...as I often feel on my birthday. (yep, today!) Here's a view from right out my window recently that reminds me that the "old days" aren't that far removed:
Lamentations 3:22-23
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
Happy First Day of Spring! To celebrate I'm sharing all my favorite spring cleaning tips for the farm! Hop over to Homemaking Organized to read it all! Great tips including:
So get going! And leave a comment there thanking K for hosting us!
I'm a sucker when we go to the feed-store... Mayda knows this and capitalized on it. Meet our Sicilian Buttercup chick and our Black Bantam Frizzle. :)
This week, in Wyatt's kindergarten work, he is studying insects. As you may remember, we are using My Father's World, and are doing a different letter each week. (Check out this craft for "O is for Octopus") This week is the letter "I", and I will admit that when I scheduled this lesson, I figured the actual insects and spiders to study would be sparse... Little did I know!
Last month we found our first Black Widow since moving to the farm. I'd rather not have made this discovery in the name of school science, but since she was here, we swept her into a jar. We have been feeding her other spiders and house flies ever since. She is definitely on top of the arachnid food chain around here. Once this week of studies is over (yes I know she is not an insect, but she eats them!), I'm not actually sure what we will do with her. "S" for was for "S"un, and that was back in "S"eptember... So no waiting around for the "S"pider lesson.
But for our main Insect exhibit, this week we had an outbreak of fruit-flies (thanks to a fruit bowl on the counter and a forgotten banana). It seems once they get going, those things are everywhere. I'd seen a picture somewhere online about how to make a fruit-fly trap, so Tyler helped me and we disposed of the banana and used the peel for the trap/bait.
Basically, you...
put some very ripe smelling fruit in a jar,
make a cone of paper with a very tiny opening at one end,
tape around where the cone meets the jar,
and wait for the fruit-flies!
They can go in, but they can't get out. Amazing. They are pretty much all gone now. We did dump this mess and reset the trap with a few orange segments. It is catching the last few. It's been great for Wyatt to observe live insects anyway! He has had a great time peering into these two jars on the table, watching a spider eat flies, and watching flies eat banana. Strange things you see in a homeschool house...
This year the county fair wrapped up our first year with our very own homeschool 4-H club. It was a year for learning the ropes and for having fun in the process. It was our second year showing rabbits and chickens, as well as the kids first year in photography. It was also Mayda's first year participating in Clover Kids! Emma received a purple ribbon for showmanship and Tyler took a silver medal. They both got purple ribbons for their photography and took blues for their animal breed classes.
With the help of 4-H curriculum ,we studied several fun subjects: fishing, trees, poultry, rabbitry, photography, and more. Other subjects in the works for our club include: woodworking, electricity, cooking, and heritage studies.
We also attended the county fair out east where Ben's folks live. The kids had a ball riding the rides and enjoying a typical midwestern county fair. It wouldn't be summer without it.
1 package of crushed saltine crackers (my addition)
1 teaspoon pepper
House Seasoning:
1 cup salt
1/4 cup black pepper
1/4 cup garlic powder
Mix ingredients together and store in an airtight container for up to 6 months.
1 (1 to 2 1/2-pound) chicken, cut into pieces
Oil, for frying, preferably peanut oil, but I used Canola with good results
Directions
In a medium size bowl, beat the eggs and mix with the water and enough hot sauce so the egg mixture is orange. In another bowl, combine the flour, crackers, and pepper. Season the chicken with the "house seasoning". Dip the seasoned chicken in the egg, and then coat well in the flour mixture.
Heat the oil to 350 degrees F in a deep pot. Do not fill the pot more than 1/2 full with oil.
Fry the chicken in the oil until brown and crisp. Dark meat takes longer then white meat. It should take dark meat about 13 to 14 minutes, white meat around 8 to 10 minutes. With mine, it was dark on the outside before the inside reached temp (these chickens were thick!) so I put them in the oven and baked them until they finished.
We weighed the chickens at 8 weeks old and they ranged from 6-9 lbs before processing and about 4.5 to 6.5 lbs after. We found a grocery sack and a fish scale worked really well for weighing. The last week of their life the 110 chicks were eating about 75 lbs of feed a day! Not to mention they ate so fast it made them hiccup!
Here are all the posts about this flock (newest to oldest):
So we finally finished processing our Cornish Chicks. We did 80 the first weekend (6 hours) and 30 the second weekend (3 hours). With all of the families who helped with the cost of the chickens also helping with the butchering, it went pretty well. I can't imagine if we hadn't had all this good help. We found a few things really made a big difference. One was getting the water temp exactly right for dipping before plucking, also the mechanical plucker was a wonderful tool, and a good pair of game shears (heavy duty scissors) worked well for removing the tail, legs, wingtips, etc. Brown paper covered all the tables for cleanliness and easy clean up, but wasn't so slippery as plastic would have been. My hubby is so smart, that was his idea!
After everyone left, we de-boned/separated 11 of my birds before freezing, since I knew I would use them more than whole chickens. When you do that many, it goes pretty fast once you get the hang of it. Here's a video... not amazing, but it will give you an idea.
The beans are coming up in the field that our neighbor farms for us.
We haven't gotten to enjoy very much lettuce because of our guinea hens eating so much of it. Thankfully they do not like spinach; we have been eating a bountiful supply of that!
This week I put screens up over the lettuce so that the cucumber plants, which I have planted in between the lettuce beds, will have something to climb on, up, and over.
Also this week we had to replant a lot of my green beans. Several plants did not germinate well this spring and had to be replanted.
I am enjoying watching the tomatoes come up well. Also sprouting is the zucchini, pumpkin, and watermelon. For father's day I gave Ben a ghost pepper plant!
An exciting new addition are the two new barn cats! Both are calico girls, but Tabitha is short haired and Fluffy is long haired.
This morning I ran to a neighboring small town grocery store for a couple of things ... It looks like one of the farmers drove in for morning coffee. :)
The clerk told me that, long ago, they had a regular customer who always came in on his tractor, since he couldn't obtain a driver's license. :) Only in rural Nebraska.
We've had little campfires before, but this spring we finally found the perfect spot for a fire ring. The recent onslaught of wind storms keeps our trees shedding dead wood all over the yard, we have plenty of fuel. We've been in heaven grilling hot dogs and s'mores, almost on a weekly basis. While around the campfire, the kids tell fantastic stories. Wyatt can do a pretty convincing pirate impersonation. :)
~~~
If you can't do s'mores, here's another snack involving chocolate and graham crackers that will knock your socks off. :)
Homemade Chocolate PB Crunch Bars
8 Graham crackers, broken into quarter size "planks"
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
3 tbsp butter, softened
8 oz Chocolate candy coating (I used equal parts chopped up easter bunny -a leftover one from the freezer- and semi-sweet chocolate chips)
Line your baking sheet with wax paper. Mix the powdered sugar, peanut butter, and butter. Spread the peanut butter mixture on half of the graham rectangles and top the other half and then place them in the refrigerator while you melt the chocolate. Melt the chocolate in a microwave-safe bowl using 30 second increments until melted, stirring each time. Once the coating is melted, use a fork to dip each graham sandwich in the coating, submerging it completely. Set them back on the wax paper and place in the freezer until set. They will keep in a container in the fridge for a week, if you don't eat them all immediately.
For a less sweet snack, I did some with a drizzle, instead of dunking. (above)
You can find a similar recipe here. These were inspired by this one, but we simplified it a lot.
At 5 weeks old, the Cornish chicks are pretty well feathered out. I find that they aren't as smart or as quick as the layer type chicks, but they can be trained to do just about anything for food.
Bunched up at night to sleep.
When they arrived in the box all 100 fit into a 2' x 3' square, and the brooder felt enormous at 6'x12'. Soon they outgrew that, so we put the layer chicks (25 of them, plus 15 Cornish chicks a week younger) in the brooder. We gave the Cornish chicks full range of one wing of the barn, and they certainly love the space, except at night when they bunch up.
But the whole purpose of raising our own meat chickens was to get healthier meat. So while I'm thrilled about the non-medicated feed my local grain supplier mixed up for us, we still wanted these little guys to get out, forage, and enjoy fresh air. This week they were finally feathered out enough, and the weather has been plenty warm for them, to enjoy getting out-doors in the daytime.
So Ben built them a sweet pen off the wing of the barn, and we opened the "hog-door" the first morning with the feeders outside and waited for them to run out.
No. Way. This was new and scary! They wouldn't go out, even though in the mornings they are "starving". So we set them out by hand, all 100 of them. That night we set them back in through the door as well.
The second morning they knew the food was waiting outside and as soon as we opened the door, they rushed out. We only had to help about 30 out the door. That night about a third went in on their own, and we had 2/3 to put in by hand.
The third day we were predicted to have record high heat, and we worried that the sun would be too much for them ( I can cool the barn with fans). So we didn't want to put them out... but this time they rushed the barn door as we went in with feed and some escaped. They ran around the corner to their pen, trying to get through the fence to get in! They knew where the food should be. Silly birds.
Today was cooler and they enjoyed going in and out of the barn from the hog door, enjoying the safety of their pen, and the comfort under the chokecherry tree. Now if only I could train them to all go in at night, like the laying hens do. Until then, I shall continue to tuck in my baby birds one at a time, by hand. :)
~~~~~
Here are a couple fun pictures of the new laying hens:
But for our main Insect exhibit, this week we had an outbreak of fruit-flies (thanks to a fruit bowl on the counter and a forgotten banana). It seems once they get going, those things are everywhere. I'd seen a picture somewhere online about how to make a fruit-fly trap, so Tyler helped me and we disposed of the banana and used the peel for the trap/bait.
Line your baking sheet with wax paper. Mix the powdered sugar, peanut butter, and butter. Spread the peanut butter mixture on half of the graham rectangles and top the other half and then place them in the refrigerator while you melt the chocolate. Melt the chocolate in a microwave-safe bowl using 30 second increments until melted, stirring each time. Once the coating is melted, use a fork to dip each graham sandwich in the coating, submerging it completely. Set them back on the wax paper and place in the freezer until set. They will keep in a container in the fridge for a week, if you don't eat them all immediately.
But the whole purpose of raising our own meat chickens was to get healthier meat. So while I'm thrilled about the non-medicated feed my local grain supplier mixed up for us, we still wanted these little guys to get out, forage, and enjoy fresh air. This week they were finally feathered out enough, and the weather has been plenty warm for them, to enjoy getting out-doors in the daytime. 
No. Way. This was new and scary! They wouldn't go out, even though in the mornings they are "starving". So we set them out by hand, all 100 of them. That night we set them back in through the door as well. 
