King Cotton

 

 

   

  

 

I had written a good bit of text to go with these pictures but decided to leave it off.  It's pictures of cotton, and that is that.   Hope you are having a good day my lovelies.  This will probably be it for the week for me.  We're going on a short trip this weekend and there's a lot more to planning for a trip now that I have to pack for a bebe.  Enjoy, and don't be afraid to comment!   

 

 

Retired

Turn off Hwy 388 onto King Rd, drive a little bit and you'll find an interesting sight.  An old railcar sitting out in a pasture. 

I have no idea how a railcar came to rest in this rural pasture, but there it is.  There's no railroad anywhere close by that I know about.  I'm sure it was used for storage once upon a time, farmers are a creative lot by and large.  They can take most anything anything and make it usefull. 

 

These were taken earlier in the spring.  That tree is full and green now and the fencerow I was leaning over to take the pictures is gone.  The landowner has cleaned it off and is refencing the pasture.  I guess I'm weird finding beauty in old rusty railcars, but that's just how I am. 

Hope you all have a great weekend my dears!

Scooba, Mississippi



Scooba is like a lot of little towns in Mississippi, already on its last legs, and when the four lane came through it all but dried up and blew away.  If it wasn't for East Mississippi Community College there wouldn't be much of anything there at all. The town has a railroad track, a volunteer fire department, a couple of stores, two gas stations, and that's just about it.  I stopped a couple of weeks back on the way home from the vet in De Kalb and snapped a few pics of the once bustling downtown storefronts. 

When I have a few more mintues I want to go back, but that day with a sleeping baby and two dachshunds ready to go home I literally left the car running, jumped out for a minute, took a few quick snaps, and was back on the road again. 

I stitched together a panorama, something I haven't done in a while and was pretty happy with how it came out.

Hope you are having a wonderful week my lovelies, and just remember it's almost Friday!

Fall Corn

I took a bunch of pictures last fall, dumped them on my computer, and then promptly forgot about them.  That happens to me sometimes.  I go off for the afternoon, take a couple of hundred pics, and then tell myself I'll look at them later.  Later never comes, I move onto something else, and well you end up with fall pictures getting edited in the late spring.  Unexcusable, I've got to get better. 

Anyway, these pictures.  I did a series in college over several semesters about farming in northeast Mississippi.  I grew up on a farm, I knew a bunch of farmers, it was something I was interested in, and no one else in the department was doing anything remotely like it.  I loved it and have continued to add to my collection of farm imagery over time.  Noxubee county is well known in the state for its agriculture.  It's located smack dab in the middle of the black prairie that extends from north east Mississippi down the eastern side of the state and on into Alabama.  It's rich black soil is the primary economic base of the county. 

 

Wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans, and of course cotton are grown, there's also beef cattle, daries, chickens, catfish, and hay.  (If I've left something out, I apologize.)

 

 

 

 

Riding out to the farm where my horses are I get to see the progression of the crops every day.  I love to watch the straight rows of corn and soybeans spring up every year, and see the blooms on the cotton.  So, you can imagine I ride around with my camera constantly. 

 

I took these pictures along with some other back in August.  This corn was right before being harvested. 

 

 

 

Hope you are having a wonderful week my lovelies!

 

       

 

Pray for Oklahoma

My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Moore, Oklahoma and those all over the state that were affected by tornadoes yesterday. In April we had a large F4 tornado, the same size as the one that hit Moore, hit Noxubee and Kemper counties. Thankfully Noxubee county is very rural so the destruction while just as devastating as Oklahoma was not on the same scale just because we don't have the same number of people and buildings. We only had one loss of life and we were lucky to have just that one. Several people were in their homes when the storm hit, but it was at least during the day and not at night like in Oklahoma.

GPS tower on hwy 388 east of Macon, MS hit April 11, 2013 by tornado

 

 

Tornado seen (taken from video) in Noxubee county April 11, 2013

 

 

I've been through several tornadoes over the years and had one pass right over my house after I got married in 2007. It's a terrifying feeling and all you can do is get to an interior room and pray. Living in the prairie like I do now is different than living in the hills where I'm from. There are very few natural windbreaks to slow down the tornado once it gets going and the longer it can stay together the stronger the storm gets.

The destruction in Oklahoma is heartbreaking. Over 100 horses were killed on one farm alone; dozens more have had to be euthanized due to injury. But most heartbreaking are the children that were killed in the school.

 

 

 

Images of the destruction in Oklahoma

 

So, if you're inclined send up a prayer for these people and their loved ones. It will be a long time before anything is approaching normal again for them. The Salvation Army is also taking donations, and I'm sure a church in your area is mobilizing supplies to take there as well. Hug your children tight, give your animals an extra squeeze, and count your blessings one by one.

Stay safe everyone, and have a great day my loves.



 

Trying not to squeal and scare the coworkers....

I received a lovely email from Rhiannon at the The Southerly Blog.  They have added me to their list of links and I couldn't be more thrilled.  Thank you so much!  It absolutely made my day. 

Super happy and ready to start the weekend!

Have a great one my loves!

Tomatoes!



It's tomato planting time!  It's actually past tomato planting time, but who's keeping track?  This year I decided to do something different.  I put newspaper around my tomatoes before I caged them.



Why? Natural weed killer. I've been reading up on different sites about how people are killing weeds with newspaper and it actually makes pretty good sense, and it's cheap. I'm all over a cheap gardening solution. The newspaper smothers out the weed, kills it, and then biodegrades back into the ground. I'm probably going to mulch over this with old hay just to make sure. Normally I just keep the bed weeded, but this year I thought I would try something different. It also is supposed to help with moisture control and keep the bed from drying out too much. Right now it's working pretty good, but we'll see how it fares against the Johnson grass of doom (tm) that grows on this place.

I planted Atkinson, Marion, and German Queens, all heirloom tomatoes and one hybrid grape tomato plant.  We are honestly about a month behind unless these things come on like game busters.  That is what the tomato house in Macon is for anyway.   

Until next time my lovelies have a wonderful day!