Nilsson News

 Hi all!  First off, Happy Birthday to the best mom in the entire world!!!!! 

Our watermelons took a long time to get ripe this year, but now they are the tasty treat that we remember!

We picked 80 watermelon before the freeze hit!  In total for the year, we probably had close to 100 melons!

While we were at the Hart's, Addy discovered a baby vole and the kids absolutely fell in love with it!  Don't be deceived by the cuteness factor, these guys can cause some serious damage in your lawn and garden!

Mummification experiment for human anatomy

It has also been quite awhile for us since we last posted.  We have greatly enjoyed spending time with our wonderful family, YOU!  It was a treat to have Emma bring Cameron a couple weeks ago and we are so grateful he survived us!  He is a very nice fellow and we highly approve!  We had a wonderful time running the "Spartan" with you and it was pretty intense at times.  Can't wait to do another, hopefully next year.  Meeting baby JJ was the highlight for sure!  I loved hanging out with the girls to hear Victoria's birth story and all I have to say is she is a champ!  Thomas did a wonderful job blessing the cute little guy and we loved being there.  We sure missed the Flakes but are looking forward to their news within the next few weeks.  On Monday, after all these events, we decided to take our kids, along with mom, dad and Becca, up to Pickleville Playhouse.  The show was another TJ Davis original called the Fickle Family Fortune and it was hilarious!  It brought back good old memories from when Elise and Thomas performed there.  On our way home, we headed directly into a huge storm that was blowing in from Canada.  The winds reached 40 mph with 60 mph gusts.  Lightening and rain and cold hit.  It was crazy!  We had to harvest all our watermelons, cucumbers, peppers and what tomatoes we could.  We had already harvested and froze all our corn so we only had to cover our tomatoes and hoped for the best.  The temps were supposed to drop to 27 degrees!  We think most our tomatoes survived and we are hoping to get a larger harvest for canning.

Yesterday, we decided to set up our watermelon stand.  The kids were excited and Emerson even put out some of his mini pumpkins he grew.  The customers were slow at first but then they started to stop by.  They sold about 30 of the melons so far.

A few weeks ago, we had our jack gelded (I can't remember if I wrote about that already?).  We have had so many problems with with the birthing situation and everyone I talk to says it stems from our jack.  He is now retired and we have other great plans for him.  While we were down in Utah, we went and looked at a small herd that a fellow is selling.  His jack amazing!  Tiny with perfect conformation and tempermant.  The four jennies were pretty cute and one in particular looked like a grown version of Ginger.  If we end up purchasing them, they will join our farm in early spring.  We are also looking forward to having a spotted jr. jack join our farm in November.  We won't be able to breed with him for another year and a half but we are excited for these changes and hopefully they will bring positive results.

We started school this week and so far, so good!  On Wednesdays we meet with the Harts for a little homeschool co-op and this year we are excited to be studying human anatomy and physiology as well as U.S. history.  Good times!