Poor Agnes......

It is with a heavy heart that I tell you that we lost Agnes tonight.  This evening the Hubs went out to feed and water them and as always they ran into the neighbors yard.  We are not 100% sure what happened to her we only know the neighbor came over and told us that she thought one had died.  So the Hubs went over and retrieved her.

We are not sure if she ate some type of pesticide, something covered with pesticide or if she was sick.  Chickens are notorious for hiding illnesses until it is too late.

Although I love my chickens they are just chickens and actually the Hubs and I took it quite well.  The girls don't know yet.  I think Little Bug is going to be devastated, this will be a good lesson for her.

So here is a little tribute to you Agnes, your spunky little attitude will be missed.......

Kindergardens!!

I promised you a little more information on Kindergardens.........If you want to join please head over to The Inadvertent Farmer!

I love Kindergardens, I really just love the premise get your kids involved with gardening and giving back to the community! A garden is such a  simple and fun thing to do with your children.  It really teaches them valuable life lessons on where their food comes from! We have also been given a challenge to give back to our community.  Our extras will go to the Queens Galley here in the Hudson Valley. 1 in 6 Americans struggle with not having enough to eat, that, in my opinion, is 1 too many.  No one, child, adult or senior citizen, should ever have to wonder where their next meal is coming from.  To me it's such a shame that a first world country even has this statistic.

My kids use to think tomatoes only came from the supermarket!  But ours are starting to flower!

We harvested one radish, it was small but tasty, Hopefully we will have some more in the coming days!

Little Bug pick one of the strawberries it was not quite ripe yet but she insisted and gobbled it right up!  Our strawberries are new in our garden this year so they did not produce as much as I thought they would so we had to go to the farm to get a good supply for preserves. I am very glad we have all of these farms around us!  Oh well maybe our strawberries will give us something next year!


Our not quite ripe yet strawberry.  Little Bug ate it anyway......

Mud puddles at the farm!

Strawberries............

Glad we picked enough to make preserves!

I need to figure out how to keep the area cats out of my raised beds, I keep finding little "presents", the hubs solution is electric fence.  Maybe I will get some netting to put over the beds.

The chickens will hopefully start giving us eggs in either July or August.  We really do enjoy the gals and Little Bird really watches over them, she is a great chicken farmer!  For now they run wild all around the yard and get into almost everything!  I am glad they do not get into the raised beds, yet......

The hubs holding Lovely Rita......

Agnes......

Edith and Agnes......

All in all it was a great week for us here!  Lots of stuff is growing away and hopefully by the end of the summer we will have a bounty of goodies to eat and share with our community!

Oh rain, rain, go away, well maybe today was a good day for rain

I had plans today.  Plans to get out and make trellises for my beans and stake up my tomatoes. But my plans were foiled. I thought about dodging rain drops and just doing it but it was cold and crappy out.  I know excuses, excuses......

I did however make homemade liquid laundry soap.  I got the recipe off of Tipnut.com.  http://tipnut.com/10-homemade-laundry-soap-detergent-recipes/ , I used recipe number 1.  It is so much cheaper than buying Tide and I know exactly what is in it, water, lavender castile soap, washing soda and borax. It seriously took me 20 minutes and a 5 gallon bucket with a lid and I was done!  I just used it for the first time on some towels I washed, they appear and smell clean. There is no actual scent but they don't smell like dirty towels! And be warned this soap does not suds up like commercial laundry soap but so far it looks like it does the job!  Also you could add regular white vinegar in lieu of fabric softener and it will be the cheapest load of laundry you have done in a while!  The cost?  Just about $8 for about 2 1/2 gallons of soap.  So that is 320 fl. oz. divided by $8, that's $.40 an ounce.  320 ounces is 40 cups and you use 1/4 cup of detergent per load that's 160 loads of laundry!  You use 2 ounces per load so it cost me $.80 for just the detergent to do laundry!  Sorry you cannot find a deal like that anywhere!! So far, so good and I will keep you updated!

Tomorrow maybe the weather will get better and I will be able to get out and get my gardening done!

Chickens, they may be what's for dinner!

The hubs and I were chatting the other night.  The subject of the chickens came up. Now when we purchased our gals we had every intention of allowing them to lay until they started tapering off then they would become dinner.  This is why we bought Golden Comets, they are good layers and meat birds.   I raised them from day old so I am attached but a chicken is a chicken. Don't get me wrong I love my gals but this is where our food comes from. 

My thought is I don't have a personal relationship with my tomato, zucchini or bean plants so why should I have one with my chickens?  After all this is the reason we got chickens was for eggs and meat, right?  So then my hubs associated killing the chickens with killing the dog.  No way, I won't eat my dog, besides it being illegal in the US, he is a Groenendael (read: hairy) I wouldn't want to shave him....

So now I have this dilemma, am I a heartless coldblooded killer?  What is the difference between the chickens we raise here at home compared to one being raised on a farm?  Is this an issue because we disassociate ourselves with the food we eat? Because the food at the supermarket or farm is already dead it couldn't have been someone's pet? I really don't know. 

I don't expect my hubs to do the deed.  I am either going to learn how to do it myself or try to find someone who will process them for me.  We still have quite a while before we have to worry about this.  Hmmmmm, maybe I am a coldblooded chicken killer?

A photographic journal of sorts.........

So yesterday I did something I haven't done in a really long time.  I went out and took photos of around my property. I love taking pictures of plants. First plants do not move and these photos always come out much better than my people photos! Second, it gives me a kind of visual journal of everything from year to year.

I was glad that it was nap time for Little Bug (boy did she need the nap yesterday!).  I grabbed my camera and with Little Bird in tow we set out on our little backyard adventure to take great pictures of all the plants and animals around the house.  She gave up on taking photos with me after about 5 minutes of me telling her no she could not touch the camera. Her birthday is coming up next month and she loves taking pictures so this gave me a great idea for a useful birthday present.

First place we went was the garden in front of the house.  The roses are beginning to bloom and their perfume-y  fragrance fills the air.  

I realized that something was eating the leaves on the rose bushes.  So I flipped over a few leaves and finally found a little fat yellow worm munching away happily on one of the leaves.  Note to self, need to find something to keep little yellow worm from happily munching.....I am kind of partial to my roses, they were all Mother's Day gifts from the kids.

I have three rhododendron bushes in front of the house too.  While the bushes are almost done blooming for the year the bees still love, love, love this bush, as do the hummingbirds.  While it is in bloom the bush is buzzing (pun intended) with all these big fat bumble bees tirelessly collecting pollen.  They kept working even though I invaded their space.

Then Little Bird and I decided to go to the raised beds.  We planted three varieties of strawberries in our raised beds this spring, Earliglow, Tribute and Northeastern.  But they won't yield anything sizable this year so I was surprised to find some of the buds swollen with either flowers and fruit.  Yum, I can hardly wait until these sweet little red jewels of deliciousness are ready to pick, even if I only get a few!  

We planted Moon and Stars watermelon this year and it is coming in quite nicely.  They just popped out of the dirt about 2 weeks ago so no fruit yet but hopefully during those dog days of August we will be able to enjoy some crisp, cool, refreshing watermelon.

And finally a few chicken pictures.  This blog would not be complete without chicken pictures.  Normally my little gals hide under the deck and just hang out in that general area.  But some of them have become a little bolder in the past few days and have ventured out into the yard. 

How do you track your gardens progress from year to year?  Do you keep a journal or take photos?