after a very easy sunday evening meal (rotisserie chicken from giant eagle with mashed potatoes and fresh tomatoes and pickles, both from the garden!), we headed outside before the threat of a thunderstorm. kenny and i were able to throw the aerobie around for about half an hour while the kids ran circles around us and their jungle gym.

half an hour of frisbee is quite enough for me, especially after an afternoon of bike-riding, so we decided to sit and watch the boys run circles around us. within seconds of sitting, kenny spotted something that looked like a bee's nest hanging from one of the fruit trees just passed his hives. it turned out it wasn't a nest, but a ball of bees, or a bee swarm. and unfortunately, they were our honeybees. a swarm can happen at any time to any hive, and there are theories on why it happens, and you can try to keep your hive from becoming a hive that swarms, but sometimes they just happen and you can't stop it. fortunately, we were able to spot it before they flew off somewhere else to create another colony. kenny has a few empty bee boxes stored in our barn...we are learning that this is essential for any bee-keeper since emergencies such as bear-attacks and bee swarms can happen at any time, and you need to "save" the bees somehow. so he ran to get one immediately, stopping off at the house to get the cameras, a ladder, and his bee suit (just his veil and gloves).

i kept the boys at a safe-enough distance (apparently the bees don't want to fly too far away from their precious queen, so they were safe about 30 feet from the tree) while i filmed and snapped some pictures.

we have no idea if the hive will survive, but at least they're safe inside a bee box, inside our electric fence, with plenty of room to roam and waggle-dance and keep their queen happy. if this survives, then we've just added to our bee colonies, and hopefully this will produce more honey in a year or two (so far, we're not sure if we'll be getting any honey this year since we may need to keep what they've produced in the hive for their winter survival).

here's a video of our evening adventure, complete with me hollering "be careful!" every 3.4 seconds, and the boys playing and singing in the background. and kenny getting stung only 3 or 4 times!

we've had several days in the 90s. i'm LOVING it.

the first really hot day was thursday, and i basked in the warmth. by the second day (friday), i finally let kenny put the air conditioning on (i think it was the kids yelling over the monitor when i put them down for bed on thursday saying, "mommy, i'm sweaty!" a thousand times that did it for me).

we broke out a new wading pool (a frog!), kenny bought a new slip and slide, and by last night, the slip and slide fed into the wading pool. it's rowan and sawyer's new favorite thing to do.

our garden is popping up all over the place. all the beans popped, so far we have an 85% percent corn sproutings, and the other plants haven't burned up in all the heat. when the plants get a little bigger, i'll get a pictrure posted. now it just looks like black mounds and hay (similar to last year's garden, minus the chickens and the groundhog troubles, plus a big fence that kenny and my brothers put up last week).

and today, kenny purchased this book. are we crazy yet? :)

despite it being a frigid 50 this past week, we've had little outside work to do as nothing is blooming or growing. not even the weeds. fortunately so, as we've had our hands tied up with the wildlife.

this is what a perfectly good, never-before-used bee frame looks like. this is what you put into a hive box when you start a bee colony:

ten points to those who can correctly identify that quote. (and some major props from kenny.)

we've tilled 3 1/2 rows and are trying to figure out which plants and seeds to put where. i'm planning on making salsa a lot this summer. because i've come to realize i just don't like store-bought, jarred salsa. the fresh stuff is definitely the way to go. the only problem is...i don't have a recipe for homemade salsa. i can look up recipes in books and online, but first i'd like to check with friends and family and even strangers who have made salsa before and love their salsa recipes. even if you didn't love your recipe, we all have different tastes...so send it any way. for instance, you may like your salsa hot and spicy while i like mine with a lot of juice and cilantro. send 'em on over, please!

now onto more bees!  i was the one to don the bee-suit today. our good friend buzz came over to mark our queen...in other words, paint her red so we can spot her right away next time we go open the hive and play with the bees.

kenny took out the empty queen cage from the hives yesterday!



when the bees are shipped to you, they separate the queen from the workers by sending her in her own cage. she and the worker bees eat their way through a sugar cork at the end of the cage. this way, the workerbees have time to accept her without harming her. once she is free, the workers do their thing to feed her and produce more workers with her.

the following picture shows the beginnings of some comb that the bees made since they arrived last week (this was on the side of the queen cage). the orange and brown bits are pure pollen (different colors from different plants!) and smell like a big fat bouquet of flowers (strong!). you may even notice a bit of raw honey between the pollen.

we're thisclose to getting the plans for our summer garden in. we've extended it by several feet this year and we're still planning which plants and seeds go where.

it's also that time of year to sign up for a very cool summer challenge - one local summer. so all you foodies and gardeners out there...go sign yourselves up and start planning! i'm already thinking of the local farm stands i'll visit and the recipes we'll be making with our own garden produce.

we recently cheated and bought strawberries at the grocery store...but the boys were in dire need of something other than apples and pears - our winter fruits of choice. i'm eager to get to the local berry farm and pick all the berries we can eat. we got a little sick of strawberries last year with the amount that we picked that i still haven't used the ones that we froze! there is just something so perfect about a warm, sweet freshly picked strawberry that one frozen 10 months ago can't match.

at 7:19 a.m. this morning the phone rang. it was the post office in our small little town (since the general store closed down last summer, the post office and the methodist church are the only thing in town next to several houses).

10,000 honeybees were waiting for us and i don't think they wanted to wait until our normal 3:30 pm delivery time to get them out of their office. kenny and rowan hopped in the car and went to pick them up.

please join me in wishing our beloved chickens a happy birthday today! a year ago on this date, it was frigid...20 degrees and windy and we bundled up and headed west to pick up a small box of squeaky chicks. today, not one of those chickens would be able to fit into that small little box.

we've lost only two chickens in one year, and that is remarkable. the other day, rowan asked me, "will the 14th and the 15th chicken that got taken by the hawk and run over by the car turn one this week too?" and then sawyer asked if we stay with jesus forever in heaven when we die, and then the conversation got way too complicated and difficult for me to continue on a 3- and 4-year-old level, so i quickly changed the subject and decided it was lunchtime at 10:30.

any way...

we celebrated today with homemade BBQ sauce over baked chicken (ha! get it?!), rice, and green beans. we have cupcakes to eat and share with the chickens tomorrow. they love leftovers, those chickens!

last week, when serina and i were sitting in crawling traffic inside the liberty tubes (who knew that there was a wikipedia source for the liberty tubes?!), we chatted about the struggle of Everywoman in america today: the desire to raise goats and sheep.

fortunately, we are of one mind on this issue (well, she more than i, but i'm getting there), so we were able to talk up our dreams and encourage each other that it was within reach. and that's where my problem begins.

i don't know if it was the culture in which i was raised, or the culture in which i started to make my own adult decisions, but at one point along those lines, i realized that i love to consume. new things. bright, shiny things that make my life so much easier, faster, and stress-free. and then recently, since meeting kenny at least, i became aware that that isn't necessarily a good thing. especially when you are a professing follower of Christ.

so then kenny and i began daydreaming one day over our sunday morning fairly-traded coffee at the bagel warehouse about moving out to the country and raising not only a family, but animals. that can help us live more simply. fast foward 6 years, and here we are: acreage, 3 boys, chickens, honeybees, enough grass to pasture several more animals, and a barn (that needs a bit of a fixin') to house more animals. we are in the position to live an incredibly simple life, eating our own (chicken) eggs, drinking our own (cow or goat) milk, shearing our own sheep, and working good and hard to make this life possible. we have enough land to garden organically, put up jars and cans of fruit and vegetables, we even have a small orchard of fruit trees (that do need some pruning, but could probably produce fruit again some day). we have a huge laundry line out back and i only air-dry a fraction of our laundry in the spring and summer.

so why do i still feel the need (or desire?) to go to Target, Sams, Barnes and Noble, and Giant Eagle (local grocery chain) to provide almost everything that we can grow/provide ourselves? we have this simple life in reach, and yet i push it away and still want to buy, buy, buy!

and not only that, i want to look good doing it. not me, per say, because i've already landed the man of my dreams...but my home. i want a pristine home, bursting with spring flowers, summer bounty, autumn foliage, and serene scenes of winter. our current chickens are free-range and they've torn up the base around most of our trees, and they dig up all the flower beds, not to mention they leave their droppings everywhere, including the front porch.

we've been spending the majority of our days on the outside of the house lately. it feels great to not need a coat, and to roam the yard again without heavy boots and deep snow keeping us from walking easily.

maybe it's because this yard has so much more foliage and life beneath the ground than our old yard did...but this year again, i'm surprised (by joy, of course) at the new buds forming on the otherwise dead-looking tree branches, and the bright green shoots sticking up out of the earth after a long hibernation. even though we're expecting it, it's always surprising that life returns after such a long, cold, dead winter.

i spent the day in the city on saturday. my friend serina and i (and her 5-month-old son, asher!) headed out bright and early to the salvation army fabric fair. we didn't realize just how nuts the fair actually is until we tried to maneuver our way through the crowds. i tried two or three times to browse through the patterns/book table, but the ladies wouldn't budge. these women meant business. we did score on some great new fabirc (cheap!) but made our way through as carefully as we could without getting hurt. :)

that afternoon, i met kenny and the boys (and my mom) at our old church for the shape note workshop i was so excited about. it was a lot of fun to sing in a group again (i rarely get this opportunity anymore since i'm not the singer in the family), and it was interesting learning a bit more about it. but kenny and i made the same observation about the actual singing: at this point, we'd much rather listen to it sung (by those who sing it a lot!) than to sing it ourselves. there was a huge need to pay attention to the line of music that you'd sing, and i honestly can't remember actually hearing the music being sung because i was too intent on getting the notes right. so i keep listening to the pieces from the Awake My Soul web site to get my fix.

in the warmth of the afternoon sun on sunday, we labored in the garden. now i know that this is (an example of) the type of work that God requires us to abstain from on the 7th day of the week...but seriously, is it work when it's so enjoyable? when it's all you've been wanting to do for the past three months of frozen temperatures? because it felt great to see the ground again, and to see the garden getting ready to be a bed of growth again. the boys helped us with their garden tools while adam napped. we breathed in the earth, the sun, the tractor diesel fumes....  if there is one thing i'd like to do away with, it's the tractor diesel. i wish there were such a thing as an affordable, green tractor that would make all the rest of our organic gardening and earth-keeping worth it. perhaps one day, the barn will be fixed up enough to house a few goats and sheep. because they're the perfect earth-friendly tractors around.

AND...we lost another chicken today. it was one of the black and white ones (silver laced wyandottes) - the ones i call george washington (they look just like him!). we believe she was hit by a car as she was lying, wings sprawled, in our rock/shrub garden. we're not sure it was a natural landing that put her there, or if someone put here there after doing the damage. she's had a proper burial and yes, we told the boys. and this after we were just telling someone how we've never lost a chicken to traffic, even though they freely walk in the street on a daily basis (cars normally slow down, honk, or stop). this puts our daily egg count down to about 10-11. thank goodness for friends who readily take eggs off our hands.

we've gone straight from never-ending snow to never-ending rain. which means it's at least above freezing, so i really can't complain.

but it's not been warm. we've only been making it into the high 30s and mid 40s at best our local weathermen are really trying to push us into spring with forecasts in the 50s. we're nowhere near.

but, the longer days, and the never-ending rain is doing something. there are green shoots in our flowerbeds, there is a light greenish hue (albeit splotchy) coming back to the grass and...the ladies started a-layin' again!

...we lost a chicken.

and i don't mean "finally!" as in "we were eagerly awaiting the death of one of our poultry." i mean it in a very realistic sense: we can't believe that all fifteen of our chickens lasted eight whole months!  when we brought the day-old chicks home, way back in april, we thought for sure a chick or maybe two would die that first night. that's what you hear about happening. or sometimes you hear that the chicks arrive through the mail with one or two dead already. so we ordered extra.

then, when they were several weeks old and we put them into their coop, we thought for sure a raccoon would smell them from the woods and gobble them up. or the bear that we see evidence of...or the hawks flying above our grounds. we thought for sure we'd lose at least four (five?) by now.

these chickens are free range, and they take advantage of this status by wandering all over our acreage and into our neighbors' acreage, across the street to my parents acreage, and even across a busier street DOWN THE ROAD. you'd think by now, a car would have gotten one? or two?

we were beginning to think that our chickens were supernatural. especially since we're still getting 9-10 eggs a day - and the days have been getting shorter and are already getting longer again.

but today, when kenny went out to feed the chickens before dinner, he noticed 14 nervous chickens running around as though they'd seen a ghost. then he noticed the LARGE (18 inches tall, perhaps taller?) hawk in the front of our woods rustling around with some golden feathers. it got one of our golden buffs. we have six of those. we only have three of each of the wyandottes, buff orpingtons, and araucanas. so at least the hawk chose wisely.

i thought i'd be a bit more sad, but i think since it was a natural event, i'm fine. kenny's fine. my dad's a bit sad, but i think he'll get over it after he lays the chicken out in a cordial gathering and buries it where he'll bury his dog eventually. 

fortunately, i think the hawk will have disposed of the chicken by morning.

today was a gorgeous day. the forcast called for rain and snow, but there was no precipitation at all and loads of sunshine.

but do you remember me whining about how we haven't gotten any of our leaves picked up yet? we did a bit of the front, and a bit of the back so far, but going outside and walking around (especially if you're only 18 months old) is very difficult in long grass and heavy leaves. so it makes days like this hard to enjoy outside.

fortunately, we were able to spend an hour picking up the leaves around the boys' jungle gym, and we hope to finish the rest of the yard on saturday. because saturday night we are expected to get a snowstorm. and last year, once it snowed, the snow was on the ground for weeks and weeks. and weeks and weeks.

there are days when i wish a leaf blower was all we needed. but then, the boys wouldn't have all this room to roam....

back in june of this year, kenny and i were all set to order a few (four, tops) turkey chicks and have them sent to us to raise for the 10-12 short weeks that they have before taking them to a local slaughterer for a fresh turkey thanksgiving dinner. free-range, mostly naturally-fed turkeys for a grand total of $6-8. plus shipping and handling.

when we went to make the order, the nice people at the hatchery told us that we had to order a minimun of 15 for shipment.

so, we decided against it as we had no room to house 15 turkeys. and we were trying to live a normal life of a family with three kids, 15 chickens newly released into their outdoor coop, and a huge garden with huge groundhog problems. we didn't need 15 more little headaches. (oh, that made it sound like the three kids are headaches. if i have to be honest, sometimes they are. but that's my fault, not theirs!)

so today, kenny called a local turkey farm. we ordered a fresh 18-20 pound local turkey for our family thanksgiving meal this year. we had a hard enough time finding a local turkey farm, let alone finding an organically raised, free-range one. the one we found keeps their turkeys in open-aired coops and are fed natural food and do not use growth hormones on their fowl. that's enough for me. especially since the USDA definition for free range does not mean pasture-ranged.

we are set to pick up our fresh bird the week of thanksgiving.

our life with chickens seems to stay so similar from day to day until something exciting happens - like a blue-green egg! and then i'm reminded just how fortunate we are to be living with these fowl.  i discovered today, that it is our beloved araucana, bettis (named for her thick neck, like the beloved, retired steeler, jerome bettis), that is producing the blue-green egg. both my mom and i discovered her in the nest box today, around the time the egg appeared. here she is in all her thick-neck glory:

when beginning our research into raising chickens, kenny and i fell in love with all the characteristics of the Buff Orpington. So far, our Buffs won't let us near them, and we are not sure if they're laying yet - two opposites of what we were expecting of them (very friendly, and good layers). But they sure are beautiful!

now, when i refer to our chickens as beautiful, i know that some of you are rolling your eyes or laughing thinking, "beautiful? i think NOT!" i know i'm in the minority. and this is a picture that doesn't flatter our Golden Buffs...and i agree, these chickens aren't necessarily beautiful. but they're our current fabulous egg-layers, and we're thankful for our eggs!

here's another beauty. am i the only one who is reminded of george washington upon looking at these silver laced wyandottes?

every evening, our boys love running around with the chickens. a few of them usually hang out with us when we're outside at the jungle gym in the evenings. rowan usually ends up picking a few of them up, while sawyer tries to, but freaks out at the last minute. adam is also very fond of them - as they are of him. they walk right up to him and peck his hand, his fingers, his feet.... he laughs and "yells" at them.

not exactly the healthiest way to eat them...but look at that gorgeous orange yolk! our first eggs. many more to come (i promise not to post pictures of every egg dish prepared by our girls' eggs).

6 eggs this morning! what will we do when all 15 of the hens are laying? free brown and turquoise eggs, anyone?

back in july, i wrote about our day at the beekeepers association annual picnic. while we were there, we met a couple who we discovered were our neighbors (meaning: they live 4.5 miles from us). Buzz and Aleda keep several hives in their back yard - their house is near a busier intersection, so this proves that if you have a little bit of land, keeping bees isn't all that difficult. they gave us their card (they sell their award-winning "BuzzAleda Honey") and told us to come over anytime we wanted to "hang out with the bees."

tuesday was the perfect day. it wasn't humid, nor raining. kenny gave them a call and of course, Buzz was excited to have an excuse to open up the hives up and show a new beekeeper the ins and outs of the honeybee hive. Buzz and Aleda are grandparents, so the boys were entertained by lots of running around and jungle-gym climbing, and sand-digging (and two popsicles EACH!) while kenny met a few thousand bees.

i was able to grab a few photos of kenny suited-up with bees in-hand, but you'll have to excuse the window screen in the picture. i was holding adam and taking the shots (while the boys played about 3/4 of an acre behind the hives), and we weren't suited up. and although kenny said they were the most docile bees he's ever "met," we weren't chancing it to take a photo without a screen in between!

before you open a hive, you "smoke" the bees with a smoker. the idea behind a smoker is to make the bees easy to manage. when they sense smoke entering the hive, they engorge themselves on honey thinking that they need to stock up on honey, leave the hive and survive until the "fire" is gone. a bee engorged on honey is a very relaxed, docile bee, so it's easier to manage the open hive with friendly bees. kenny holding one of the frames:

if you look closely, in the center of the cluster of bees you'll see a yellowish dot on the back of the queen. Beekeepers sometimes put the dots on the queen so they can identify them quickly. there is one queen per hive of up to 50,000 bees! the queen lays all the eggs in the hive which produce either a drone (male) or a worker bee (female). the honeybee lives for up to 3 or 4 weeks while the queen lives for however long the workers deem necessary.


the setting sun on a hive of bees and their honey combs.

i never would have thought beekeeping was fascinating until kenny mentioned he wanted to keep bees one day. even then i wasn't interested. i kept referring to it as "his hobby." but now i am just as excited to receive and keep a hive ourselves.

you can't get a hive until spring, and if you order it through a catalog, you have to order in the dead of winter (january). you can also get a swarm from another beekeepers, but you still have to order a queen to keep the hive a-hummin'.

there is so much to know and learn about (and benefit from!) the honeybee. if you need or want proof of the One True Creator, study the intricacies of the intelligent honeybee. Intricacy and intelligence are God's specialty.

it looks as though the rebellious age is spreading throughout our chicken brood.

we have 15 chickens. last night, kenny found their hiding place: roosting in branches about 15-20 feet above the coop. we realize our roost in the coop isn't adequate for them, and we realize these chickens need to roost at night. it's in their chicken blood. but what will they do when the branches are ice-covered? or snow-covered? or there is a windy storm overnight?

tonight, we only counted 10 chickens in the coop...which means another chicken has joined the rebellion. we could only find two in the tree. so three chickens are unaccounted for.

i don't think they realize yet that bear and raccoons can climb trees. perhaps this means they haven't encountered one yet. that's good news.

the bad news is...we might have to clip their wings from keeping them from roosting so high up. and if clipping their wings is anything like bathing a cat or cutting the hair of a toddler boy [whose name (rowan) i will withhold for (rowan) the sake of his (rowan) privacy], we're in for it.

kenny should really be the one writing this post, but he gave up blogging for Lent a while back and just never got back into it (actually, it was around the time sawyer was born, 2004, when he gave up on blogging).

he's the mastermind behind our next big project, which kicked off officially today: beekeeping.  we spent the morning making sweet and sour meatballs to take with us to the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association's Summer Picnic/Potluck. we were expecting there to be perhaps 10-15 folks there sharing our meatballs, perhaps a few bags of chips, some warm soda, and maybe a cake in the shape of a honeybee complete with "honey" icing while the beekeepers chatted about their hives.

fortunately, it was nothing of the sort. we were one of 50 families (maybe more)...totalling a few hundred people with hot dogs and a TON more food to share. there were activities for the kids (the boys made "kite" honeybees and tree-branch name plates) while kenny listened to a few of the experts talk about the recent bee colony collapses. he also got to "schmooze" or "network" with several beekeepers in our area (one lives just down the street!).

these beekepers know how to throw a family party.

they do get a bit corny with their "Honey Queen" contest where they nominate some floozy woman as the "Honey Queen" for a year. as i was passing her wearing her tiara and sash, i asked her just what she did to received this title (yes, okay, i was taking notes so I COULD BE THE NEXT HONEY QUEEN)...and i made the mistake of referring to her as the "queen bee." she corrected me immediately and told me that she wrote an essay on the health benefits of honey and the judges interviewed her. she said she won based on the combination of her interviewing/speaking skills and the uniqueness of her essay. i was hoping it was a baking contest so i at least had a chance for next year. but speaking skills? writing an essay? PUL-EASE.

our neighbors donated their old beekeeping equipment to us complete with bee suits for kenny and i and a little-itty-bitty child's suit for the boys. rowan and sawyer tried theirs on this morning.

i'm now really excited about this: the benefits of local honey (i mean, a few yards away local!), honeybees for our garden and our neighbors' gardens, and learning the incredibly complex ways of the honeybee are just a few of the things i'm excited about. we order our bees sometime in january and we'll receive them late spring, 2008.

this is one of rowan's favorite phrases. sometimes he asks me the same question over and over throughout a day or a week, and after i've answered it a few times already and he asks again, i answer him with, "you tell me, rowan." to which he responds, "no, you tell ME!"

smart kiddo.

but i digress. this morning, the boys and i went out to let the chickens out of their coop, and as we walked closer to the coop, my heart sank. the flower boxes under the front windows were torn off and thrown about, the dirt inside dumped and flowers GONE. fortunately, i heard clucking sounds from inside the coop and none of the doors were open. i got their food and threw it about for them to feed. they seemed normal, but i know they experienced some terrifying moments last night....

my question is this (you tell ME!)...was it a raccoon or a bear? i've heard of the strength of a raccoon, but can they tear off nailed-in wooden boxes with one hand (they'd have to hold onto something else to reach the boxes wince they're not on ground level)? or could it be the famous bear we keep hearing about in our woods?

what do YOU think??

no more plants eaten again today. a quick post as it's been a long evening, already!

a picture of the coop that kenny designed and built. it sits behind our barn. that's the egg collecting door on the right. hopefully, we'll be able to figure out how to get free-range chickens to lay their eggs in their nest boxes, and not around the yard. our country neighbors just laugh and shake their heads at us. :)
 

one of our araucanas. this one is very fond of jumping up on people. it did it for the first time the other night to a friends who was visiting for the day with this family, and then again tonight on my mom. it's quite disconcerting. i'm thinking it's a compliment since we're suspecting this chicken to be the top of the pecking order.


a golden buff, walking merrily along.


tonight, we harvested our first leaves from some heirloom lettuce seeds given to us by my friend serina. the leaves are still small, but it's time to thin, and they're so deliciuos at this stage - packed full of flavor (and vitamins!).

our summer vegetable garden was growing by leaps and bounds. and then...just like THAT...90% of our beans disappeared. we noticed a few of the leaves chopped off on monday, and by tuesday morning, we had ten left of the forty-some plants that had grown to three inches tall.

yesterday, we noticed one of our beautiful broccoli plants was eaten to a stalk...and then i stumbled upon something else growing in our garden: a nest of five itty, bitty baby bunnies. they must be one or two days old now, and they sit nestled under our three strongest lima bean plants. *sigh*

what do i do with my need-to-save-the-baby-bunnies heart, and my newfound love of all things gardening and growing our own food? folks out here would tell us to drown the babes without thinking twice...they're mama could be the culprit of our missing beans plants! however, we've spotted three groundhogs on the premises over the past few days, and they're more likely to eat beans and broccoli than rabbits. apparently. and we couldn't care less for the groundhogs.

kenny sprinkled cayenne powder over most of the plants last night, and nothing disappeared overnight. so the bunnies are staying put for now. until we give in and decide we are growing food, not bunnies.

in other farming news...does anyone have any experience growing rhubarb? i picked some up at our local farm stand a few weeks ago and made rhubarb sauce, which i love. kenny never had it before. i guess it's a taste that one needs to acquire? i'd like to grow it...but don't want to wait years and years to harvest. does anyone know if i could get a splitting from a plant and would it transplant well for a harvest as early as next year?

* THURSDAY MORNING UPDATE: the baby bunnies are gone as of this morning. it looks as though the mother took them to a safer place...or the neighbor's cat had a really nice breakfast. *

what an exciting day at the homestead.

it's a little earlier than we had hoped, but due to circumstances out of our control, our 5-week-old chickens are now free range. after rounding them up for the 27th time on sunday and yesterday, we just decided to let them have at it. their little makeshift pen wasn't doing it for them anymore, and since they've now got tail feathers, they're about twice as big as they were last week...they need the extra room.

and they love it. they wander around and around and under the coop, eating grass, pecking at bugs. they go hide when rowan and sawyer come running, but come when the adults find them with hands full of food. eventually, rowan and sawyer will treat them with respect, right?

also this morning, our baby robins were dumped out of their nest. at first we thought it was an accident, but my mom, who was visiting, assured us that this is what mama robins do with thei babies, and it's completely natural. BUT THEY'RE ONLY ONE WEEK OLD!!! apparently, she was right. we found two of the three babies hopping around the garden (i held off on watering for about half an hour until they were out of the garden) and mama and papa hopping around the yard chirping at them to follow them into the woods across the street (and at us to stay the heck away from their babies!). i guess papa robin spent the past two weeks looking for their new home, since this is the first i've seen him.

at one point, one of the babies was stuck in the middle of the road. you can imagine that at one week old, they're not walking very fast. kenny actually stopped traffic (all of the one car that past our house in that half hour period) to keep the baby robin safe. we think the other robin made it across the road since there is no evidence on the road of its demise, and it is not in our yard any more.

then we looked up and saw two hawks flying overhead. for the first time since fall. we ran over to the chicken coop and left the boys there to play with the chickens. perhaps hawks won't swoop where there are children at play.

as i was walking back i happened to look down under the grapevine where the original robin's nest was and noticed a black coiled stripey "rope" that happened to be a snake. i ran in the house, pulled kenny away from his work yet again to tell him about it. i knew he want to show the boys. he tried to grab it, but it slithered away into some tall grass. or our peonies.

we're wondering if the garter snake is the reason behind the mysterious absence of the third baby robin. does anyone know for sure if garters eat baby birds?

hawks, snakes, and wild cars on the road...the real culprits of small farm animal deaths.

the chickens turned a whole month old on monday. to celebrate, we moved them out of their brooder in the laundry room to their brand new coop in the yard. i couldn't be more thankful. they're SO BIG now, that they were kicking up dust from their bedding and it was EVERYWHERE in the laundry room. i spent the entire day (between diaper-changes, meals, naps, playing, and reading) wiping down the room and cleaning it two times over. remember these cute little fuzz-balls?

they are now not so cute. they're turning into chickens, and have scrawny necks with patches of bald waiting for their feathers. their feet are awkwardly too big for their bodies (just like in the 7th grade!). however, where their feathers are fully grown in, the patterns are beautiful, and there are glimpses of their full-grown beauty when they stretch out their wings. i am sure that in no time at all, they will be beauties.

here are our girls, all happy in their new digs:


a golden buff (front) and a buff orpington (rear) checking out the ramp:


feeding time:


three silver-laced wyandottes and a buff orpington:




did i mention how happy i am to have them out of our house? don't get me wrong, i love the girlies, but they really do stink. in ways you didn't think possible. and not like "dirty farm smell," it's more like something died in our laundry room on top of the dirty farm smell.

the chickens are still confined until our neighbor's dog is trained to stay inside his brand new invisible fence. how nice of our neighbor to set up an expensive system to keep her big pure-bred pointer dog from eating all 15 of the chickens.  i think the plans for the fence were already in the works, but when she heard our chickens were living in their coop soon, she got the fence buried and began training her dog.

if only we can figure out a way to keep hawks, foxes, and raccoons from preying on them.

the chicken-hobby is a big project, but one that we're enjoying. we have to keep the boys away from them most of the time "but they're my friends, mommy!" is rowan's excuse for wanting to hang out with them all day long, and what he repeats to us when we tell him it's time to leave them alone.

i keep getting questions about the chicks...and it is about time i update you all on those precious little critters.

they are two weeks old today! they're almost double their original size already. their wings are forming, feathers are popping out all over their bodies; they're lanky, their feet are huge. it's like they're all hitting "that awkward phase" at the same time, and at such a young age!

we always talk about how our kids grow so quickly...let me tell you: watching human babies grow is like watching grass grow, or paint dry, compared to the lightening speed at which chicks grow.

we took them outside and "penned" them in with rowan and sawyer. at first they weren't sure of the grass, the sun, the ROOM THEY HAD TO FLY (they take this little fly-jumps all over the brooder and they keep hitting the walls). but they got used to it fast.

here is a golden buff perched on sawyer's foot.

the boys love to feed them, pick them up, pet them...here are two golden buffs, a buff orpington, and an araucana eating out of rowan's hand:



as i type, it is 9:28 eastern time and kenny is working tirelessly in the garage on the coop. he's very concerend about the comfort of these chickens: the coop will stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter. i think he knows that i would be very concerned come the first snowfall, wanting to bring all 15 chickens (if the hawks, owls, and dogs hadn't gotten any of them over the summer and fall) inside to stay warm. so my husband assures me that they'll be toasty. in their coop. outside the house.

it should be all built in the coming weeks. the chickens are getting big enough to go outside for longer periods of time, and will very soon be living outside the house.

i think i'm experiencing my first anticipation of an empty nest. those little chicks are growing up so fast...they're going to be out and on their own in weeks, and i think i might have to go buy a candy red sports convertible to be able to handle it.

before you go snickering about how earth day is just a way for tree-huggers to get their own (recycled-only, please) hallmark holiday, i'd like to point out that there is a lot of good that comes out of observing good earth-stewardship practices.

for instance, and i'm not saying i'm a big fan or anything, but OPRAH dedicated an entire show this week to environmental issues, and how the average household/person can make small changes in their daily lives to make a big impact. Oprah is watched by millions of people. Surely more people will begin recycling and reusing, now?

there are also earth day celebrations in many cities and towns across the country making people aware of the need for change in how we live. so how did you ring in spring by observing earth day this year?

we were so excited to be outdoors (on saturday) where it was sunny and warm. i spent the morning washing and line-drying all of our bedsheets (our room smells lovely - i can't wait to crawl into bed!). the boys helped kenny clear out the area around the firepit at the base of our yard (old dead leaves and lots of weeds. we plan to plant grass, have a few big rocks to sit on, and plant wildflowers and other indigenous plants). we planted a few plants that may or may not live (easter hydraneas and lilys...probably hothouse flowers, but it's worth a try), and picked up sticks that fell throughout the winter all over the yard (hundreds and hundreds of sticks and small- to medium-sized branches). 

kenny and i walked around the yard with the boys making plans for the flower beds (the previous owner had HUGE flower beds with just about every flower imaginable. i'm incredibly intimidated by these overgrown and weedy beds. but they need help), the shrub garden (yes, a garden of shrubs. it's becoming an eye-sore and i've never really liked it. we're getting rid of it by replanting the shrubs elsewhere in the yard and planting grass) and the vegetable garden. (kenny is currently starting heirloom vegetable seeds that we received as a thank you gift from our friend serina to plant out in the garden by the end of may). i also began the change-over to completely natural cleaning products and cleaned our laundry room bathroom with water, baking soda, and vinegar.

but we did spend a good part of the day frustrated at the lack of recycling recepticles in our county. in fact, we spent a good part of the day looking at neighboring counties and admiring their recycling programs. i am planning on calling the recycling department monday morning to get the skinny on the lack of recycling in or area. goodness knows, we don't need everyone burning their plastic containers every saturday this spring and summer (since everyone in the country seems to burn their garbage).

if anyone reading this knows anything about starting a recycling "system" in small-town america, please give me your best advice. not that i'll be doing it, but i can at least make a lot of noise.

we ended saturday by cleaning out the chickens brooder's bedding. we've done this a few times already since monday and we are just shocked at how quickly these little chicks are growing. their wings are starting to get bigger and they stretch them out and mock-fly around the brooder. rowan begs to pick them up about 400 times a day.

tomorrow is a picnic lunch at moraine state park after church!
enjoy the sunshine!

it was FREEZING yesterday. add to the cold, it was WINDY. when we ordered our chicks back in early march, it was 60 degrees. i imagined us picking up our chicks donning shorts and t-shirts, sunshiny day and all. the sun met us in ohio, but pennsylvania was hidden under stormy clouds all day long (and we were in ohio all but one hour).

so it didn't REALLY take 10 hours. but we left at 10, met kenny at 12:15, and were on the road by 12:30. it took us over two hours to get to the hatchery in polk, ohio, which was really quite nice and not at all what i expected. we parked the car, got out and stood next to a penske delivery truck with literally thousands of chicks in boxes inside, waiting to be mailed. it made me happy that our little chicks were to be riding home with us, and not the noisy 1000-other chicks in the truck.

it was a long day, but totally worth it. the chicks are loving their new little home in their brooder in our laundry room under warming lights. the boys step up on their stools to be eye-to-eye with the chicks and they all run over to the glass to see the boys.

a few things we've learned about chickens from observation already:
 - when they are one-day-old, they suffer from narcolepsy. they walk from the water to where the light is warmest and stop mid-step, eyes begin to close and then fall flat on their face. or they fall asleep with their head still in the food dish. it was really quite entertaining for kenny, my mom, and i to watch after the boys were in bed last night.
 - they'll peck ANYTHING. they especially like to peck at harder things, like wedding bands and screws in the walls of their brooder.
 - they've stopped chirping so much and now when we hear them chirp, we wonder if something is wrong.
 - today, they all seem to fall asleep together, for about 45 seconds each. they've all had about 89 naps already since this morning.
 - just as a newborn infant, they'll keep you up all night. kenny came down to check on them (and their temperature) at least three times last night.
 - three brooder lamps shorted on us last night, even after checking them out last week. we have two normal bulbs in there now, keeping it at around 85-87 degrees (it should be close to 90 the first day, and down a few degrees as they grow).

adam, sitting in the middle seat with me:
 

the boys, with their new chick friends in between them in the back seat:




rowan, gazing into his new little friend's eyes. his friend wondering if he's her mother?


kayle, the tabby is "interested"


where the boys went the minute they woke up this morning:

what a day. i have NO energy to blog about our 10-hour trip to ohio...but my goodness, are these chicks freakin' adorable. seriously, it's like the energy and exhaustion right after giving birth.

i'm off to bed, but here is a few pictures of our baby egg-layers. :)

tomorrow (monday) is the day!

our 15 little chicks are still growing in their shells in the hatchery somewhere in ohio. they will be "induced" early tomorrow morning, and fully hatched by mid-morning. we pick them up in the afternoon and drive them home to their new brooder which has a fresh layer of pine shavings, a nifty new lamp to warm them at 90 degrees farenheit, and eager little boys who can't wait to smother them with love all over them.

pictures will follow once the excitement has died down in the household.