Ranch Wife's Slant

Tag: country living

  • Preserving a Favorite Summertime Tradition

    One of the greatest pleasures of living in the country is picking berries and preserving them in jams and jellies to savor all year.  Nothing says a country summer like a therapeutic couple of hours walking around on sticky floors from making batches of wild berry jams. And there’s nothing more gratifying than opening a…

  • Living the Simple Life

    I thought my household needed to be simplified so I read Living the Simple Life by Elaine St. James. I was amazed to learn that I didn’t need to buy the book. It just verified that I should have written it. My family has been doing the majority of the book’s suggestions for years, which…

  • Getting In Touch with Your Inner Cowgirl

    When any of you ladies out there get to feeling out of control, in a rut, downtrodden, or run over in the rat race, take the time to restore your soul and get back on your feet.  The best way to do this is to get in touch with your inner cowgirl; here’s how: Take…

  • Mary Jane’s Farm Magazine Makes Waiting for Tanks to Fill Enjoyable

    Recently, my girlfriend Sadonna recycled her Mary Jane’s Farm magazines by passing them on to me. She gave me three issues and I haven’t been able to part with them yet to pass onto someone else because they’re so good! For any of you guys out there who might be reading, Mary Jane’s Farm magazine…

  • Signs of Summer

    After a long Black Hills South Dakota winter, the thought of spring seems like a dream and summer an illusion. Too many times we’ve been fooled by wonderful spring weather only to get clobbered by a late spring snowstorm to remind us that Mother Nature’s in charge of when it’s spring and summer. That’s why…

  • The Face of Terror

    Last Tuesday, the family spent the day moving our cows to a different pasture.   We loaded up our horses and drove to our starting point to gather cows, which was a twenty minute drive from home. Our son followed in his pickup because he and my husband planned to gather up and move salt…

  • Cowboy Logic Camping

    My husband told our kids once, “A campground is about as close to living in a city as you can get,” when they mentioned how much they liked staying at a campground. Considering the way we choose to live and the idea behind camping, I had to agree with him. Experiencing the outdoors and connecting…

  • Eyesore, My Eye!

    I can’t imagine life without a clothesline, but evidently some people can’t imagine life with one. I wrongly assumed once that everybody has experienced line-dried clothes and loves the smell of fresh air in their laundry like I do. When I pluck sun-dried laundry off the line, I burry my nose in them; inhaling a…

  • Livin’ on the Edge

    Ranch work isn’t as life threatening as say, working on an Alaskan king crab fishing boat but the way my husband and I go about getting our work done could be considered dangerous. We’ve become somewhat desensitized to the risks we take. We put the thought of consequences we could suffer later out of our…

  • Seein’ Stars

    The story I’ve been putting together for next week is about sodium yard lights, er, the absence thereof. I thought it was such a co-inkydink (our slang term for coincidence) that I wrote about that particular topic the same time my family and I all slept outside and watched for shooting stars “organically,” as in…