Ranch Wife's Slant

Cowboys, kids, and ranch life

Category: Ranch Slants

  • Driving to Work is The Fun Part

    It’s been a year now since I got my jeep. I had wanted one for years. Jeeps just suit my outdoorsy, adventurous and four-wheel drive personality. My dad had a 1950’s Willyz Jeep he’d bought when he was in high school. It stayed on the farm for several years and eventually he brought it home…

  • Generating Column Topics

    When I sit down to start drafting my column, I don’t always have a topic figured out. I typically free write to generate ideas but sometimes I get stuck. When that happens I’ll brainstorm instead. I have different formats to do this. Having a variety of different breakthrough techniques to pick from shakes up my…

  • The Ranch Wife Chronicles: A Fellow South Dakota Ranch Wife’s Blog

    At the Women In Ag conference this past fall I met a new friend Robyn, who lives in the opposite direction from where I live, and since we met we’ve stayed in contact through technology. Robyn and her husband live on a ranch in a more remote location than I do, yet she and I…

  • Saving Bales and Then Some

    The secret to the success of our marriage and our ranch among other kinds of work is baling wire. Between my husband and me, it takes a lot to hold a ranch together; mostly a lot of baling wire. We fix the majority of our problems with this ranch necessity. We have an old square…

  • A Ranchwife’s Slant’s Core Value #5: Expand

    Expand is a core value that is mostly a regular reminder of a continuous goal I have to grow in my column writing. It’s a core value that keeps me focused on improving and growing in different aspects of my column as well as my writing in general. The biggest goal is to expand my…

  • Core Value #4: Entertain

    Entertain is the core value that I have the most fun with. Writing to entertain is the highlight of writing my column. Newspapers provide people with local, national, and world news; stock market reports, forecasts, classifieds, letters to the editor, and columnists. I seek to give readers something more entertaining than negative news or my…

  • Linda Hasselstrom and Windbreak House

    One of the things I enjoy most about being a ranch woman is learning from other women who share the same lifestyle, exchanging ranch stories, and finding similarities with them. It makes me feel connected with a culture, so-to-speak of other women that understand my lifestyle, its frustrations, problems, and the stresses that it doesn’t…

  • Core Value #3: Delight

    Delight is one of my favorite of A Ranchwife’s Slant’s core values. Because the goal is to get readers to read my column, I feel that delighting them is the best way to get them to come back. People feel good when they read something that’s real, funny, or something that they can relate to….

  • Brown Beauties

    Farm fresh eggs are hard to beat. Literally. The yolks of these brown beauties are so thick it takes work to whisk them. There is a huge difference between store bought and farm fresh eggs. I never paid much attention to eggs until we acquired laying hens and started getting our own eggs. The color…

  • Core Value #2: Inform

    Inform is a core value I feel is an important focus for my column.   With so much misinformation in the media about eating beef, ranching and agricultural practices in general from sources that have never set foot on a ranch, I am able to speak out about the truth but I do so in a…