From the Heart of the Lost River Valley

Welcome to my blog.

Hi my name is Brenda Anderson, or also known as “The Farmers Wife”. We live on a farm in the heart of Idaho. I have way to many hobbies and I love to try lots of new things. All of which I hope to share with my readers and my friends. I love to teach! And I love to learn!

I am blessed with a beautiful family, the cutest little Grandkiddies and an awesome husband.  While farm life has it’s up and downs and is lots of hard work, I am grateful for all of my experiences that teach me and help me to grow and learn.
I also write children’s books. This is one of my favorite things to do. I love spending time with my animals, they inspire me with stories to write about and entertaining pictures to go with the stories. My books can be found at www.brendaskidsbooks.com.
I hope you will check back often and enjoy the experiences, pictures and articles I share.

This is our story:

I look at my pioneer ancestry, now that is a homesteader.  The pioneers  came to a new piece of ground with nothing on it, they plow it up to plant it, build their house, barns, chicken coop, and root cellars.  You know pretty much starting from scratch.  This is what my Great Grandparents did in the Malad Valley in Idaho.

Modern day homesteader

I like to think we are a modern day pioneer/ homesteader.  We bought a piece of ground with a pivot and snow on it.  There were no houses, roads, power or anything of the sort.  Just an old pivot and snow.  This was in January of 2009.  When the snow started to melt we wondered, what did we do!

We had sold a feed store, home with sheds, cows, and gave up the leased ground we had.  We were somewhat set up at our other place, but we just had to much going on and needed to change the way we were doing things.  Now we had to start over.  The fields were covered with weeds, mostly Leafy Spurge.  A really nasty hard weed to get rid of, and to top that off there were lots of rocks.

Not exactly the farm ground we were hoping for.  As we started to farm it we did find quite a few places that had some really nice deep dirt.  The first year we planted grain.  We really wanted to try to get the weeds out before we planted hay.  That is when our pivot went down.   This was an expensive breakdown.  When we pulled the pump we found out our well had flood bowls in the bottom of the pump and it wouldn’t pump enough water.  More expensive fixes.

We have learned a lot over the years of being here in the Lost River Valley.  It is definitely a place you have to work hard for every dollar you earn.  We have since planted almost 700 trees, built a home and a shop.  We are now working on putting in fences so we can raise cows again.

My piece of heaven

I do have my own little section of heaven with my goats, sheep, chickens, alpacas, horses, mules and donkeys.  This is what keeps me smiling thru the breakdowns and the expenses of farm life.  But really when I think about it, farm life is a way of life that I wouldn’t want to change.

So now you know bits and pieces of our story of homesteading.  I know I have it a lot easier than the pioneers did, and I am grateful for that.  I like to think that my Grandparents are pretty proud of me and the things I have learned.

I love blogging and sharing with you the things I have learned along the way.  It wasn’t always easy and my endeavors are not always successful.  But I am learning.

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Thanks for coming and reading our story!