Baby Eggs

Our Baby Chickens, from Easter, are no longer babies!!

Here you can see the head of Lacey (red colored), most of Maran (black with white) and Dini (white) around the "water cooler" trading the gossip and Lacey bragging that she has been the first of the new girls to lay an egg!! A whole month earlier than I expected!
















It was quickly (the next day) followed by another. The one on the right is actually the 1st egg. It was SO cute and tiny. It was about 1 inch. The one on the left is the next day (or someone else's)














The picture below is of the two baby eggs with a Scarlett Pink egg (freshly washed so it still looks wet in places) between them so you can see the size difference.
















The new eggs are a really dark brown. I can't wait to see Maran's eggs as she is the "Chocolate Egg" layer...and the comets look pretty close to chocolate already! The four babies, Arica, Buffy, and Scarlett are all producing now so we get, on average, about 4-6 eggs a day now. Muffy is starting her molt so we aren't getting much from her, and we still have 3 babies that have yet to start laying. I'm hoping the white chickens will lay white eggs, just to add more colors to the egg boxes!

Now we are looking for another Americauna, so we can have a dozen chickens and get more green eggs. They are the favorite of the household, and of our egg customer's kids. Arica just can't keep up!

And as a teaser....I found something neat on Craigslist that is going to expand the homestead yet again.....more on that soon!

Peaches!!! YUM!

Nothing says summer like PEACHES!!














I got about 25 pounds of peaches and after we all ate about 5 pounds of them...



















It was time to start canning.














I had both yellow and white peaches and I think it made the jars look really neat.














We ended up with 7 pints of canned peaches in light syrup, and 8 jars (1/2 pints) of jelly. And this time I remembered to turn them right side up so they don't defy gravity like the strawberries!!














Onto the raspberries! And tomatoes...and peppers...and pears....and apples....oh and still more green beans!!

Back to Blogging....

Alright...I hope you are ready! I am hoping to do a better job at this. Tonight is not very busy at work, and I actually have my camera, and the "tail" so I will (hopefully) be getting caught up. And be sure to check further back because I will add pictures to the posts that needed them.

On your mark...

Get set...

GO














This is one of the "baby" chickens!

The weekend of endless Green beans!

So on Friday, the BOY and I drove up to Galion to someone's place that was selling bushels of beans. I went with the intention of getting 1 maybe two bushels to can/freeze. When we got there the man told me that they were going to pull up the beans and if I just wanted to bag up the bushes and take them home I could have everything on them. So, thinking this was a good idea, this is what we did. We couldn't see out the back windows of the Versa on the way home as we had 7 trash bags full of bean plants.

After spending the rest of the day on Saturday pulling of about 70% of the beans from the bushes, we ended up with this....














About 55 pounds of green beans (17 gallons). Then they all needed to be snapped / cleaned and the ones that were a bit "long in the tooth" we are shelling for "shelly beans". Like a bean that you use for chili and such, just it cooks in about 20 minutes instead of two hours.

Here the BOY is helping snap the beans.














We gave all the bushes to the girls to play with and eat the beans. They really had fun with it for a few hours and the coop looked like a jungle!



Here's the BOY petting Raindrop.













Now still after snapping and shelling 3 hours Saturday night and 2 hours on Sunday afternoon....this is the amount left to do....so what do you think I'll be doing today??