Snow Days in March.

Snow days in March really are not unusual.  It was the 60+ degree weather in February that was concerning.  All of the flowers and trees began waking up prematurely, so when the temperatures dropped back down to normal march temps all the plants that had woken up were affected.  

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These are the peach tree flower buds covered in ice. The blueberries look very similar.  i do not yet know if we'll be getting any fruit this year.  My daffodils froze solid. We had lows of 12 degrees, maybe colder and then freezing rain on top of it.  

Although ever year i get a picture of snow on my daffodils, this year they did not recover. The flowers got too cold and froze.  My daylily plants also froze and turned into piles of soft dead foliage, so i'm not sure whether they will recover or not. i've never had a year without daylilies. 

i brought all my seed trays that were in the greenhouse inside, as i knew they would not survive if i left them out.  

This was the scene inside. We all stayed warm around the fire, and enjoyed the quiet of winter that we seemed to have missed during January and February when the temps were so mild.  Thought i've never been a winter person, i still need a week or two of hibernating and slowing down and embracing the season.  i feel like i missed that this year.

i usually spend the winter cooking and baking, but this year i spent more time in the glass shop than i did in the kitchen. The glass shop is not heated though, and with the temperatures as cold as they have been it was just too cold for me to work. So i took the time to use up an extra gallon of milk we had.  i made a batch of mozzarella, fresh butter and buttermilk, used the whey to make ricotta and had a full cup of fresh cream left over which i used to make creamy feta and roasted red pepper fettuccine.

The buttermilk was turned into pancakes, i used the ricotta and about half of the mozzarella to make stuffed shell and then used the rest to make home made pizza and quiche. i've been making a lot of quiche these days, as my hens are really starting to lay. 

i'm getting some really gorgeous egg colors too. Despite my attempts at breeding for colors (which failed) nature did an excellent job all on her own. These colors are the result of barnyard mix, and  not any intended breeding. The pink comes from a heavy 'bloom' over a brown egg.  

My new chicks are growing fast. They are 3 week old now and are getting lots of feathers. We moved them into a larger pen, and added a roost and they really seem to love it.  

So far our march has been rather uneventful. We are all eagerly awaiting spring, and hoping that the weird weather settles down and hasn't already caused irreversible damage to all the fruit blossoms that were just beginning to open.  i have seedling started in the greenhouse and am trying to get sweet potatoes to grow their starts. Trying not to get ahead of myself, and embrace the cold days the best that i can. 

I am grateful for the silence of winter mornings, for the beauty and wonder of the glint of sunlight in frost melting to dew, for the early-riser's peaceful solitude that sets a mood of thankfulness, hope, and calm for the dawning day. ~Terri Guillemets

New peeps, rescue hen and so many eggs!

My hens sure do think it's spring! i'm finally getting lots of eggs again!! Remember all those chicks that hatched out last summer?  They are all laying now. Unfortunately, of all those crazy peeps that hatched out, i only ended up with one olive egger and one medium brown layer. All the others are laying white/cream/beige eggs. i thought for certain that breeding my olive egger with the maran would create a dark olive layer...but it did not. :/ The olive egger i did get is a complete mystery since it hatched from a feral hens clutch (all brown/beige eggs)...not an olive egg. 

More daylight means more eggs! They are really starting to come in now!  i'm super thrilled with my variety of colors, but am still missing blue!!  The majority of my eggs are boring white, cream and beige. i really need blue eggs! 

So, i got some (hopefully) blue egg layers! :) With all the chicks hatched out last summer, i must have lost my mind to actually purchase more chickens!  When i saw a local farm store was selling EasterEgger/ Americanas i had to get a few. EEs lay blue eggs! They actually lay blue, green or pink eggs,,,but i'm hoping at least one will lay blue.

They are so freakin' cute. 

i also recently took in a rescue hen, We've been calling her Lola.  She is an older Easter Egger, and i was told she doesn't lay anymore. She was offered on a free site for butchering/stew pot, but i offered to give her a home and let her retire here.  The last rescue hen i took in was my Olive Egger, who became one of my best layers. So i'm secretly hoping this girl  will eventually starts laying blue eggs, but i'm fine if she doesn't.  She seems to be fitting in well with my other hens, i have several retired ladies already.  

So just when i was feeling overwhelmed by all the eggs, i found a nest under the deck with 16 eggs in it!  Several of my hens have been laying in this nest.  These dark brown eggs are from the offspring of the Olive egger hen and Maran roo.  They are not even slightly green, and just a shade lighter than my Maran eggs.  They are also the same size and shape and my maran eggs. 

So yeah, i have no idea why this hen doesn't lay green eggs and why the other one (my mystery olive egger) does.  All my theories on color breeding just went out the window. lol. 

Olive Egger Mystery

You may remember earlier this spring when we ended up with a bunch of new chicks.  i was trying to hatch out olive eggers. Olive Egger chickens are not an actual breed, but a cross of two breeds — usually a blue egg layer and a dark brown egg layer. For example, when an Ameraucana hen's egg is fertilized by a Marans rooster, the resulting chick will be an Olive Egger who will lay olive green eggs. i only have one olive egg hen, and i've been trying to breed her with my Black copper Maran rooster, so that the female chicks would then lay dark olive eggs. When i tried this last year, i end up hatching out all roosters.  This year, i tried again, but the olive eggs kept disappearing or breaking.

Then my wild hens began disappearing and returning with chicks. We had to give away a bunch of them. i bet those crazy hens hatched out 60+ chicks. It was so frustrating, because i really didn't need any more chickens, i just wanted to have a couple more olive eggers.  Many of the new chicks look just like my other wild/gamey birds. A few have the same striped look of my Olive egger hen, leading me to believe one of the Olive egg roosters may have fathered them. 

 i was under the impression that the roosters wouldn't carry the olive egg gene to pass on to their chicks, so imagine my surprise when a couple of my spring chicks started laying and i got an OLIVE EGG! It's a really dark olive too.  All three of these eggs came from chicks from that first clutch of 16.  There are two large fluffy gray hens in that batch that looks more like domestic hens than the wild girls. One has started laying the brown eggs that are just a shade or two lighter than my maran eggs, and the other is laying the olive eggs.  The bright white egg came from one of the wild girls, even though they typically lay an off white cream. 

My egg color variety is really fun right now. My marans are currently molting, but when they start laying again they lay the chocolate brown eggs. My original olive egger, Olive lays olive eggs like the one above but much larger and maybe just a hair lighter.

This is my beautiful mystery hen that is laying the olive eggs. i named her Gracie. She is such a gorgeous and unusual looking hen. My wild hen hatched her out, and she wasn't sitting on any green eggs...so i have no idea what Gracie  is a mix of.  Here, i've been trying to hatch out the green/olive eggs to get an olive egger and i get one without even trying. With the amount of wild birds we hatched out, i have to think she's probably not the only one. Although she is the only one with this look.  

In all my efforts to actually hatch out an Olive egger from an olive egg, i only ended with two chicks. As they grew i was pretty excited, because i was certain that both were girls. Then one morning i found one of them dead in the coop.  i believe my Maran rooster who is quite large may have crushed her, as they were fully feathered but still tried to climb under the other birds like they did with their mama. That left me with one Olive egger. This girl.  She is not laying yet, but when she does she should lay dark olive eggs. Even darker than the ones i'm already getting. She is a mix of Olive Egger ( americana/maran) and Black Copper Maran.  So i'm really excited for her to lay, although it probably won't be until the spring.

i've been trying to thin out my flock and give away as many of the new birds as i could, but now i feel like i need to wait until spring to see who may be laying olive eggs. One of the main things i had wanted to do it get the green gene introduced into my flock, so i wasn't dependent on my one olive egger for green eggs. If something happened to her, i would no longer have olive eggs and Olive eggers are difficult to find. However, Gracie has proved that i don't have to hatch them out of olive eggs, the roosters must also carry the gene.  So i really think i've succeeded in that. i can't wait to see what other egg colors we end up with.

Spring Surprises.

So we've had a lot of surprises this spring. Several of my hens disappeared several weeks ago. Some reappeared, and some did not.

My first hen to return showed up with 16 chicks!!!  They are all fully feathered now, and i expect that she'll be starting to hide from them soon.  When mama hen feels the babies are ready to be on their own, she'll start distancing herself from them and hiding. It's always a little sad to see the babies running around crying for mama not sure what to do. 

Our first batch of chicks are about 5 weeks old.   It's still a little early to tell the boys from the girls, but on some of them it is already obvious.  The black chick standing is quite definitely a boy, obvious by the size and color of the comb.  When you see dark pink this early, it is a good indication that it's a boy.  The light colored smaller chick up front is a girl.  She is much smaller than the others, and has a very yellow comb. 

Typically the girls have a yellow or pale pink comb until they reach breeding age. When they are mature enough to breed, the comb will turn bright red.  

With this batch, i already see a few definite boys and a few definite girls, but most it is still too early to tell.  i have two favorites from this batch that i am hoping are girls, and then i plan to find homes for the rest of them. We do not have a coop big enough for this many chickens and they are quickly outgrowing the chicken tractor.

This is my second hen to disappear and then reappear with chicks. They are about 4 weeks old now, and she hatched out 13!  So we've had to move birds around to find a place to keep her and all her peeps safe.  She is very wild, and will not let us get any where near her babies. i'm tempted to find homes for both her and all her babies together (plus a rooster).  

It's really hard for me to give them away, but we just don't have room for 29 more birds!!! 

Just as i was stressing out about what to do with all those chicks...we get another surprise!!  This hen, which i didn't even realize was missing showed up with 9 more chicks!! They are only 2 days old in this picture and super sweet. 

So yeah, that's 38 baby chicks this spring!!! OMG! 

We obviously can not keep them all, i am just hoping they are not to difficult to re-home. i may try offering chicken starter sets (one girl and one boy) from different broods, otherwise i'm going to get stuck with a crap ton of roosters.  Most folks would just eat the extra birds, but as a vegetarian family that's definitely not an option and re-homing 30+ chicks can be a bit difficult...especially when i want to guarantee they won't be killed or eaten. 

So yeah, really starting to hate surprises...but they are soooo cute!!   :) 

Spring is in the Air

One of the first signs that spring is near is when my begin to lay again regularly and start going broody. This year i was really hoping that one of my domestic hens would go broody so i could sneak some of my pretty olive and maran eggs underneath her.

i had traded for pretty blue hatching eggs as well and was hoping to finally get some blue layers in the mix.  i had no such luck though, i could not get any of my hens to set. 

i did however have a couple wild hens go missing, a few weeks back. i wasn't sure if they were setting on eggs some where or had been lost to a predator, but i was hoping that they would show back up eventually. 

One morning i spotted one of the missing hens and followed her until i watched her diappear into the woods. Took a little while to find her, but eventually i did. She was setting a whole clutch of eggs. i really did not want more wild chickens, but i had no idea how long she had been setting so i didn't want to disturb the eggs.  

When i went to check her a few days later i found one of the eggs had hatched and i could hear peeping coming from the other eggs. So i got my daughter and her friend to help me move the hen, chick and eggs into a safer place. i was afraid that something would hear/smell the new chicks and get them during the night. So we moved her into a nesting box inside the small chicken coop.

When i checked them the next morning i was somewhat shocked to find 15 baby chicks and still a few eggs unhatched!  By the end of the day we had 17 new chicks!!  i have no idea what we are going to do with them all, i just hope i get some hens this year. Last year my attempt to hatch out a few hens left me with about 12 roosters!  

My girl is in heaven though, and they are so freaking cute. Once they hit that awkward 'teen year' stage i might be able to part with a few, especially any obvious roosters.

i had two other hens go missing, and i spotted one yesterday and also spotted a pile of feathers behind the goat field.  So one is not coming back, but the other very well may show up with her clutch of chicks any day now.  Ah, so many babies!! So yes, spring is definitely in the air.

Around the homestead- reflecting back on a good year and new year goals.

It's so hard to believe that it is 2016. The older i get the quicker time seems to move.  We are now almost 3 years post fire, and life is pretty much back on track. We have found our new normal, and are slowly turning this house into a home.

For Thanksgiving this year, almost everything came from the garden. i did purchase a Tofurky roast, which is more of a novelty than anything. It wasn't necessary for our meal, but we enjoy them and like the idea of a very 'traditional' thanksgiving meal even though we are vegetarian. Our meal included roasted roast vegetables, butternut squash soup, Acorn squash stuffed with apples, pecans and honey. Fresh salad, garlicy greens and pumpkin pie. 

My hens took a little time off to molt and rest over the winter, but now that the sun is returning they have begun to lay again. i'm really thrilled with the variety i'm getting now. Still just missing the blue. i took this photo in the snow and the colors really just popped.  i don't think i'll ever get tired of taking egg pictures. 

Just like every year, i had a lot of issues in the garden. We had a really wet  rainy summer, and it caused the diseases like Septoria leaf spot, early blight and powder mildew to spread like crazy. i harvest quite a bit, but it felt like i lost a lot as well.  Even though i was canning all summer, the canned goods were just stored in boxes and hidden away in the basement, so i really didn't know what all i had.  It kind of left me feeling like i had wasted the whole summer for nothing.

Then Kenan put in these shelves in the cold storage area downstairs and we pulled out all the canned goods and set them up on the shelves.  This is the first time ever i've had a pantry to store all of my canned goods. The shelves are  24" deep, so i can store a ton of food.  i also have my potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, onions and garlic in the baskets.  Below the shelves are storage bins with holiday decorations and craft supplies.  It's a pretty amazing feeling to see it all laid out like this and to really recognize all of the hard work i did over the summer. 

This spring we are planning to get a real greenhouse, fence the garden and really try to improve the soils in our gardens. We are also going to work on improving the goats area, and setting up our cistern to be solar powered. Kenan is also talking about getting an overflow tank for cistern.  That way we would have an almost unlimited supply of water for garden irrigation.

 We had also originally talked about putting in a second well, since ours is low flow and really doesn't produce enough water for our household, especially as the kids get older and want to shower more often. However after doing a bit of research, we are instead going to try to tap into two artisan spring heads that are behind the house.  The goal is to set up a 1500 gallon potable water tank using solar powered water pumps.

So yeah, we have a lot of plans for the year.  i will try to document our progress, but it seems more and more difficult to find the time to put together these posts. Even now in the winter when i have more time, i spend it working on dolls, jewelry or in the glass shop.  i'll be posting about that eventually as well. i'm really excited about the work i am doing this year, and look forward to share

Chickens, Chicks and Chicken tractors.

New peeps!!  i'm so excited that one of game hens became broody earlier this spring. Game hens are known for hiding eggs and going broody often. She decided to set right in one of my main nesting boxes, so i was able to remove most of the eggs and then hand pick the eggs to stick under her. She had one of her own eggs, 6 olive egger eggs and a Mottled Java egg.  i mark the eggs with a sharpie, either putting the date that she begins setting or a big X on the egg. That way if other hens continue to lay in the nest, i know which ones are fresh and which are incubating.

On day 21, i was so thrilled to find this sweet little peep in the nest.  This little guy hatched out of the Java egg.  i began picking up the other eggs and tapping them, and found three olive eggs with pip marks.  i tapped one and it tapped back. Then i began to hear peeping from inside those 3 eggs.  i went back to check on them several times that day, but they hadn't hatched yet.

The next morning when i went out to check i found 4 new peeps. :) The first one is a Mottled Java cross. i'm not sure who the daddy is, but probably a BCM.  The other 3 are Olive egger cross. i believe the two black chicks are Olive egger/ BCM cross so they should grow up to lay dark olive eggs (if they are girls of course).  The chipmunk patterned chick was also an olive egg, so it's daddy is either the Cream Legbar rooster or my main rooster, which i believe is an easter egger. So who knows what color eggs it will lay. :)   i'm really thrilled that was able to hatch out some of the olive eggs. 

i have a second hen broody, and she is setting on another 4 olive eggs, 3 Black star (XL brown) and another Java egg. These are due to hatch the first week of May.  i believe the BCM (Black Copper Maran) is the daddy to most of these, so i'm really looking forward to the variety of egg colors i should be getting this fall. 

As much as i love having all of these animals, you end up rather tied down. It's difficult to find a reliable house sitter/pet sitter if we want to go away at all, and i hate asking friends because i know it's a huge inconvenience to ask them to come out every day and i don't want them to agree because they feel obligated. So we've been working to really improve our animal set up so that we can go away for a day or two without constant worry. Although i have two coops with fencing, my tiny peeps can not get in the main one because of the steep ramp.

Although they could get into the smaller coop, mama hen is very protective of her chicks and will attack the other birds that are in there.  So she really need a small safe area, for her and her chicks to hang out in when we are not here to help them into the main coop. So the husband made me this simple A-frame chicken tractor, which is the perfect size for mama and her peeps. The chicken wire is double layered and staggered, to hopefully keep snakes out. i also had him leave the extra chicken wire along the bottom so i can puts rocks on it or something to make it difficult for anything to squeeze under. 

Once kenan had it finished, my girl and i gave it a quick stain. Then we moved mama hen and her peeps into the new enclosure.  This is the first 'chicken tractor' kenan has built and i think he did a great job with the design. He was originally going to put the door in the back so you could access the little chicken house, but i suggested he move it to the front so it's easy to fill food and water containers. Now that it's complete, i realize that it should probably have a door on both ends. My daughter is dying to get her hands on those cute little peeps, but every time she gets near mama hen hides them in the little chicken house. :)

This is too small to keep chickens in full time, but is great for mamas and peeps and it's also good for breeding pairs. Once my BCM pullets begin laying, i'll be able to put them in here with the BCM roo an guarantee some BCM chicks, rather than barnyard mix which tends to happen when you have multiple roosters. 

Our next project is to replace our current chicken feeders with PVC tube feeders, so we can give them a ton of food at one time and not have to worry about it getting wet/molding/spilling etc. 

i'm really excited to see all the progress we are making this year. i'll continue to post progress updates as we finish each goal.  Gardens have been tilled, and a few things planted so i'll be updating on all of that soon. 

Garden Season and Around the Homestead.

Spring fever has hit! The last few weeks i've been drooling over seed catalogs, planning out my gardens and ordering seeds.

Baker Creek is still one of my favorite places to order online seeds from!  i still have quite a few tomato seeds left from last year, and so i didn't go overboard ordering this year.  i did get the Blue Beauty which i'm excited about, and another variety called Tigerella.  The black pineapple tomatoes were my least favorite from the varieties i grew last year, mainly because i couldn't ever tell when they were ripe. i'm going to try again this year, keeping it in a pot so i don't confuse it with the other tomatoes. 

i've managed to get a large percentage of my seeds for free this year.  i  ordered seeds from Tropical Traditions, using my referral credit.  Besides coconut oil, and coconut products they also offer organic, open pollinated,  GMO-free seeds.   i  received the The Ultimate Emergency Survival Seed kit for $1, in exchange for a review.  i signed up for the Peaceful Valley newsletter/catalog and received a $5 gift code, which i used on seeds and only paid shipping.  

i also saved many seeds from last year, so i have a really nice collection of seeds just waiting to be planted! Locally i purchase seeds from Southern Exposure Seed exchange (Harvest moon health food store) and Seeds of Change (Tractor Supply). So i tend to pick up a few new packs of seeds any time i go out.  

i always start a few seeds way too early. This year is no different. i started most of my cold crops, but also a few tomatoes. This year i've started Violent Sicilian cauliflower,  Purple sprouting broccoli, Redbor (purple kale), lots of lettuce ,  black cherry and violet jasper tomatoes. 

This eggplant was planted last year, and never did anything. It was so small, i dug it up and brought it inside and overwinter it.  This spring is has really started to grow and has bloomed twice now! :)  i think this will give me a pretty good head start on eggplant this year. :)

i have several 'lettuce bowls' planted. i find that they grow well overcrowded like this. In the spring you can pull off individual leaves to use in your salad, and once the plants are a good size and the ground is ready to plant they can be separated and transplanted into the garden. i had really good luck doing it this way last year, and look forward to it again this year.   i have 3 different pots of lettuce started, so i'll be able to have a pretty constant supply of lettuce throughout the season. The potted lettuce can be moved to cooler locations, so even in the heat of the summer you can still grow it.

i still have a ton of sweet potatoes that were harvest last fall. Most of them are still edible, but i do have a few that have begun to sprout.  The longer starts i remove and place them in water to root.  These smaller starts i'll leave until they get a bit larger.  It will be really nice if we get enough sweet potato starts that i don't have to buy any this year. In the past, i haven't been able to get them to grow starts until after it's time to plant. 

Kenan set up the cold frame for me again this year. This is a really good way to help protect seedling when it's still getting cold at night.  They can be made easily, using materials around the house. You can get old windows off of freecycle or at the Habitat Restore. Ask around, lots of folks have these taking up space in the shed or garage.  We used concrete blocks, but you can build a raised bed out of wood, or straw bales and it will work well too.  

Every year Biglots has these super cheapy greenhouses for sale. They have several different sizes, and at the end of the season they mark them way down.  Last fall i snagged this walk in greenhouse for 75% off. i paid less than $20 bucks for it. i know it will probably only last one season, but i'm still excited to have it.  It was very easy to put together and i've already got a bunch of plants stating in it.  i also bought the 4 tier greenhouse  at 75% off to use inside over the winter.  It worked really well to keep a few things, like my eggplant, going all winter long.  i also used to to get a head start on seeds while it was still below freezing outside.  Both of these greenhouses are made with pvc and are not real strong, but when you can snag them at a discount i think they are totally worth it. 

Spring is definitely in the air (even though it is snowing as i type this).  My chickens are laying like crazy, we are getting over a dozen eggs a day.  i have one broody hen setting on eggs. She is setting on 6 olive eggs, so i am hoping that they are fertile and she hatches out some olive egger babies. My OE hen has been hanging out with my Black Copper Maran rooster, so the babies (2G) should produce really dark olive eggs, i believe.  i've read conflicting info on whether the male BCM affect egg color...so i guess we'll see as long as we hatch out a few females.

This last week we've finally had some spring weather.  The daffodils are starting to bloom and Kenan tilled up 3 of the gardens.   i'm still planning out where to plant this year, but i'm excited to get started. We are putting in lots of fruit trees this year, and more blueberry bushes.  

 Kenan's glass work is doing fantastic and i am back to beading, which i haven't done seriously since before i had kids. Lots of work to do, but making lots of progress, and finally beginning to feel like we are back on the right path again. 

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.” - Abraham Lincoln

Moving forward and new additions.

Slowly the rebuilding begins. Not just the rebuilding of our house, but the rebuilding of our life, family and homestead. Just getting back to our land has been very healing for all of us. We have slowly fallen back into our old routines, and our time spent at the rental house is barely even a memory now.

Trying to pick up the pieces of where our life left off, i sometimes feel like we have fallen backward and it will take us years, if ever,  to return to where we had been. 

After moving from our property our chickens began to get picked off one at a time. Although they were in a fenced in area, several of them were escape artists and still managed to find a way out.  At first a hawk seemed to be to blame. It actually killed several but birds inside the fenced area. It soon became apparent that our own dogs were killing them too. So i rigged up the fencing so that they no longer had access to the entire chicken yard, instead they were limited to small pen which would hopefully prevent them escaping.  This worked for a while. 

Then only a few days after we moved the RV to our property my dogs dug out of their kennel, under the fenced area and then broke done the fencing of the pen and slaughtered almost all of my birds. It was devastating. The only birds to survive were the ones who were able to get into the coop.  At the beginning of the year i had something like 30 chickens. We had hatched out several brood of chicks last summer, and i'd purchased 4 young Americana in the fall. Now, they were all dead.

At the time we moved back to the property i only had 5 hens remaining.  My black (game) hen, one black star, one Austrolorp, a Speckled Sussex and a very old Americana who hasn't laid in a couple of years. i also still had a rooster.  

i have been wanting to get a few new chickens ever since we moved back to the property. i missed the chick days at Tractor supply, and i honestly didn't want to raise day old chicks anyhow. We have no where to keep a brooder, and i didn't have the time to put into them. i started looking on craigslist, but most folks were selling basic production layers. Although i raise chickens for eggs, i also like variety in my flock and really didn't want plain domestic layers. i began to check craigslist regularly and found someone selling a large variety of 3-4 month old hens.  i was able to hand pick the hens i wanted.   

Hiding behind the fence is a Golden Campine. The Campine is a very old and rare breed which originated in Belgium. It is considered a heritage breed and is on the critically endangered list.  She is very skittish, and once she starts laying she should lay white eggs.  Also picked are a Mottled Java and 'Gran-Gran'  my old Americana. We do not eat/kill our birds when they stop lying so she is enjoying her days of retirement.

This is the Mottled Java. It is also a heritage breed and on the critically endangered list.  They are a hardy breed, they lay large brown eggs, are known as being good foragers and for going broody. Our Java is very docile and gentle bird. She will come right up and eat corn from my hands.

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Cuckoo Marans lay really dark brown eggs. They are considered 'chocolate eggers' because the eggs are such a rich brown color. Cuckoo is one of the birds i just recently lost in May, so i was happy to add one back to my flock. 

i also added a Delaware to my flock. These birds are a medium size, but lay large to jumbo brown eggs.  They are also considered a critically endangered breed.  i had a special relationship with a Delaware that i'd lost in May and was happy to get another. She is a very chatty bird. Follows me everywhere and is constantly 'talking'.  Although her coloring is not all that exciting, her personality makes up for it.  i just adore her.

We really were not planning to get another cat any time soon. We have still been holding on to hope that Tom would return or be found.  When we moved back to the RV we learned that our neighbor (at the bottom of the hill) was in the hospital, was not doing well and probably would not be returning to her home. 

A few weeks after than she passed away.  She loved animals and her partner/spouse was trying to relocate some of her animals as he was unable to care for them all. We had received our first chickens from them, and also both of our beagles (Sampson, and then Rufus).  So it only made sense for us to give a home to one her kittens.  

He is tail-less, a Manx, like all of her cats and a sweet welcome addition to our family. After a week or so of being nameless, we named him Banjo.

Little by little, we are finding our way. Construction has began on the house, and we should be in our new home before the winter sets in. It is hard to explain the feeling. bittersweet, for sure.  i am learning to let go of the old and embrace the new. 

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.  ~Victor Frankl