Two birdwatchers building a birdhouse… …and two orpington chickens happy to be free from theirs. Added to Five Minutes for Mom Wordless Wednesday and Dagmar’s Momsense WW .

I like a good cooking challenge. When I heard about Saucy Mama’s Fabulous with Five contest for food bloggers, I had to give it a shot. The competition required creating a recipe with a Saucy Mama condiment and only five additional ingredients. Having an abundance of backyard chicken eggs, I devised a simple and healthy breakfast or lunch dish. Each individual serving includes plenty of protein and, thanks to wilted spinach, a good dose of [...]

The talented Catherine of Photo Kitchen came over last week to take photographs for Hounds in the Kitchen Egg Week. Today’s conclusion follows tutorials for blowing out eggs, making natural dyes, baking a dutch baby, and creating eggshell seedling cups. A year and a month after collecting our first pullet egg, we have learned a few things. Today we share our top five facts about backyard eggs. 1) Eggs are laid with a special impermeable [...]

The lovely Catherine of Photo Kitchen came over last week to take photographs for Hounds in the Kitchen Egg Week 2011. Yesterday, I shared how to blow out eggshells. Continue reading for recipes, tips, and even an eggshell planting project. Encouraged by my friend Vanessa Prentice, I made egg dyes from edible materials this year. I was surprised to find that natural dyes are easy to make, completely safe to consume, and don’t stain your [...]

This week has been the essence of spring. Ohio has felt downpours of rain, blustery days so chilly Alex lit the wood stove, and sunshine that made me weak in the knees. Best of all, it is the growing season! In the spirit of Friday Five, here are spring scenes from the homestead this week: 1) Backyard hens soaked to the core during Monday’s rainstorms. It isn’t true that a chickens are so dim that [...]

Our australorp hen is on the cover of this week’s Columbus Alive! Read raising the roost about keeping ‘pets with benefits’ in the city. Learn a little more in the two sidebars, keeping chickens 101 and why to raise chickens. I love sharing about our homestead. Along with an interview for the article, I had the pleasure of watching a professional search for the perfect chicken pictures. First, photographer Jodi Miller came out with writer [...]

Sometimes my inner voice says I’m too preachy about things. It is true that I share a lot more success stories than mistakes. So far, our potato growing has been nothing but missteps and I’m ready to share so we all can learn from them. Here are all the ways I do NOT recommend you grow potatoes. 1) Give potato buckets only a little drainage. Last year we tried growing some seed potatoes in old [...]