lilies starting to bloom.

I love these creamy, buttery colored little lilies because they have such a long bloom cycle.









and then there are times when color just doesn't seem to go in a photo and this was one of those times.

This lily was originally a bright pink and no matter how hard I tried, the color just clashed with my eyes this morning so I tried this and found a soft, dreamy effect that made things just right.

I hope you enjoyed taking a walk with me, now who's coming over to help vacuum, pack bags, and figure out who that little bird is in my previous post??

Sunny Fellow at the Pond

That would be my yellow bog iris. When we moved here 2 years ago in March, I threw a small clump of these yellow bog iris tubers into the small inlet side of our pond. That small clump has tripled in size and I am hoping that they will one day fill the end of the pond. These iris also do well in regular soil and I am thinking about putting on my hip waders (yes I own hip waders but we will save that story for another day) and getting me a clump to plant up here at the house. The blooms remind me of Nubian goats with their floppy ears.

Here's the whole clump. Notice how muddy the pond is. We've had a lot of rain and run off over the last 2 days.


And a couple more shots that you might enjoy.

Bleeding Heart

Spring is my favorite time of year and I anxiously await each bloom so I can start snapping photos. Today, in the corner of my flower bed in front of the house, I found this little beauty.

I have been playing with my ISO settings trying to reduce the amount of noise in my photos. I knew that if there was sufficient light, I could set my ISO as low as possible and get much better shots. I did a tiny bit of editing in Photoshop and came away with the end product. I want to capture each and every bloom around our farm as they open and eventually make a photo book of them. The dogwoods have really opened up today and I will try to get some shots of them this weekend.

I also took this while playing with my settings. The low ISO seemed to also give me much better bokeh. I love photos with this blurriness in the background and this leaf just happened to be calling for me to take its picture


Hope you enjoy my little bit of color and Spring. It was absolutely gorgeous here today. Of course, we only get one day of it. We are supposed to get rain and thunderstorms for the next week!

Grungy Blossom

Leaving you with a couple of photos tonight.

Another apple blossom using one of Joy St. Clare's free textures. It has that grungy feel yet I think it turned out pretty.


and J wanted his picture taken. J always wants his picture taken!

Playing With Textures

I posted a tutorial a couple of weeks ago on using textures in Photoshop CS2. After downloading and using other peoples textures I decided to make a few of my own. I've been playing with them today and wanted to share an example and some "how I did it's".

Here is a link to the original tutorial.

Here is the link to my textures. I have added a few more since the tutorial. They are free for you to download, but please, do not claim them as your own or add them to any other groups of textures for download.

Here is the original.


After following the tutorial above, these are three of the finished products.

This is using the Sandstone texture/overlay blending mode/adding a little Gaussian blur to sandstone layer/flatten image.


This one is Weathered Wood/Overlay blend mode/adjust opacity/flatten image.



and this one is one of my favorites. I love the look of shadows it gives to the apple blossom.

On this one I used the Sage Grass texture/soft light blending mode/a little Gaussian blur/reduced the opacity just a tiny bit/flattened image.


And here they are for a comparison.


Hope you enjoy these. Please post comments and questions if you have them. Thanks!

Apple Blossom

Thought I would share a tiny bit of Spring with you as Easter closes. I snapped this shot this evening on my way to the chicken coop to shut the chickens up for the night. It's a blossom on our apple tree. As you can tell from the background, it is on the verge of bursting with these beautiful blooms. Hope you enjoy my tiny bit of Spring.