Summer Farm Still Life

I have been wanting to take some photos lately of some of the various scenes around the farm.....most of them are using various vintage pieces that interest me and set them with plants or flowers around the yard.

Some of them are falling apart......which is what happens when they are old pieces anyway and get abused by the elements for years......hope you enjoy a walk back in time.

I have a bucket full of these.....brass number tags that you would put on your cows to keep track of them for records.

One of my favorite things to do at my Grandma Kullmer's house was to feed the calves when they were little.....there would have been a big nipple coming out the front of this bucket, where the hole is and you would have the milk supplement all mixed in the bucket and hang it on the gate and try and make sure that your calf got his food and not the bully in the pen.....there was always that one that thought he should get ALL the food.

These metal wheels were before my time.....although I think we had a couple old implements when I was little that still had their metal wheels.  I have always loved them and saved everyone of them.

Metal wheels and barn doors.....can't have too many of those.  A couple years ago.....I went to a nearby ditch and the Silver Fox dug up some grass.   The kind that get huge in the fall and have these beautiful silver plumes on them.  One clump of that grass went here......framing a milk can and a big circle gear, I liked the look of.

We have a shed that lost it roof about 18 months ago......we started taking down the west wall of it last week.  This has been here on the NW corner of this building long before I was ever around.  I really think it was used to tie up horses......but who knows.  This was partly why I wanted to take these pictures.  This will be going away.....I am hoping to harvest some of the wood to line the cabin.

Chippy, peely, weathered and worn.....

I pretty much saved all the metal gates and have them several places.....the corner post.

These panel are the sides of a wooden wagon that dad used for years....it still has some paint left on it and we used it to cover up our propane tank in the back yard.  The yellow lilies are from my Grandma Kullmer.

Several years ago we had a direct lightning strike on the house.....that then hit the ground and went up two trees in our back yard.....a red maple and an English walnut.....they are deeply scarred from it.

The red maple puts out these huge pieces of what I would call fungus every year.

These things are humongous and funky.....they drop off going into winter and grow again in the spring.

More benches, pots, branches, barbed wire, doors and a chicken feeder for good measure.

Then we have a collection of other people's landscaping discards.....this place has odds and ends from family ripping out old stuff and it's found a new home here.

How about an old mower.....how would you like to mow the yard with that???  Not so much.  Kraft advertising sign for chicken feed with another chicken water and chicken crossing sign from my mother-in-law.....Florence Lesh......who had a chicken collection of sorts.

Flowering in the garden right now is my lavender which I moved from the kitchen garden and a rock garden type plant.  My Grandma Kullmer always had a garden spot that was mine and it had pretty rocks in it and rock garden type plants.....I have several varieties of those and they were all from her.  She always had Hen and Chicks too.....love them.

Here are some lilies just starting to come out around the old tiller.....these lilies happen to travel from Quad Cities and the Carruthers house on the cul-de-sac.  The yard was full of flowers and they didn't want the upkeep of all of that and ripped most of it out.....so I brought several clumps of them home and they have been happy here ever since.

Hope you are having a great summer!  And thanks for stopping by.....