Marans lay some of the darkest eggs, and they are playfully nicknamed "Chocolate Eggs".

Here they are, so beautiful and dark and lovely. These eggs belong to Marans and will be a fabulous addition to the colorfulness of my egg baskets! Not to mention, when you blow these eggs out and add a little shine, they are THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ornaments! 🙂 The birds are nice to look at too and will fit in wonderfully here with our mixed flock.
One more week on the incubator with blue & black australorps, mixed easter eggers and then about 2 after that, these eggs will hatch. I should be able to get them into the incubator in the next couple of days.
By that time the geese will either have hatched their eggs or not, but I’ll at least finally know for sure if we’re going to have goslings this spring or not! I have a special kiddie pool waiting for them JUST IN CASE!
Can’t chat too much now, many things to do after a brief FREEZE last night. It got some of my less important crops, but nothing that will be too problematic around here.
Keep up with me on Facebook, where I post much more frequently!

My very best girlfriend has finally gotten the go ahead to get her own chickens from her family. She has been waiting for the household to be in agreement about the new additions before proceeding and I admire her ability to wait until the “right” time. So many of us, just get our chickens and don’t think twice about the consequences, or where we will keep them, or what they might need eventually. We just get a few and proceed with the daunting task of figuring it all out in a hurry. We had our first chickens before we had our first coop, she already has a new coop and is working out the details of the day to day care.

I was MORE than excited to find she had her eye on some of my own chickens and that I could actually hatch FOR her, the new babies she would eventually call her hens. I spent a couple of weeks choosing the very prettiest of my eggs, and selecting a good variety of colors, so that her future egg basket would be beautiful AND bountiful. Here they are.

2.5 dozen of our loveliest eggs

They are due approximately 2 weeks from now, and a couple of days. I’ll try and get a nice picture from the first candling early next week to share with you. I am expecting a slew of fuzzy faces with brown/blue/grey & splash feathering, blue & splash Australorps, and from the darkest of the eggs in there some kind of cuckoo feathering too.

I heard from another chicken lover that there was a show nearby this weekend on Saturday at the Tennessee Fairgrounds. I don’t know much about it at this time to tell you, but if I find anything out, I’ll blog it here for ya. If YOU know some details, please get in touch!

Anyone remember that tune?  I seem to always be full of retro quotes phrases & song that it seems no one in my age group or younger can recall!

We begin the 2012 blog with Tomatoes! If you’ll recall from last year, we began using a large 10′ square dog run to house our important tomatoes.  I had hopes of bringing in bucket loads of tomatoes, but all in all, we got next to nothing really other than fresh use.  The space just wasn’t ready to plant, but we had to give it a try anyway.  Here it was early summer season last year with tomatoes about a foot tall inside.

Believe it or not there are 1' tall tomato plants in there

Then they grew up over the season and provided a few tomatoes here and there.  I could tell that the idea was working if only the ground hadn’t been first-year-never-before-dug TN red clay.  See they were supposed to grow up and then on top of the strings over to the side walls and then down again.  But, they never really got that far.

Good idea but insufficient preparation.

So we decided last year to make a major improvement in the Tomato run.  We collected leaves & straw from the chicken yards all winter long and piled them in the run.  And in late January we raked it all up into a pile and began the slow process of turning the pile over every other day.  Which we did all through the month of February and most of March.

Here is the composting in progress...

And that brings us to last week.  When my husband was gifted an almost unlimited supply of used retaining wall type cinder blocks.  That’s right, the BIG kind.    So we happily began using them to rebuild our driveway fence line and then the Tomato run!  Which brings me to yesterday & today and the 4 tons of split top soil & mushroom compost we brought in, most of which went right to the future tomato home!  And now for the finished product, ta da:

8 San Marzano Tomatoes plants are planted deeply in the main bed area, with Large Red Cherry Tomatoes in pots in the corners!

Now, if we’re able we will finish up the 2nd row of blocks (tall) after the growing season and fill them with dirt.  But for this season, I’m just going to plant in the cinder blocks as they are now.  Probably a blend of flowers & herbs, possibly some greens.  Then next year when the wall is two rows tall, everything will be super neat & tidy and look just amazing I know it.

And that concludes the tour of the tomato run upgrades for 2012.  It’s come a long way, and I can almost taste those tomatoes already!  I hope you have enjoyed your visit to my blog and will continue to join me each week on Wednesday night this season for garden updates!

OH and did I tell you, I have my FIRST CSA customer this year!  I couldn’t be happier and it’s really nice to actually know who your selling your produce to ahead of time.  It adds a real sense of community I think to my daily work and I am loving that!  Next year, I look forward to adding another family too provided I can keep growing each year as well!

And guess what else….  that’s right, it’s chick season and our incubator is all warm and ready for eggs…

This is always my philosophy and why shouldn’t it be? Unless your dead, there is always another opportunity to try again, and again I resurrect this blog and update the software so I can continue forward.

Whew!

Lexi & I spent half the afternoon preparing the bed for planting and replacing the outer wall. I broke a shovel digging it in, but I did it. I managed to remove what was a wood plant raised garden wall over 10′ long of rough cut timber and replace it with cinder blocks I gathered from all over the yard. It looks great and was worth every aching muscle I have now to prove it. Someday it will be two cinder blocks tall but for now, one is more than great.

New right hand block wall & plants ready to go in!

So I went out last night, in the dark with Husband in tow & planted in the newly updated front garden. I put out all the Green Beans I started as a fall experiment, as well as the 6 cucumbers we started too. I don’t have trellis so I just decided to mound them up, 2 to a mound and soon we will mulch them and just let the cucumbers fall where they may!
We still have to get a couple dozen lettuce & spinach in the ground, and then that will just about wrap up all the fall planting I’m willing to tackle this year. So much to do, so little time!

Cucumbers & Beans planted.

Dawn Suiter

A few items to keep handy that make life lots easier.

I try to keep my indoor freezer, full of quick items that make my life easier.  Don’t you?  I just ordered some new fabulous containers for the freezer so I can use some of my glass jars in dry storage where I need them.  The new containers are fabulous because they are square and BPA free plastic, so they will fit my space so much better!  Never-the-less I thought we should start talking about organization as we approach the winter months!  It’s important because we will all be spending so much more time inside, and we really need to do things to make our lives better and more pleasant; treat ourselves like we’re on vacation!

Let me go ahead & explain what your seeing here and how it works for us…

Breakfast Cups – Tupperware single serve portions for a morning scramble for our daughter.  She wakes up earlier than the chickens, so she needs every easy step she can get!  Each one is a mystery to her and are filled with a variety of things like ham or sausage, banana or bell peppers in all colors, corn, carrot bits, a pinch of sweet onions etc.  Just enough to go with 1 egg in a 4″ skillet and give a boring morning egg a little fun & variety without slicing dicing or making a mess.

Pre-cooked 4 oz Sausage – I use these for pizzas & pastas mostly, and the occasional breakfast meal too.  It was like an epiphany to me one day when I realized I could freeze my sausage cooked already and instead of waiting overnight for it to defrost, and then have to make a sausage skillet mess when I really didn’t have time!  Already cooked drained & from the freezer to my plate in 10 minutes!  Since ground pork sausage is one of the few items we can buy that is preservative free & healthy, we eat a fair share of it, approximately 4-5lbs monthly.

Pesto Pints – Again, dinner in a flash helper but not just that.  I pull these out for a themed week, and we have Pesto & Angel Hair Pasta one day,  a spoonful or two on our pizza crust plus sauce, on another day I’ll toss a little of it with a vegetable potato mixture and finally if there is anything left, I’ll use it to marinade a piece of chicken before baking in a foil pouch!

Soups – self explanatory I should think.  These were not suitable for pressure canning for one reason or another and so they are in the freezer for a quick-ish meal.  DH can take one out the night before and take it to work, reheat in the jar.  Or I can anticipate the same for myself and take that meal to go!

Tomato Puree – This batch is from low acid yellow roma tomatoes and I’m not sure yet if they are safe to can.  So after pureeing & cooking down my garden goods, I just jarred them up.  I can take them out when I intend to make sauce, they are usable within a couple of hours and perfect for a last minute pasta sauce!  I also have puree in cans on the pantry shelf from traditional red tomatoes.

Berries – this batch is for tossing into everything, yogurt, smoothies, or for turning into sauces & jelly.  Sometimes there are Strawberries, or Blueberries, and right now there are Blackberries.  Super handy and I even toss a few out to the chickens on a really hot day; they appreciate a nice cold frozen berry when it’s sluggish hot.

Alright, so those are just a few of the ways my freezer door helps me out every day.  Your turn!  Take a pic and let me see.  It’s ok if you want to clean & organize it first, heck, I just gave you a good excuse to get that done.  Take your time, I’ll be here, but I DO want to see those doors!  You can post pics on my Facebook page easily or link to them in your comments below.

Cheers!

16 pints of Pea Soup, Chicken Soup & Lentil Soup and 5 Quarts of liquid GOLD (seasoned homegrown chicken stock).

It was a good weekend for canning here at home!  The pressure canner got a good workout and I even “double decked” my load…  that’s some home-canner jargon there for ya 😉   I hope to get to the jellies now in the next day or two, which is new for me.  I learned in the opposite order that most folks learn.  Many people start with hot water bath canning and jelly or jam, but we never ate much of that stuff so I never really bothered.  For me, I’d rather have a cabinet full of food that does NOT require me to cook it and so my daughter or husband can easily fix dinner now, thanks to the simple, yet scary, steps of home pressure canning.

If your interested in learning more and eventually becoming a pressure canner yourself, there is nothing better in my opinion than creating your own ‘canned soup isle’ or instant dinners, you can get started at the National Center for Home Food Preservation: http://www.uga.edu/nchfp

"Double Decked" jars

3 pots at once make the procedure SO much easier!

And that means it’s time to make soups!  At my house, my extra freezer has a couple of wire bins/baskets for storage on the bottom.  One is exclusively reserved for bones, hence the name Bones Bin.  It gets full after a month or sometimes longer depending on what we’re eating.  It is comprised of things like leftover chicken carcasses, ham bones & skins, pork & chicken necks, some cooked, some raw, but all frozen solid.  When the bin gets full I go pick up a couple bags of organic celery, carrots & a bag of sweet onions and get to work making ham, chicken, pork broth for cooking!  If I can afford it, as I could this time, and have ham bones, I also pick up some Split Peas & Lentil Beans and make soups instead of just broth.  I use a few carrots & celery each, 1 onion & 1 garlic cloves worth in each pot, regardless if it’s ultimately soup or broth.  Using the food processor to make short work, 1 or 2 minutes, of the chopping & slicing of several pounds of raw vegetables, I just eyeball an equal division among the pots.  Fill with water & bones and beans if applicable and simmer for a couple hours.

$40 worth of Chicken Broth in the making! And most people throw these things away!

The chicken broth pot must have at least 8 bird carcasses in there, picked over dinner leftovers, some from when I filet breasts off the bones before cooking but don’t do such a precise job, and also several necks are in there from our last poultry harvest too.  It holds around 3 gallons of water and is packed as tight as it can be.  It should yield around 10-12 quarts of extremely tasty broth that makes store broth taste like salt water!  Not to mention a good broth costs about $4 for each of those quarts.  That means I have turned what most families throw away into about $40 worth of high quality broth, by only adding $3 maybe $4 worth of fresh vegetables, and you don’t even have to add those!  You can just boil down the bones by themselves and it’s still amazing!

I also had a ham bone & some skin from a big shoulder I purchased and divided up.  They make great soup and so I made Split Pea and Lentil soup.  Before I pressure can the Split Pea soup I will add several bits of ham from the shoulder, but I dont’ add that during cooking, I just use the bone.  The Lentil soup will be served meatless but has a great ham flavor to it due to the cooking with the skin & fat, which is easily removed still in one piece after cooking down.  Lentil Soup is really so great, super nutritious and when you do serve it, you can throw in whatever else you have on hand as far as meat or additional vegetables or add none! It’s VERY flexible!  In fact, you can at this point strain the lentils and serve them chilled in salads, and then use the lovely broth for other meals & soups too!

Lentil Soup using some pork skin from a shoulder roast. The skin is easily removed once the soup is done.

I’ll be sure to post once I have all my beautiful jars full of homemade goodness!  Hope you have a productive day!

Sprouts started in only 3 days, since the weather was perfect for them. Here they are getting a little fall rain shower.

Walking row down the center - Left: Celery, Kohl Rabi & Radish. Right: Carrot, Spinach & Radish

I went out to check on my seedlings and look what I found!  Almost all are up now and looking really good!  Left to Right we have Romaine, Spinach, Cucumber and the remainder are Green Beans which are pushing up through the soil just now, and some Parsley, which I have no idea how it will work out this late in the year.  This batch of parsley will go into pots so I can bring them into the cold frame to overwinter.

Last week however, I got really motivated and went ahead and planted the back garden with seeds!  Kohl Rabi, Radish, Carrots, Celery and more Spinach.  This space will be tented with plastic, and soon we’ll have the structure up for that to happen.  For now, we have at least another month before any kind of bothersome cold sets in.  After that, plastic cover will need to be handy but won’t really be needed until November I’m sure.  That should also be the time we are harvesting most of these if not sooner.  This back area is completely an experiment, we’re not sure what we can grow well in the fall quite yet, AND we ran about 3 weeks late planting, so who knows, but it’s worth trying!

A good load of peppers for Week 2 of September. Only a few tomatoes but dozens of green ones are on the vines right now.