A great week.

This week the kids spent a couple nights with Grandpa and Grandma. I was able to do spend some good time with friends and my sweet husband. Aubin and I hung out and went to a flea market and found some great bargains, Suzanne and I watched some Martha (I haven't seen Martha in years-it was so great) and made facial lotion. I also helped catch a bull calf to band-castrate him. (I may have wrote that incorrectly, I don' quite have the whole bull/calf/castration/steer lingo mastered yet.) And Matheau and I ate at Chipotle, had some Ben & Jerry's and started watching season 6 of 24.



But as always, I love my kids. So when they arrived home we have had fun picking black raspberries, going swimming, working in the garden, and today, Allison volunteered and helped me clean out the hen house.

Fruit.

We have wild black raspberries that are getting ready to pick. Last year I did a horrible job of keeping the area around them cleaned up enough to pick them. This year, since my Dad, brother and Matheau have mowed twice, I have been able to keep an eye on them. They should be ready to start picking this next week.





I ordered some tomato seed from Seed Savers-late-but I could resist. A couple of days ago, I noticed one of the containers I had planted them in was missing some leaves. I didn't really think much about it until a little later, I noticed that a lot of leaves were gone! After a bit of inspection, I found the culprit. I nice fat caterpillar.

A quick stop by the farmers market this week.

Lizzie and I found some fresh chai basil (quite yummy in pesto), yellow squash, mixed lettuce and spinach, a dozen sweet potato starts and a couple of homemade peanut butter cookies for the ride.

Being thrifty.

I have this dilemma, we live on a budget but I like to buy the "good stuff". For example, instead of polyester I like to buy cotton batting. I like handmade and wool/cotton yarns, without all the acrylic. Sometimes the two don't go very well together, but I do have a few tricks to help me survive. For example, for my recent lap quilt project I used cotton batting, but instead of using the entire piece for the quilt, while cutting out the fabric, I made the quilt a wee bit smaller so I could I could make some coasters for wedding gifts and to go with the quilt on the front porch.

Some coasters and a felted potholder for a wedding gift.


Coasters for the front porch.

Hollyhocks.

After showing the photos of sweet pea starts I was thinking about all the hollyhocks I spent hours digging out of my flower beds thinking they were just really big weeds. When we first moved to Mound City I spent a lot of time cleaning up flower beds to put in some of my favorite flowers and herbs. These really huge lettuce looking leaves kept showing up and I would have to take a shovel to get rid of even half of the roots. You can imagine my horror when I found the same leaves in a pot with a price tag of at least $9.00 per plant!!

Since then I half left a few. But just incase you may make the same mistake I've taken some photos of them at various stages. My first ones started blooming just yesterday.

Picnic lunch.

Trying a couple more recipes from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and Apples for Jam. The chicken legs had an orange sauce-yummy. And deviled eggs and fresh bread just make good picnic food.

Without internet.

Well, it has almost been a week and it is going be be a bit longer. :) So, just in case you are wondering, I am collecting about two eggs per day from the girls and they seem to have made the full transition into our hen house and runs. They have even learned to walk (is that the right word to describe hens moving?) quickly when we are moving out into the yard.

Have a great week everyone.

My first green egg.

You have no idea how cool it is to see a green egg laying in your hen house-unless you already have eggs in your hen house. ;) If it was just after 6 in the morning, I would have let out a really loud holler of joy. This egg is from the ameraucana from Suzanne.

Four new hens.

Our three hens left seem to be doing fine. They are behaving normally and are able to stand whenever they feel like it. Huge Praise! Yesterday, my friend, Suzanne called, and then came over with four new hens-already laying hens-so this morning, we found our first egg.

Just to give you an idea of the size difference between a full-grown hen and a young hen. Here is one of the few photos I snapped of them together.

Yesterday afternoon and last night I kept our original girls and the new girls separated. Since there is a big size difference and they are new, hens have the tendency to peck the less dominate. This morning I kept them together for awhile and they seemed alright. The younger hens would kind of fly/run away when the more mature would come close, I have also noticed that even with the larger hens, they try to avoid eye contact with the most dominant of the group.

Another great thing about getting the hens from Suzanne is that the hens are friendly and don't mind being handled.

This is my first year to grow sweet peas. I have always seen them in magazines and books, however, this year, after spending so much time looking through Slice of Organic Life, I thought I would grow my own. To be quite honest, I had no idea what they would look like when they came out of the ground. In case you haven't seen one before, here is one that is still pretty young.


And another rose in bloom with a visitor...


Last but not least, some photos of my finished porch/lap quilt. The idea for the quilt was totally inspired by a quilt in January's Country Living magazine in a article about Amy Butler. I even used a blanket stitch around the edge.

I had a hard time going to sleep last night.

Sunday was a really hard day. Yesterday afternoon when I headed back to check on the girls and Mar and Ollie, I found only feathers from a white rock and barred rock, and a dead Trixie. The rest were gone. Hannah came out and we found only three alive. Anna Sophia, Marvel and Owlie (two white rock or wyandottes hens and one americana hen). We rounded them up into the hen house and went searching for the others. No sign of them.

Later in the evening when I went to check on the girls, they were not moving well and kept stiffening their legs and didn't seem able to stand... I called my friend Suzanne and asked her expert opinion (she has a lot of chickens and goats and other fun animals) and sure enough, it is a sign that they probably had either been stepped on, or maybe chomped down on by their predator (my guess is neighbor dogs or a coyote), but they didn't leave any punctures, this still can kill them. I started praying that they will make it. I know there are far bigger things that need prayer, but man, I want these three girls to live.

Before bed, they had moved around a bit, even jumped for a mosquito, and they were roosting when I went to close up the house for the night. I was really praying they would be alive when I went out there this morning. I dreaded my walk up the hill. So far, they are alive, still sitting on the roost, but it isn't totally light out, so I will check on them in a bit...