In the Beginning… Our Very First Day as Chicken Keepers

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to structure this chicken series. I’m hoping that it will be useful to aspiring keepers so I’m working on organizing my posts in a way that will be most helpful.  That said, I’m just going to start at the beginning of our journey…

IMG_1348Here’s day one, March 31, 2007, twenty minutes after our first chickens arrived..

Knowing that we had been thinking about getting chickens, our friend Chip brought these three Silver Laced Wyandottes to us. A friend had ordered a shipment of fifteen or twenty and needed to re-home a few.

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There was some excitement around here that day!

Because they were a bit of a surprise and we weren’t really prepared we had a wooden box for them to live in. But fear not, we quickly made a nice warm brooder using an aquarium.

On the kitchen counter of course…

IMG_1360We named them Sunny, Chip and Brady and they all lived for many years. We just lost Chip (the chicken, not our friend) a few months ago.

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We were having fun with our new passion!. I remember the kids spending a lot of time up on that chair talking to the girls.

But we had so so much to learn, and we did, one step at a time..

You can too!

Enjoy Everything!

Michele

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Family meals inspire cook to do the same for his young twins : Stltoday

I love this post by Pat Eby for the St Louis Post Dispatch and thought it would make a great share for today.  In our family the center point is our dinner together, it’s that simple. We come and go at this time of year but I strive for us to eat together as much as possible for all of the reasons that are mentioned.  Enjoy everything!  Michele

Family meals inspire cook to do the same for his young twins : Stltoday.

Potato Day!!!

The moment you’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived!

Yesterday we harvested our pot of potatoes!

We had a few friends visiting after school who helped out.

Here comes the wheelbarrow.

The team lifted up the pot and dumped it in!

Success!!

We found  the pottery and rocks that we’d put in for drainage.

And here they go, a treasure hunt for potatoes…the kids loved this!

We were all quite surprised to find potatoes in there!

Everyone found a few..

Here’s our little harvest. Next summer we’re planning to plant several pots, start toward the bottom third of each pot and gradually add soil as the plants grow. We did a little bit of that but probably not enough.  For this year, we were just excited to see that we grew potatoes!

 After we’d removed potatoes and pottery the girls spent about twenty minutes digging around in the dirt and admiring the amazing bugs that they found. That made my day!

This is what gardening with children is all about!