Want to know if you're a real farm girl? You've been living in the farm for years but do you really consider yourself as one? Check these signs and find out for yourself!
You Know You're A Farm Girl When…
By Kathy Bernier
Sometimes you just know. You know you're a people person when you stop to chat with a stranger in the grocery store checkout and end up giving them your phone number in case they want to talk more later. You know you're the cat lady when your cupboards are so full of feline vittles that there's no room for people food.
There are signs of being a farm girl, too. Here is a list of the top ten warning signs that you just might have left the pavement for good. You just might be a farm girl if…
10 Reasons You Know You're A Farm Girl
These are the original 10 – you liked them so much we added 10 more!
Count down with me, and see how you relate! Did we miss any? Share your own reasons in the comments.
1. You own more pairs of rubber boots than heels.
In fact, you are so happy in your comfortable pull-on farm boots that you just buy them in pretty colors and hope you can get away with wearing them to town.
2. You have ever lain awake in bed waiting for that last jar of canned vegetables to pop.
How sweet it is—the sound of the lid sealing in all those flavors of fresh garden and hard work.
3. You have a different idea for an air freshener.
Your idea of an air freshener is a bowl of ripe peaches, fresh-cut lilacs in a vase, warm bread right out of the oven, laundry just in from the clothesline, and summer breeze coming in the open windows. What could be fresher than that?
Click to make your own all-natural air purifiers.
Oh, and a humidifier is just as fancy: a kettle full of water on the wood stove.
4. You see the weather through different eyes:
When a nice day is predicted, other people see a beach day. You see a great opportunity to get the carrots thinned and clean out the barn.
In the fall when others are welcoming the season for wearing tall boots and long sweaters, you are concerning yourself with getting your tomatoes picked before a hard frost and getting enough firewood split.
To regular people, rain means muddying up the just-washed car and carrying an umbrella. If you're a farm girl, it means a day off from watering.
In the cold of winter when the weather forecasters on TV are warning viewers to bundle up and drive carefully, farm girls are more worried about getting the barn gates shoveled out and keeping the animals warm.
Click here for tips to Prepare Your Barn For Winter.
5. You have a different dress code.
You have looked down and realized you are dressed in pajamas, farm boots, a wool overcoat, work gloves, and a kitchen apron. Life comes at you fast on the farm, and sometimes you end up adding on layers for the next activity without considering the whole ensemble. It happens.
6. You wake up earlier than others.
You have ever woken up at 6:30 and run downstairs in a panic, demanding to know why the rest of the house let you sleep in so long. Farming starts early in the morning, and nobody wants to be late to the party.
7. You use Mother Nature for heating and cooling.
You have carefully carried a pot of warm milk upstairs and set it on your husband's dresser for overnight, because it's warmer up there and the cheese will set up better. Let's face it, using Mother Nature to heat and cool the house has its challenges. You have to go with the flow—and in some cases, take your pot of cheese with you.
8. You have a different shopping list.
Your shopping list usually includes at least one of the following: ammo for the varmint gun, chainsaw gas, canning jar lids, bug spray, and syringes for goat shots.
Out on the farm, there's a whole different list of “must-haves” – Click here to read 9 Tools I Always Have At The Barn.
9. You have ever found a beetle in your bowl of fresh berries and cereal, picked him out and tossed him, and kept eating.
You worked way too hard getting those berries to your bowl to throw them out now. After all that planting, tending, pruning, and picking—what's a little bug here and there? You breathe a big sigh of relief that you didn't eat him and drive on.
10. The number one way that you know you're a farm girl?
When you lean over to pick something up on your way in from collecting eggs in the chicken house and suddenly hear a faint but distinctive “POP” sound coming from the vicinity of your hoodie pocket.
You knew it was bound to happen eventually. All those times you reminded yourself to remember they were there, and all those times you breathed a sigh of relief when you found them in your pocket three hours later and you realized you had forgotten them. You were lucky then, but it was just a matter of time before your luck ran out.
It's so inevitable that it's almost a rite of passage.
You reach in, and sure enough. Eeeeeeeuuwwww. There it is. A farm fresh egg, broken and gooey in your pocket.
You peel the jacket off, pull the pocket inside out, rinse it out in the sink, and congratulate yourself for having made it as long as you did without it happening.
If you have done any of these things, there is little doubt about it. Your feet and heart are firmly planted on the farm for life.
10 More Signs You're A Farm Girl…
Maybe you still are not convinced. You have seen a few of the warning signs but are not one hundred percent sure.
Here are ten more signs to help you determine the truth. If you have been on the fence about whether or not you are a true farm girl, read on to see if any of these sound familiar.
If any of these things ever happen to you, it's a pretty good sign.
11. You know you're a farm girl when… You get excited by these catalogs!
You're more excited when catalogs containing greenhouse equipment, dairy supplies, day-old chicks, livestock treatments, and fencing equipment arrive than you are about any other catalogs. Trendy accessories, fancy home goods, and cosmopolitan lifestyles don't even tempt you. But if you pore for hours over a page of hoof-trimming equipment and drool over a sale on garden tools, it's a sure sign.
12. You know you're a farm girl when… Your big guns didn't come from the gym.
Your gym is pulling weeds, splitting wood, and milking goats. You don't need an electronic bracelet to tell you if you're active or not—you put in a couple of miles a day just getting from one chore to another and back. Your abs get a workout shoveling manure and your shoulders can lift a bale of hay up over your head. Those city girls look cute in their workout outfits, but how many of them can pitch hay and catch piglets? You can, if you're a farm girl.
13. You know you're a farm girl when… You worry too much about the homestead.
If you've ever woke up at two in the morning worrying about whether or not you closed up the little access door on the chicken house. You try to go back to sleep, but you cannot get the thought of your birds being vulnerable to roaming foxes and skunks out of your head. You try to tell yourself that the electric fence will prevent any evil-doers from skulking into the barnyard, and then catch yourself starting to wonder if the fence ever got plugged back in after chores. There is no point in fighting it. You roll out of bed and trudge downstairs to the back door, pull on your farm boots and wool barn jacket, grab a flashlight, and head out into the barnyard.
You find that the chicken house door was closed, of course. It always is. And the fence was plugged in, too. But a farm girl always has to be sure.
Click Here For 5 Ways To Protect Your Chickens from Fowl Play
14. You know you're a farm girl when… You get excited about compost.
You realize you are “that girl”. The one who hauled home a load of compost. In the back of your farm truck that doesn't handle all that well when it's empty, to say nothing of when there's hundreds of pounds of cargo in the back. Holding it down at 38 miles an hour and doing your best to keep it in your lane.
And when you turn off into your driveway and breathe a sigh of relief, you notice that a line of thirteen cars roar up to speed on the road behind you. You know that they are breathing a sigh of relief too, after eight miles of being behind a slow-moving load of smelly compost on a warm summer day.
Part of you feels a little bad. You would have pulled over if you could, but there weren't many opportunities to do so—and anyway, you needed to just lean into it and get through the job.
The other part of you—the farm girl part—giggles a little at the thought of it sharing the compost aroma with the whole neighborhood. You are in farm country, after all.
15. You know you're a farm girl when… You have phone numbers to the grain store and the veterinarian memorized.
You can practically dial them in your sleep—and come to think of it, you probably came close to actually doing so once or twice during those late-night lambings.
They probably know your voice, too. You call up to find out if they have any tetanus vaccine and syringes on hand because yours has expired and you didn't know it had and your animals are overdue for their annual shots, and you cringe a little as you wonder if you did the same thing last year.
It takes a farm girl to manage all that stuff.
16. You know you're a farm girl when… You Never Leave Your House Without a Pocket Knife
When you get dressed in a hurry in the morning, you aren't all that worried about whether or not your lipstick or eyeliner gets toted along, but you make sure you never leave the house with empty pockets. Your little knife can cut hay rope, pry the ice out of a frozen gate latch, trim a hanging thread from your barn jacket, cut a ripe zucchini from the vine, slice a blemish from the skin of an apple, guide a wooly bear caterpillar off the path, open a grain bag, and scrape the garden soil from a carrot.
Like knives? This knife is big, beefy, and guaranteed to get you out of ANY jam!
17. You know you're a farm girl when… You know your milk, literally.
You know you're a farm girl if you have ever drank milk from a jar that was labeled in pen with the date, AND the name of the animal who gave the milk.
You know it is about more than just flavor and mouth-feel, although your discerning taste buds really can tell Bessie's milk from Susie's. It can be about quality as well, and even best safety practices. “I'll use Bessie's milk for this cake,” you think to yourself, “so it will be nice and rich.” That's how farm girls do it.
18. You know you're a farm girl when… You get undressed at the end of the day and find your unmentionables stuffed with hay.
Hay gets moved around a lot—from the field, from the trailer, into the hay loft, and into the animals' hay feeder. It's inevitable for pieces of hay to fly around loose and end up lodging themselves into itchy annoying spots.
If you are so used to the feeling of hay up and close and personal that you make it to the end of the day without shaking it out of your clothing, there's no doubt you're a farm girl.
19. You know you're a farm girl when… You love vegetables!
You have eaten the same vegetable three meals a day for days on end, because it is in season and you want to savor it while you can.
Tomato omelets…tomato salad…tomatoes on pesto bread…tomato tarts…fresh tomato pasta. There are endless amounts of foods you can make with tomatoes. Check some out for yourself here.
Or maybe zucchini, cooked up in muffins or frittata, sauteed in oil and doused in Italian seasoning, or pickled, or atop pizza, or grilled.
Cabbage can be fun, too. Grated in coleslaw, cooked up in mashed potatoes, pan-fried, wedged and drizzled, or stuffed.
When you raise your own food, you eat while the eating's good. And that's a true farm girl sign.
20. You know you're a farm girl when… You have a different definition of the word “kids”.
You are startled when someone is talking about their “kids” and you suddenly realize they are talking about human children. You are so immersed in the culture of spring time goat offspring—what you think of as kids—that you forget just for an instant that the entire outside world thinks of kids in a different way.
“Want to see a picture of my kids?” a lady at the grocery store asks you. If you expect to see four legs and a waggedy tail instead of T-shirts and blonde curls, you're for sure a farm girl.
A tried and true farm girl
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All ten! Good to know that others go out to take care of the animals in their pajamas and forget eggs in their coat pockets only to remember when they can feel them break.
You know you’re a farm girl when February rolls around and all of the other ladies are talking about getting ready for swimsuit season, and all you have on your mind is the new seed catalog and what you’ll be planting in the garden this spring.
You know you’re a farm girl when you have 3 new rabbit kits in your bra for warmth, while hastily searching for another nest box.
I will be glad when I can find a lady and move back out to the country…
So true!!! Definitely had the egg break in my shirt before. Also had animal babies, or sick/injured animals in our house before as well.