I love the bare, crystalline mornings, edged with frost and sharp with ice, when the blue sky is so clear as a bell you want to dive in between the bare branches as the birds do and fly up and up. I got frostbite one morning on the bottoms of my feet from crunching barefoot…
Tag: Chickens
Pumpkin Coconut Curry
It’s that time again…. The time of hauling 5-gallon buckets here or there, full of this or that, tucking in the tender starts, securing seeds in the soil, and wandering the edges of the garden gesturing and muttering to myself… I’m not just communicating with the unseen, this is actually how I plan my garden….
The Game
The chickens and i have this little game. Our kitchen is essentially a screened outdoor space, and it is pleasant in hot weather to leave the doors open for ventilation, especially when the stove is going. And this is when the chickens see how unobtrusively they can tiptoe into the kitchen and gobble cat…
Peaceful Mornings
Being in the countryside, with a lot of empty land around us, you would think that there would be a lot of peace and quiet all the time, especially in the very early mornings as the sun is just rising. But you can’t imagine the awful barnyard noises I was ignoring while taking these pictures!…
Coconut Chicken Curry
It’s been a very cool, wet spring but now the days are longer and hot, and at noon the sun feels too bright and strong. I’ve been waking early again, going out in the cool, misty mornings, enjoying the gentle and almost alpine air to work in, and spending the bright, hot part of the…
Recovering
Last week was rough. On top of all the new babies, Ethan was out of town for work, and we all had a really nasty illness, possibly the dreaded flu that’s been killing everyone. I have no idea really, since I only go to the doctor if I’m actually dying, and obviously i made it…
Pigeon Pea, The Elusive Chicken
A few months ago our neighbor unloaded five defective chickens on us. His old mother had gotten them as a bunch of straight run laying chicks, and they had already unloaded the dozen roosters they had ended up with on us the year before. Now she was going on vacation and the five chickens were getting…
The Little Red Hen
My children got attached to one of the red Freedom Ranger hens from the last batch of meat birds. I’m not sure how it happened, because those chickens all looked almost exactly alike, and they were kept way out in the pasture where no one ever played with them. However it was, at harvest time…
Graduating the Chickies
The pastured meat chickens have been a lot to keep up with so far. They grew faster than we thought they would (doesn’t this always happen?) and it was a wee bit of a struggle to keep up with them. They are so incy-wincy-teeny-tiny when they arrive, you can’t imagine they will be so large…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 