weeding

I have been doing a lot of weeding in various garden beds lately and I collected a wheelbarrow load full. 

I was headed to dump it in a pile back in the woods, when it occured to me that this wood be a great treat for the chickens.

They pecked and rolled and and wallowed (pronounced wallered around here) and scratched and ate for hours and hours.

Slide found their activity to be an entertaining show for a while

....officially the first full day of spring....

I have transplanted nearly all of my seedlings I started a month or so ago into the spring garden.  (The only ones that have not been planted are the asparagus). 

There is lots of straw mixed in this bed because I dumped there whenever I cleaned out the chickarium (aka chicken coup) over the winter.

There was not room for the peas so they will have to go somewhere else.

Strawberries have flowers now and I canot wait for those.  The blackberry bushes are also getting lots of leaves.

Strawberries...and Molly....and a nice green pasture of Triticale that will be cut for silage in a month or so

Today my mom comes to visit for the whole week so I have got to finish cleaning.

Babies

Spring is the time of year for babies.  You have met the baby calf that joined our family this year.  Here are our most recent baby additions.

This is our inexpensive, makeshift brooder (clear sterillite tub, paper towels, heat lamp and an old window screen as a lid.  I use paper towels to line the box for the first week or two because the chicks have not figured out what is food and what isn't and I don't want them eating shavings)

3 chicks we are adding to our small flock.  We had 8 layers, but we lost one on new years eve.  We also have Kudzu the game hen.  We decided to add just a few more chickens this year (mostly because of my desire to have baby animals around this spring).

We ordered 4 chicks, but one of them unfortunately did not make it.

Gold laced wyandotte (Dahlia)

Silver laced wyandotte (Zinnia)

White plymouth rock (Daffodil)

 Yes all the chickens have names and yes theya re all named after flowers (no I don't plan on eating them---we already have:

Rhode Island Red (Poppy)
Jersey Giant (Citralia...no that is not a real flower, but that is another story for another day)
2 Barred Rocks (Azalea and Tulip)
3 Easter egger hybrids (Magnolia, Marigold, Lavendar)
Wheaten game hen (Kudzu...rescue chicken, also another story for another day)

Raining Wednesday

Today it has rained all day, a lot.  My plans to take my plants I started from seed a couple of week ago outside have been hindered by rain twice now.  Over the past weekend it rained 3 and a half inches, though I did manage to plant my strawberry plants Saturday morning before it really started to come down and they look great.  Today was a home day because I have been feeling poorly since the weekend and I have a big test to take on Saturday for grad school so I want to make sure I am well.  I stayed home and took a nap, studied a lot, made some bread in the bread maker and some pizza dough so Myles can make us pizza for supper (yum).  I washed my hands a lot so hopefully I will not contaminate anyone else with my cold.  I also got in a bit of reading and a bit of knitting which was great.  Spring (am I getting ahead of myself by saying it is spring) is very busy, and between school, work, and home (animals, gardening, cooking and cleaning) there has been very little time for reading or knitting which are two of my favorite things to do.  Although I will be sad when school is out for the summer i am looking forward to getting to spend more time on the other things I love to do.

Our new real food diet is going well.  We have enjoyed our meals this week end Myles and my dad have taken to reading a lot of labels curiously, wondering what is in some of the things we still have around the house.  Bad news for the mayonaise we buy (lucky for me we have a few jars in the cabinet so it will be a while before I have to tackle that one).  I am also going to attempt to be less lazy about the milk we drink.  I have been buying milk (yes, spending money on exactly what we make here).  I have been drinking skim milk since I was a kid (high cholesterol) and turning the rich whole milk into fat free-ish skim milk is work, but I guess I need to step it up a notch.  We are enjoying though, knowing that what we are putting in our bodies is real food, not something that just looks like food.

Eating food...

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants"  This is what Michael Pollan says in his In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.  I think we are all guilty of eating stuff that looks like food AND tastes great, but is not good for us at all and is probably not really food.  We are defintely guily of this here at our house.  So this week we started a new eating plan.  We are vowing to not buy any food that has more then 5 ingredients, particularly if those ingredients are unrecognizable.  So today was the first grocery list.  We will continue to eat what we already have in the house even if it does not follow the rule (no need to waste), but we will not buy any other food that breaks the rule with the exception of a splurge item per person.  Myles has to have his peanut butter/cheese crackers to grab on the go for lunch on busy days around the farm after all (I don't know what my splurge item will be yet).  I decided this week to plan our meals like I would every other week, because I was pretty sure most of what we eat does follow these rules.  So the menu for the week is as follows:

(Monday mom is making ham and potato casserole so I did not have to plan for tomorrow)

TUESDAY- Spicy pork tacos (ingredients- boston butt, garlic, onion, cumin, chili powder, salt, pepper, olive oil, coke, limes, corn torillas, cheese, veggies for topping, salsa and sour cream)

WEDNESDAY- BBQ chicken pizza (left-over bbq chicken, pizza crust, BBQ sauce, mozarella)

THURSDAY- blackened chicken salad (chicken, cajun seasoning, oil, salad veggies, ranch)

FRIDAY- garlic lime shrimp pasta (limes, garlic, olive oil, shrimp, salt, pepper, pasta)

So off to the grocery store we went.  I was right, we pretty much do buy stuff that fits the rule, but there were a few food items we did not put in the cart. 

• The coke for the pork (it cooks in the slow cooker, so coke is the liquid we usually add) does not fit the rule, so I will be substituting water and a little sugar.
• Some tortillas would be a no, but we have a tortilla factory in town, so I will have to pick up fresh tortillas on my way home Tuesday (though there are brands at the grocery store that fit the rule)
• The pizza was a problem (my hope for that night was that Myles could make the pizza because I have a lot of studying to do for a big test Saturday).  I planned on picking up a refridgerated pizza dough, but alas too many ingredients and a few unrecongnizable ones at that.  Myles has never made his own pizza dough before, but he has seen me do it and I think he is up to the challenge.  Also the BBQ sauce we have was a gift and has only a few ingredients so it meets the rule.
• The blackened chicken salad ingredients all went in the cart, until we got to the dressing.  I always make ranch from a packet...and the ranch packet had A LOT of ingredients and some really hard to pronounce ones.  So, though I have never made my own ranch dressing before from scratch, the time has come.  We still have some made in the refridgerator (from the packet) left from this weekend so I will use that for our salads this week, but then it will be time to learn to make my own.
• All the pasta ingredients were good to go (will be using the pasta maker to make my noodles).

The only other food we needed was bread.  It was a no go.  I have made bread before, but with the time constraints of our busy lives it was never a regular practice.  Today I made a loaf in the bread machine, I love the bread machine.  It is so easy and fast.

Thus chronicles the beginning of our path to eating real food.  I'm sure we will have to let go of other things we love that we have not thought of yet, but in an effort to eat food that makes us healthier, I believe it will be worth it.