Thursday, February 28, 2013

Treasured Thursday

Kids have been enjoying my Valentine's Day present to them - the Window Markers!!! Clearly the Dog has been amused as well!


At this point we will do anything to get through the last few weeks of cold weather ;-)

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Feeding the chickens

Today was our girls' lucky day! We picked the best looking worms from our bin and brought them to the coop for the girls to try. Kids were super excited. Were the chickens?


See it for yourself...


We were throwing them down one by one and the girls were besides themselves. 


Who will get there first? We need to slowly make more space in our earthworm bin because new babies are being born every day. 


And since we are in the coop, we will pick some eggs.


Sorry girl for interrupting ;-)


Monday, February 25, 2013

Winter on our little backyard farm

I wanted to include some pictures of our small backyard during the winter months when everything is covered with snow allowing only small pieces of garden treasures peek out and leaving the rest to our imagination...

The pond area is left with practically no life. Even the waterfall is turned off at this time of year.


My sage is sadly posing for my picture...




I leave the grass uncut on purpose. I love how it looks when the snow covers it. 


Forgotten garden nick nack...


Looking at the neighbohood


My resting garden beds


Yes, I am desperately waiting for everything to start blooming again :-)


Friday, February 22, 2013

Chickens and snow

Our girls have issues with snow. On other people's blogs I see pictures of their chickens walking around in a foot of snow and mine don't want to have anything to do with that white cold mess outside their coop.

Here they are thinking about coming out and roaming free...


Well, on second thought they decided to stay in... again.


They were just looking at me like I was crazy when I was trying to call them to come to me. Their head tilting was telling me that they didn't quite understand my request.



So they just stayed in and watched everything happen from afar. 

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Introducing: The Red Wigglers

Here is a highlight of our winter farming adventure - our earthworms made it safe and sound to their new home! I really long to expand my little animal collection that I have in my backyard but being a suburban farmer means you are limited to space and neighbors' tolerance. I believe earthworms in a box is a safe addition right now :-)


I have been reading a book that is called Project Based Homeschooling, written by Lori Pickert and I absolutely love it! I love the idea of having the kids pick their project and work on it in their own pace with their own ideas. When I mentioned to them that I wanted to start an earthworm farm to have some treats for our chickens and valuable nutrition to our garden beds, they were on it at once. T did the research with my help and we were good to go. 


When the worms arrived they knew they had to add some newspaper bedding to the peat moss we already put into our plastic bin. What is a better activity than tear a newspaper apart?


When they were finished they wanted to decorate the worms' new home. They wanted to name their worms but I suggested it might be difficult to recognize them among the 998 other worms that all look very much the same...


Here is the final look :-) 
I still had to drill some tiny holes into the box because I had lots of worms gathering by the lid opening and the suggestion was that there is not enough air or it might be too moist inside. 


Before we added the newspaper, we moistened the peat.


Next came the newspaper.


And then some food. And spray some water over it again. you are not suppose to use regular tap water so I used our filtered water.


To be honest, we weren't quite sure what to expect when we open the bag... but we decided to be brave ;-) It wasn't so bad - bunch of worms all in one pile with some wet peat. Actually kind of cool!


The kids loved handling them and digging in the bin to try to find more of the worm bunched up in one spot. And just to think that almost a year ago they were both afraid of them :-)


Final look at the group!


Let's hope they will survive...