Friends Landing, a real country feed store

June, 2020

Oh I loved this store and I hope you will too. You already know that I love trees and rivers and lakes and birds and all of that “nature” stuff, but I love other things too … like going to a real country farm and feed store.

When I woke up one morning at Friends Landing, it was raining. It rained just this one day of my camping trip. But it did rain this one day, so I wanted to find some indoor things to do. Ah ha! The feed store! I could go to the feed store! It isn’t every day that you get to go to a real country farm and feed store.

So I jumped in the big white truck and headed into town … to Montesano Farm & Home.

It was a pretty good sized store, with so much stuff in it that I could have spent the whole day there looking and learning. But I resisted that temptation and spent about two hours there, which turned out to be just enough time to see some fascinating things.

Above … an entire aisle of just bee keeping supplies … all manner of things in all manner of sizes. I read labels and learned lots, but there were some items that, even after reading the labels, I still didn’t know what they were used for. I like bees. Maybe some day I’ll take a bee-keeping class.

Above … for your rabbits and guinea pigs and chinchillas and other small friends … “Healthy Timothy Hay Treat”.

For those of you who don’t know, there is a variety of hay called timothy. It is a grass hay (as opposed to a legume hay), and is most often used to feed cattle and horses who are stabled or otherwise confined and so don’t get a tremendous amount of exercise and so need less protein. Legume varieties of hay, on the other hand, have more protein and so they are more commonly fed to most cattle and horses.

Ok, around the corner to the next aisle …

Here in this farm and feed store, there was a plentiful array of everything under the sun related to horses. Above … face masks … without ear or nose covers (on the very far left, partly out of the photo), or with just the nose piece, or with just the ears, or with both ears and nose piece … and all of those options were available in either fine mesh or durable mesh.

And of course there were horse shoes aplenty, in various sizes, along with tools used to shoe horses.

Above … some of the potions and lotions used on horses’ hooves and joints. I’ve heard about Pine Tar all my life but never knew what it was, and I never knew it was used on horses. So I pulled one of those containers off the shelf and read its label …

The label didn’t say exactly what Pine Tar is, so I looked it up online after I got back to the trailer in the campground. The very long definition I found had numerous scientific words in it. Basically, heat and pressure are applied to pine wood (often just the roots and the stump are used). The results are charcoal and pine tar. Pine tar was used to seal the hulls of old wooden sailing ships in days long gone by. It is still used today as a sealant on certain surfaces and it is used for medicinal purposes on animals of all sorts … including horses, chickens, and humans.

There were no saddles or other large equipment for horses in this store, but there were a few very nice smaller items. The leather breast collars above (the items hanging as a “V”) looked hand carved and colored, and matched the browbands of the bridles hanging right next to them.

And how do I know all of this about horses? I used to own a horse. When I was about 13 years old, my parents bought a horse for me … a strawberry roan Quarterhorse (red hair with lots of tiny flecks of white hair). Strawberry roan horses come in all shades of red depending on how much white hair they have; my horse was a dark auburn redhead. His photo is below, and yes that is one of his horse shoes that sits on top of the frame. On the day he was delivered to the pasture close to our home, my mother asked me to name him. Almost without hesitation, I said “Charlie”! My mother laughed out loud at that; she understood. After all, who hasn’t had a “charlie horse” at some time in their lives. Charlie and I were great friends for many long years.

But I digress. Back to the Montesano farm and feed store!

I walked up and down every aisle in that store. One aisle held all sorts of fence material … rope, wire, posts (metal and wood and plastic), things to fasten things with, things to hold the posts up with, etc. One section (below) held all manner of electric fence stuff … polytape, cable, wire, in various sizes and colors, and designed for various amperages of electricity.

Just before I left this store, I discovered the back corner where the live critters were. All of them were really fun. I especially liked the chicken chicks below. Soon enough they would grow into big, clucking hens or roosters, but at this point in their lives they were pretty sweet.

On the wall near the chicks, I found the sign below. The sign was a year old, but maybe the dates were close enough to 2020 dates to still be applicable. Pretty cute saying there in that sign … “Hot Spot to Pick Up Chicks!”

If you’d like more information about the Montesano Farm & Home store, here’s their website … http://montesanofarmandhome.com/.