This week, we lost our speckled sussex hen, Sussie. Suss had not been active, or laying eggs, for a few weeks. We tried several recommended treatments but she continued to lose weight and strength. On Thursday, Alex found her dead in the coop. In life, Sussie was the most skittish and shy of our hens. She had a funky gait and I wonder if she battled a weak heart or other congenital defect. Lil loved [...]

Lots of awesome things happened around the homestead today: we pickled homegrown peperoncini peppers, filled the basil jar with dried basil, made stuffed sausage, put cabbage into a crock for sauerkraut, and brined pork belly. In the evening I convinced Alex to clear out the cornichon cucumber patch because they were past their prime. What happened with the excess cukes? Witness the unscripted madness: 1) Take a bite to confirm it’s bitter. The cuke is [...]

Last month I devoured three accounts from fellow female real-food lovers. I read Kristin Kimball’s The Dirty Life, The Chicken Chronicles by Alice Walker and How to Eat a Small Country by Amy Finley. Each was part inspiration, part ‘what not to do’ and thoroughly enjoyable. Finley’s How to Eat a Small Country is the tale of a family reconvening in a foreign land from the verge of dissolution. Amy, her husband, and two young [...]

The chickens eye the tomatoes, the dogs walk all over the bean bed, and the squirrels want into everything. What’s a space intensive gardener to do? Fence around the beds. Yet every spring I resist. Fencing is ugly and expensive. It is a pain (literally, I have a hole healing in my finger from a wire poke) to install and remove. Grass is hard to cut around the edges. This year I was intentional about [...]

This is the foot of Speckles after Alex cured it for months in salt. He and Lil arranged a rock in the claw and set it aside to air dry into a Halloween decoration. In other words, ours is a very strange family. And, if you ever questioned whether dinosaurs came from birds, I submit this reptilian-like claw as evidence.

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 .

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 [...]