New Arrivals and All Grown Up...

The chickens are enjoying their outside pen and the garden scraps!  Our garden has produced an enormous amount of zucchini.  The chickens love zucchini!  I have frozen 2c. Ziplocks of zucchini so I can make some delicous zucchini bread during the winter months.  My grandmother's recipe is my favorite.  I will share it with you all soon.  My friend Sylvia says she has a great recipe for zucchini cake.  I can't wait for her to share that with me!  Our chickens in the above picture are getting huge.  We now let them free range for a couple of hours each night.  They love it!!  They actually wait at the door for us to come and let them out.  They know what time we get home or they hear us and they wait to be set free!  We have our eyes out for coyotes though.  Entire flocks can be wiped out.  We love our chickens, so we are keeping a close eye on them.  Below is a picture of our new arrivals.  They are so sweet and funny!  They spook easily and tap, tap, tap around their pen.  We have 51 of our older chickens, which should be laying eggs any day, and we have 22 new ones.  Of the new chicks three of them are turkens.  My son wanted them.  They have the funniest looking necks.  I will try to get closer pics when they are a little bigger and less spooked.  It is so much fun getting chickens in the mail, but I think we are done for now.  I will post pictures soon of them free ranging.  They are so beautiful and fun to watch!  How can you not love chickens?

Home Pics Before and After

This posting is much belated.  Between school starting and working on the farmette, we haven't had much time to post.  I am glad we could finally take a breather and share our progress with you.  Below we have before and after pictures of the house. We have taken out huge bushes and had the house painted a lovely gray with black doors and creamy yellow trim.  I love the results!  We also used Behr deck-over and finished two of the three deck areas.  We still need to do the main entrance to the house.  It took 3 days to do the other two decks.  Plus there are the chickens and garden and life in general.  I am sure you all can relate.  God is good though, and there is not a day that goes by that we are not thankful and grateful for the blessings that we have!

 

 

 

 

 The above and below pictures are of the side of the house, but it is where the main entrance is.  We took out the six bushes on the side of the deck, and the house has been painted with Behr paint from Home Depot.  The gray color which is the base of the house is called Elephant skin.  The doors are painted with a black color called Broadway, and the trim around the windows is Behr Cream Puff.  It is a cream with a yellow tone to it.  The painter was skeptical, but he liked it after he saw it all together. 

 Our front door.  I can't wait to get some mums and pumpkins and deck out the deck!  We have talked about eventually covering this entrance, but it would be a challenge and probably expensive.  So, we will see. 

 Above is the picture of the house before we painted and completed the deck over.  We had already taken out the three large bushes from the front.  I believe in an earlier post I have a picture of the house with those bushes still intact.  They literally blocked the entire deck.  I planted azaleas and I have some perennial daisy plants that have done pretty well. 

 

This is the after picture.  I love, love, love how it turned out.  I will try to take some better pictures with better lighting.  I am not sure this picture does it justice.  This deck is wonderful to sit on in the cool, crisp air and look across the street at the cornfield.  May sound boring to some, but for me, it is paradise!

This is the other side of the house opposite from the entrance.  The deck boards needed staining something horrible.  We decided to use deck-over.  Now, we did do something wrong with our remodel. Live it; learn it!  We used Minwax stain which is actually for interior uses only.  They had that printed nice and small on their packaging.  The stain looks great and is a great contrast to the soft grey deck-over we used, but we don't know how long it will last and what it will look like once it starts to do whatever it is going to do.  I googled it and we are not the only ones who have had this happen.  We will see!  We removed more bushes from this area.  There were two tall bushes on each side of the stairs leading up to the deck.  We hope to have an in -round swimming pool installed in the next couple of years.  We would put it on this side of the house.

 Here is the after picture.  I will repost better pictures soon.  The contrast of the stain to the deck-over is really pretty in person. 

 This is the back of the house.  We had some wood rot that had to be taken care of before they could paint.  We are planning a two to three car garage between the house and the building in the future as well.  All of our lighting fixtures on the outside of the house are white.  I am thinking about spray painting them black to match the doors.  It will be cheaper to spray paint them than to buy new ones.  I think the house really pops now.  The next step is landscaping and of course finishing the rails and steps on the entrance side of the house.  I love that this house is shake shingles and all wood.  The problem with that is upkeep, and it was a difficult house to paint.  The nice thing about having an all wood sided home is the character and charm.  We love our little farmette!

The Outside of the Cottage

 Well, we have been in the cottage farmette for about three months now.  We are taking our time in fixing it up.  We have done a lot with the inside, but we still have a ways to go.  One of our priorities before winter comes is the outside.  The house needed painting badly!  The decks are in bad shape as well.  There are boards that are unscrewed, and, as you can see in the above picture, the boards all need to be stained and sealed.  After the house is painted, we are going to work on the decks.  We found a product at Home Depot that is a thick paint-tinted plastic that will make the decks look sharp.  Picture one is a picture of the side of the house, but it has been turned into the main entrance.  Both sides had very overgrown bushes like what you see at the left of the picture below.  We wrapped chain around them and yanked them out with our SUV.  I will replace with roses and snow ball bushes in the next couple of weeks. 

 We will trim the bushes by the fireplace, but I promised my husband if he took the other bushes out, he could keep these three.  I am not sure what I am going to do about the black plastic under the rocks that was torn up when we pulled out the bushes. 

 This is the front of the house.  I am sure this was once the main entrance but has since been enclosed with a deck.  We pulled the bushes away from the front of the house which was shown in a previous blog post.  I love this little deck.  Our dogs can come out onto it with us, and they are safe.  The colors I have chosen for the house paint are a dark gray, cream trim and black for the doors.  It is going to look great.  I can't wait for it to be completed!!

 This is the side of the house opposite to where the current front door is.  We have a nice little deck that leads to the yard.  We have room for a grill and table and chairs.  The deck is off of the bedroom we use as a Master. 

 This is the back of the house.  What is interesting about this house is that we have a door leading to the outside on every side of the house.  This back part is also very clearly an addition.  We think it was originally a back deck and possibly a one-car garage.  I wish we could find out more about the history of this house.  I have been talking to neighbors, but we still have very little information. 

Those are the before pictures.  The outside paint job should be completed by the end of this week, and I will post after pictures.  We have big plans for this place!  Since this is going to be our last home, I want it to be everything that we want.  We have future plans to add a two-car garage, a swimming pool, a koi pond and courtyard garden, an orchard, a berry garden, and much larger vegetable garden.  Our goal is to become as self-sufficient as possible with few financial obligations.  We are trying to think of ways to make money off of our little farmette.  We have ideas that include a possible pumpkin farm, organic-raised chickens, and on and on.  God has blessed us so richly!  We are very thankful, and we thank you for joining us on this journey. 

The Outside Chicken Pen

After we got the chickens moved into their coop, my dad started working on their outside pen. We wanted them to be able to spend time outside without being eaten by coyotes. So my dad put up posts and wrapped wire around them. He leaned ladders up against the window, inside and outside.  He then opened the window to let the chickens out.

They seem to have gotten the hang of going outside by themselves.

 Going back inside is a different story.

The other night, my mom and I came home from a wedding when we realized the chickens were still outside. My dad and brother weren't home, and it was getting darker rapidly. We don't have a light out there, so we had to get the chickens inside as soon as we got home.

 



We went out to the chicken coop, hoping that most the of the chickens had gone inside by themselves. But they hadn't. There were still about twenty chickens out there.

So there we were, in our fancy dresses and shoes, catching chickens and putting them inside. Thankfully, they were all half-asleep. The catching them was the easy part. However, when we put them inside, they didn't go down the ladder by themselves. They just sat on the window. We had to push them in.

We couldn't see inside the coop, but we kept hearing thump, thump, thump. We were scared that the chickens were falling to their deaths inside the coop. I went inside to make sure that we weren't killing our chickens. And we weren't. Once they got inside, they were able to fly to the ground. It wasn't graceful, by any means, but they were still alive.

It was quite the experience, catching the chickens in our wedding clothes.

Goat Cheese Puff Pastry with Tomato and Basil

If you enjoy goat cheese, tomato, and basil, then you will love this recipe.  My daughter is not a big fan of basil so we leave the basil off a few of them for her.  I have to give credit to Jenny Steffens.  I took a cooking class that she led right before Valentine's Day a few years ago.  She made this delicious treat and cut the puff pastry into the shape of a heart with a cookie cutter.  You can make the puff pastry into whatever design you want for any occassion.  I have been addicted to this recipe ever since she cooked it for us.  Thanks Jenny!!   This is a recipe worth sharing.  It tastes like a million bucks, and it is so easy to make.  It looks beautiful on a plate too!  Although, none of mine last long on a plate. 

Use the ingredients in this first picture. 

 Lay out a sheet of puff pastry and let it sit until it thaws.  Cut it into squares and score the inside with a pizza cutter or sharp knife.  You have to score the inside because it will puff up, and this will make a nice well in the center.

 Brush with olive oil.

 Add goat cheese.

 Add a slice of tomato.

 Cook in a 450 degree oven for 7 - 8 minutes or until golden brown and cooked through.

 Take out of the oven and add fresh basil. 

Enjoy!

Chicken Movers

Years ago, my mom bought this chicken mover thing.

 

I'm sure there's a technical name for this. Other than "chicken mover thing."

Anyway, my mom bought it because she thought it was cool. We lived in a subdivision at the time, so it has just been sitting in our breakfast nook ever since my mom bought it. We never thought we'd actually be using it. But this past weekend, we did.

Our chickens have spent the past five weeks living in our building.

My dad built this pen for them. The giant screen on top is to keep other animals out. And to keep our chickens in. We knew that we couldn't keep the chicks in this pen much longer. They were already trying to fly out when we lifted the screen.

 

So my dad began work on our chicken coop. The frame of the coop had already been built. We just had to fix it up.

 

My dad built a door. Nothing is going to be getting in through this door. I can barely get in it.

 He built roosts and ladders and added a couple windows.

We laid straw down Sunday and got ready to move our chicks in!

 

We were excited about moving the chicks, but we were also a bit concerned about how well our chicken mover thing was going to work. 



My dad and my brother climbed into the chicken pen and started gathering up the chicks.

Once we had several in our chicken mover, we carried it out to the coop and let them go.

 

Our chicken mover thing worked very well for the larger chickens. However, we were a bit worried about putting the smaller chicks in there.

 

My dad put the chicken mover thing into the pen and gathered up one of the smaller chicks. My brother picked up another one, and they put the chicks into the mover. It took the chicks less than five seconds to escape. They were small enough to fit through the rungs of the mover!



We decided to use a blue crate to move the smaller chicks. My dad grabbed the crate and tried to herd the remaining chicks in. Which was rather difficult. The smaller chicks are much faster than the bigger ones.

We finally got all of our chickens moved into their new home. And they seem to be liking it.

 

Lazy Gal's Chocolate Pie

 The real recipe I want to share with you is the Lazy Gal's Pie Crust.  You can use any pie recipe for the filling.  Yesterday, I made chocolate pie.  When that is gone, I will make banana cream pie.  Yum!  Lazy Gal's Pie crust is a recipe that my grandmother Edyth shared with me a long time ago.  Whenever she would have left-over crust, she would put it in the oven with some cinnamon and sugar on it.  That was an extra treat!  My grandmother loved to bake, and we loved to eat what she baked.  Cooking was my grandmother's hobby.  The great thing about this pie crust is that you can make it in the pie plate.  I think that is why it is called Lazy Gal's Pie Crust.  There is no clean up!  This is a no fail recipe. 

First put 1 and 1/2 cups of flour in your pie plate.  Make a basin.  Sprinkle 1 tsp. of salt over the flour. 

 Put 1/4 cup of water in the microwave until it comes to a boil.  Quickly add 1/2 cup of vegetable oil and then pour into the basin.

Mix with a fork until moist.  Then use your hands to cover the pie plate with the crust.  Prick the bottom of the crust with a fork.  Cook in a 350 degree oven for 15 min.  Then add your favorite pie filling.  Leave uncovered until it cools.  Eat it warm or refrigerate.  Enjoy!  The crust is very flaky and light.   The salt adds a nice taste to offset the sweetness of the pie!