From the Garden

This year was the first time we were able to plant a garden in several years. We were excited to be able to eat what we grew. We planted tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, watermelon, basil, and several different kinds of peppers.

We got a couple of watermelon, cucumbers, and peppers. But our tomato and zucchini plants really took off.

We got more cherry tomatoes than we could count! We also had quite a few of the bigger tomatoes. There is nothing quite like eating tomatoes fresh from the garden. My dad ended up making salsa with the tomatoes and some of the peppers. It was delicious!

Even though there were a lot of tomatoes, we got even more zucchini. It seemed like everyday we went out to check the garden, we had several new zucchini ready to pick. And some of them we didn't see right away. Although, I am not sure how we missed this one.

We had more zucchini than we knew what to do with. We ended up grilling some. We also shredded some. We froze some of the shredded zucchini, and we also made some amazing zucchini bread from my great-grandmother's recipe.

 

Our little garden isn't producing much anymore. But being able to eat fresh food straight from the garden has been wonderful.



 

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!