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 ;-)

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 ;-)

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 :-)

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. 

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...

How I kept busy with yarn during the Holidays

I completely forgot that I wanted to post few pictures of my December whereabouts. You know the time, when I was MIA here on my blog? Well, I was creating lots of hand made gifts for friends and family. Here are pictures of some that I didn't forget to photo journal ;-)

Leg warmers for our special neighbor friend!

Boot cuffs for my sister-in-law!

Christmas tree chain, which I fell in love with! <3 p="">

And a men scarf for my husband's cousin, who jokingly asked me for one via Facebook ;-) My first creation for a man.

I was pretty happy with all those things I made, but I won't lie - they were time consuming and that was the reason why I was behind on all my other projects! Holidays turned out great and that all that counts - wait not all, the smile on people's faces when they got my presents were the best ;-)

My One Word for 2013

I know I am a little late with this one but couple weeks ago I found a post on someone's blog about The One Word for 2013. This is how it works - instead of writing down a list of New Year's resolutions and then later get overwhelmed by it, you simply come up with a word that summarizes what you want to accomplish this coming year. I love this idea!

My last year's "unofficial" resolution was to start running again and do something I thought I could never do. At the beginning of the year I had no idea what that might be but I just let it sit and stir and eventually it came to me on it's own. And so in September of 2012, I ran the Chicago Half Marathon. You have no idea how much I went out of my comfort zone.

This year I feel more confident, thanks to my last year's success and I am setting this goal - get organized. Now I am not talking only about organizing my house, although that is a big part of it, but mainly I am talking about organizing my priorities, my mind, my life...

I would like to feel more confident in what I do and I believe the biggest part of succeeding in that is to keep myself on track with everyday life, activities, and just things that are going on around me. Stay on track with my goals, make people around me happy, send friends and family Birthday cards, be present in the moment. Those are the small things that are usually running through my fingers and I miss out on them. 

That is what I want to achieve this year 

Get Organized!

In case you are interested in joining this idea, here is the link to the lovely Melanie from OnlyAbreath.com, who makes these for free! Isn't she so nice?

Stuffed peppers European Style

I haven't posted any recipes lately and since it's winter and therefor the backyard life is quite boring, I am letting you in on a family recipe for these delicious and super easy stuffed peppers.

You will need:

green peppers

1lb of ground beef

1 medium onion, diced

salt

black pepper

sweet pepper

1 egg

breadcrumbs

3 tbsp of oil

1 small can of tomato paste

3 tbsp of all purpose flour

First cut the top of the peppers and clean out the seeds. Then mix together ground beef, onion, salt, pepper, sweet pepper, egg and breadcrumbs.

Fill peppers with the meat mixture. 

Heat up the oil and fry the peppers from all sides. Be careful, they might start cracking so keep an eye on them. I did about 2 minutes on each side.

When you fried them on all sides, add boiling water (I always boil it in a tea kettle while preparing the food). Also mix the tomato paste with water and add to the pot.

Now let it boil until the peppers soften. Then take them out. You might see some meat balls floating around the pot - my kids would not like the boiled peppers so I just made them the inside meat mixture into a meat ball. 

When you take out all peppers, thicken the sauce with the flour. I mix the flour in a magic bullet with cold water and then slowly pour it into the pot while stirring. Put the peppers back into the pot.

Dinner is ready! I serve it with rice but if you know how to make dumplings, those are even more delicious! (That makes me think about the next recipe post ;-)

Is there a competition going on in the coop?

We have had our chickens for a year and a half now and they are actually egg-cellent layers ;-) We have never had lack of eggs even when the girls were molting. 

However, few months ago I started noticing extremely large eggs in the laying boxes. They are also a weird shape but never really double yolked, which I read they might be. 

Well, supposedly there is nothing wrong with any of those overachieving hens and it can happen on occasion. I am only concerned about the pain they must be in when the egg is coming out - ouch! I should check their private parts for any damage or even a stuck egg. That happened to us once before and we had to remove it by hand being careful not to break it while still half way in the chicken. Anyone knows more about this subject?

Snow is finally here

I was a bit disappointed when there was no snow for Christmas this year again. It started falling in the evening and it lasted only for few minutes. It has been falling on and off since then but never too much to be good for a good snowball fight or even sledding. 

This is the view from our our back door. 

And here are the girls on Christmas eve having fun looking around for the last pieces of green grass. They don't like to come out when the snow is on the ground so this was their last walk around the yard.  

So now is the time to start planning for next year - new garden plans, more garden beds, and some fruit trees that we would like to add to our little farm. I would also love to have bees but I might have to wait for that just one more year. First things first... I will keep you updated on my progress and new findings! 

Orange slices as a tree decoration

So this is Christmas my friends! I have been MIA on all my social media websites because just like every year I make a list of way too many handmade gifts that I want to make for friends for Christmas and so just like last year, I spend the last month before the Holidays creating them (and I always finish, even though it sometimes doesn't seem like I will...)

Anyway, I thought I would take a quick break and share a little tutorial for these super cute dry orange ornaments. I make them every year but those from last year are still really well holding up!

First step, you guessed it, is to cut your oranges into circles.

Then lay them on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven at 250 degrees Fahrenheit (120 Celsius for my European friends) for about 3 hours. Come back and turn them over. Leave them in for another 2 hours. If you have to leave them longer. Check if they are dry enough to use. The middle will turn darker and might be a bit damp, almost gooey-like. That is ok, it will finish drying while hanging on your tree.

Take them out and let them cool. Use a cute ribbon or a string to hang them up. They are such a cute addition to any Christmas tree!

Merry Christmas everyone!

all the small things

We are very close to Christmas right now and everything is just turning into a chaos. I wish I could just sit back and reflect and really fully appreciate the small blessings in life. I am sure aware of them but just to truly reflect on them is something I need. There is so little time in my days that are filled with work, teaching the kids, housework, animals, and just stuff. I still don't have all christmas presents bought or made and the date is fast approaching. After this weekend I vow to relax more and experience this Christmas season the way it's meant to be experienced. 

For now, please take a look at some of our decorations we put up with the kids around our home!

This angel was a gift from my mom...

We love to pretend that the silver tinsel is our inside snow ;-)

One of my best decorative pieces is this German Candle mill. (Kids love to play with it while eating)

A little count down help...

and some wooden letters are a must! I love them. 

This is a detail of our tree this year and...

This was our tree last year. I have to admit I am a bigger fan of white lights...