It’s been a few weeks since the constant nausea of my first trimester subsided–praise the Lord! Since then, I’ve been trying to catch back up to life and all the things around the house and gardens.
In the past month, we’ve waged war on the “mother-in-law’s revenge”–aka goutweed–in the front gardens, planted fall mums, orchestrated a near-whole house refresh with new carpet and paint in the majority of the house, revived the dahlias in the cut flower garden, celebrated 2 birthdays and an anniversary, finished the football season, and moved the girls into a shared room to free up a room for the nursery.
The big garden also got A TON of care and attention from Clint who built raised and installed garden boxes and used old pallets to build a new compost bin. I’m serious y’all, it’s impressive!
As the cool weather rolls in, we have much more to do–like prep the coop and gardens for winter.
I’ll be posting something about each of our updates and adventures moving forward. In the meantime, what winter prep tips do you have to share with me?!
Last week I made bird feeders out of pine cones, peanut butter and bird seed. I found the recipe on my Kindle in the Nature Cat app. I think it’s in PBS kids app.
It is so easy to make! You can watch the video of me making one or read directions below!
Here’s how:
Step 1: Get a pine cone.
Step 2: Take string or yarn and tie it to the pine cone. Make sure one side is long enough to hang on something, like a branch or hook.
Step 3: Spread peanut butter all over the pine cone. You can get it on the string but just where it’s tied on the pine cone, not the hanging part. Also, don’t get dirty peanut butter in your jar. You don’t want to eat that!
Step 4: Get a bag of bird food and pour it on a tray or plate.
Step 5: Roll the pine cone in the seed. You can also sprinkle it on but I like rolling better. Watch out! It’s messy.
Step 6: Hang you feeder on a hook or branch and watch your birds happily eat!
Now that I graduated kindergarten, I think my Mom will let me do more projects like this!
Last week, fall finally showed its beautiful temps here in central Ohio and I decided to make the most of it. Thursday afternoon I spent a few hours unloading pea gravel between meetings (since it was cool and breezy enough to do so without breaking much of a sweat). On Friday two of my calls … Read More
Last time I shared with y’all I was fresh into redoing the backyard, so excited about the possibilities. It’s been a month and a half and until this weekend the project hadn’t gone any further. Luckily the stars aligned and I had the energy AND the time. I told Sr. that all I wanted for … Read More
Last summer, despite Sr.’s disapproval, I put a pool up. He was against the idea for two reasons 1. He’s not a fan of pools(unless there’s a slide going into the pool, he doesn’t see the point) and thinks they attract mosquitos. 🙄 2. He thought I’d ruin the grass. While it didn’t attack mosquitos, … Read More
I love to being outside. But my Mom takes the whole point of being outside away! She makes me work in in the garden all the time in the summer and spring. It sucks all the fun out of the great weather. I mean, who wants to pull weeds, plant, or shovel dirt and mulch when the weather is nice… or ever?!
She also makes help her with her projects. For example, the chicken coop, fencing the garden, building her a potting bench… that she hasn’t even used yet!
Building the big garden gate with Mom.
Spreading pea gravel for Mom
The only time I don’t mind working in the garden is if I can get money for it. Mom will sometimes bribe me to do work outside for her. But most of the time, if Mom pays me, she makes it hard work. She says she wants to “get her money’s worth”. 😒
And sometimes I do not finish, so I don’t get paid for the whole job. Mom says working for her is good practice for my business with the Yard Crew (more on that later). But Mom has high expectations. She even fired me once! 🙄
Now, don’t get me wrong, I like having a garden and fresh food. I just do not like to WORK in the garden.
The job I hate the most is pulling weeds. Mom has me pull BUCKETS and BUCKETS of weeds from the front garden. We don’t even grow food there.
See the bucket?
I raked all those pine needles for a path.
My Dad can be worse! He doesn’t make me work int he gardens but he gives me gross jobs outside, like picking up dead animals. And RAKING LEAVES is the job hate the most!!!!
This year my Mom say she is going to make the garden bigger. OH JOY!!!!!!! 😑
Grace writes her blog posts using the dictation feature on Google Docs then helps Mom edit the blog after she copies it to the blog.
I love Christmas because I can wrap presents and give people stuff. I like wrapping presents a lot and putting them under the tree for Santa give lots of presents under our big Christmas tree that’s downstairs. I like to wrap presents a lot so I wrapped a bone for my dog Jack. I can’t wait to see his face when he sees the phone I hope he likes it.
I think he knows what it is!
I didn’t wrap anything for Sarah Lee yet but I’m thinking about it. my sister loves my cat Sarah Lee and she’s doing a blog about dogs. Mommy has wrapped a present for me. I can’t wait to see what it is because it’s big! My sister has a present from Mommy too. I didn’t know she wrapped presents yet.
I also love baking cookies! My Mom, sister and I make the BEST gingerbread cookies!
We have elves that come to our house too! Last week the elves got hurt and really sad because they tripped on all of our stuff so we had to clean up. My elf, Heart, has a broken elbow Brian’s elf, Steve, has a broken leg and Ella’s elf, Eggnog, still has something wrong with her eye because I put sprinkles in it. I feel bad about that.
After we cleaned they got better and brought us elf slime, jingle bell necklaces we made, and today… LIPS! Mom said they are wax but we shouldn’t eat them even though they smell good. She’s also not happy they stole her red lipstick.
Oh! And Uncle Josh is here! Lat night we had a sleepover in the basement with him. Mom didn’t sleep over with us but she did make popcorn for us. Josh is staying until Christmas so he can watch us open all our gifts. We play lots of games with Uncle Josh. And read, and cook, and snuggle.
Did you know we have Christmas to celebrate when Jesus was born? I bet he was such a cute baby. He wants us to give love and gifts and be kind to people. All I want for Christmas is love… and a bunkbed and a new sled and a card with money. But what I want most is love and to wish my teacher, Mrs. Gibbs, a Merry Christmas!
Our chickens have not been laying eggs so we had Ava and Vinny’s GiGi come over because she has 11 chickens and they always lay eggs. She came over Sunday before last and said they needed more sun and room to roam. We need to make our coop bigger. She offered to take our hens over the winter until we can make the coop we’ve been dreaming of making. As soon as our Mom told us we said, “When will they leave!?” She said, “Tonight.”
I was feeling okay until they left. Tonight was too soon! I helped get them all in the large crate and load it in the truck.
When we got back inside I sat on the floor and then I went upstairs and said to myself why did the chickens have to leave? When I walk by the empty coop I feel sad. Ava’s GiGi sent us a picture the day they got to their winter home and they looked happy. I’m still sad though.
Mom said we’ll see them in two weeks. They have been gone a week and a half. I miss them. When I see them, I will hug them. then I will say ” Hi chickies!” When I see them again I will be so happy I’ll…cry!!!
This week is the first week of Fall and you can tell. The weather is getting colder here. We went to my sister’s soccer game on Saturday morning and I was FREEZING! To celebrate the official end of summer, here are my top 10 favorite things about this past summer:
On my neighbors birthday we did a hundred foot slip and slide with tons of dish soap! (see video at the bottom of the post)
It’s the phrase of the week… well, that an “Hurry! Get out of the chicken pen, you’ve got a class zoom meeting about to start!”
The hens are went from two to three eggs a day this week and the kids CANNOT get enough! They check the coop several times each morning, which means they find the eggs nice and fresh.
Earlier this week Ella and Ava came running up with an egg yelling, “We got a hot one!” 🤣 And they’ve been saying with every new egg ever since. Grace has caught on as well and ran in during one of my Zoom meetings with a client. 🤦🏻♀️
A few weeks ago, we lost our sweet lap hen, Hazel, to a hawk.
We have 2-3 hawks in our neighborhood (plus a large fox and a few coyotes) that have been making quiet a ruckus this late-summer. I noticed their calls in mid July and heard from the McCrearys, who live two doors down, that one swooped down on their young flock as Molly was trying to usher the hens in the coop.
Despite the McCreary’s close encounter, their distant calls and a few sightings, we weren’t too worried about the hawks as predators since our hens are pretty much full grown. It was the fox that always appeared at dusk,just after the hens went into their coop , and liked to hang out eating groundhogs behind the shed that we saw a a real threat to our free-rangin’ ladies. After all, when the hawks’ squawks neared, the hens always ensured they were under the cover of the brush in the gardens. We knew we couldn’t keep the hens free-ranging for long and would need to build a bigger coop and/or run but it wasn’t at the top of our list. Unfortunately, our delay worked in the hawks’ favor.
On a Monday, I debated letting the ladies our as I was working a number of back to back virtual meetings, as is the norm in back to school season. However, it was going to be a hot day and their adorable coop is just too small for comfort so we decided to let them out for the day. Just before a new customer meeting, Sr. came in from the garage and said, “I think something ate the chickens, there are feathers everywhere!”
With my meeting just moments from starting, I told him to get the kids and try to find the rest of the flock and put them away. I then texted Tarin to let her know what was happening and started my call. Luckily, 5 of the 6 hens were found safe, but terrified, in the ferns at Tarin’s house. Hazel was the only one missing. Sr. wasn’t lying. There were feathers everywhere. Poor hazel seemed to put up a good fight and looked to have almost made it from the treeline, where the trail began, to under the old Chevy truck where the trial abruptly disappeared. We searched the grounds to see if she might have survived but found nothing.
Scene of the crime – please ignore the bald spots in our yard
By the next day, we had decided that it wasn’t in the budget and we didn’t have the time to build a new coop with a run like we have been planning so Plan B would have to be another solution. We found this covered pen and decided it’d be just what we needed for now.
The pen arrived in 2 boxes– chicken wire and aluminum poles. Thanks goodness Sr. had the patience to put the aluminum frame together Thursday or else it wouldn’t have gotten done this weekend. Saturday, we all worked together to cut and attach the chicken wire roof and walls. The kids transferred the hens to the pen and smothered them all in love (they missed wrangling them) while Tarin and I did a deep clean of their coop- which desperately needed it after nearly 2 weeks of 5 hens being cooped up in there 24/7.
After clearing out a few branches and debris from under the pines, we positioned the pen over the coop and set out their food and water. We even found a small board to serve as a nameplate for their new digs.
Now the new problem is keeping the kids, especially the little ones from going in and out of the pen–1. because they’re more likely to leave the pen door open and 2. because the poor hens have no way to escape or hide from those little arms.
There was a deer walking slowly through the woods. There was also a hunter walk slowly through the woods. Finally, the hunter saw the deer. The hunter stepped closer behind the deer. The hunter jumped on the deer’s back. The deer leaped and the hunter fell to the ground. When he got up an angry male deer stood in front of him. The next day the hunter came back. This time the hunter saw a pack of deer. . . he ran away never to be seen again.
THE HALF-ASS HOMESTEAD 