Alice Waters and Inspiration

So Farmers in the Dale has been working feverishly to get our Organization launched, we still have much to do but have also accomplished much as well! Today we had a tour of an edible schoolyard in our community and it was truly an amazing experience! Honestly it just took my breath away how amazing it was, the whole concept of children having this type of hands on learning just really made me feel so proud of what that school is accomplishing! I took pics to share of the yard and the kitchen classroom. Alice Waters is one of my all time favorite food heroes! Ever since my mom bought me one of her cookbooks a few years ago, I have been one of her biggest fans! It is such a beautiful cookbook and I began to research her and study her concepts on food and farm to table style cooking. A true hippie at heart this woman is a personal inspiration to me because not only is she a little bit of a hippie herself she's also an amazing Chef and inspiration to all of us who love and have adopted a farm to table type cooking, she's also the owner of "Chez Panisse" and truly the original pioneer of the entire farm to table movement started back in the 60's I believe (?) and have I also mentioned that she is the one that started the original concept of an edible schoolyard and curriculum design for the schoolyard gardens!?! This woman's vision of feeding the world and her local community and exposing the rest of us to this amazing concept is truly fascinating to me! I just LOVE her!!! Her cookbooks are beyond BEAUTIFUL too!

So here we are walking up to the building and being introduced to the amazing people that are running this wonderful garden and going to give us a tour and there it is, Alice Water's philosophy on a beautifully painted plaque, I almost died and went to heaven right then! I had no idea that they had based their edible schoolyard after her own curriculum and concepts. I knew right then that this was going to be an amazing and unique experience. Thanks to Grimmway farms for donating to and sponsoring this program, the children that attend this particular school are learning how to grow crops, how to raise and care for hens, how to maintain this massive garden space and how to cook straight out of the garden in the most beautiful kitchen classroom I have EVER laid eyes on. Truly I want a kitchen like it all for myself! I'm not even kidding! The idea that kids from Kindergaten up to 6th grade being exposed to this type of learning is one of the better things I have seen a public school do. The garden works closely with the teachers to help create a very hands on learning experience for the kids while also incorporating other various learning skills like math and science.

As you know I am a HUGE believer that food education could not only change the world but is really important for our future generations to learn! I teach my kids how to cook even now at the ages of 3 and 6. Edward can cook eggs by himself (with supervision of course because he's still 3 and there's still fire involved!) Kaitlyn just made pumpkin bread the other day with very little supervision. Food is important! Teaching our kids about where food comes from is just as important as learning how to cook and feed themselves. Let's face it, everybody eats and cooking is becoming a rare art that needs to be brought back in a big way! We have our garden and my kids are very open to eating and trying things picked straight out of that ground! It's more fun when they get to pick it themselves and I find that our garden time opens the door to lots of questions being asked and lots of opportunities to teach and learn about the food we are growing so an edible schoolyard is totally up my alley!
Our Farmers in the Dale is about a community of people that are all connecting together, families, kids that are wanting to be involved in making this movement something unique and special, a learning opportunity for all and a community of all ages that are wanting and willing to make a big difference in our own community.

We are hoping to launch Farmers in the Dale sometime in January, you can check us out right now on facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/Yourfarmers/?fref=ts

Or on Instagram under : Farm4others

we will hopefully have a website up as well closer to our launch to help our volunteer families and our community to connect with us.

The garden was unbelievable! Such a huge area with so many various types of fruits and veggies growing. They had a hen run and 17 hens! They had an outdoor pizza oven and a tool shed where the kids can access various tools to help them in the garden areas. They also had an outdoor washing station where they clean veggies and fruit before taking them into the kitchen classroom to cook. 

The kitchen classroom was my favorite part of the tour. I was so in awe of this space where kids learn how to cook and learn about food.

They had several different areas where the kids could gather and use various cooking tools based on skill.

The art around the classroom was adorable! They even had a bench with pillows that had fruits and veggies on them.

Every child has an apron to use and there are different types of stations for various types of uses.

They had so many kitchen gadgets and tools for cooking and chopping and everything! They even press their own olive oil from the trees growing around the schoolyard and use the oil for cooking!

They take this table outside so the kids have another little station to work on and learn using a board for information on the various plants, veggies or fruit they are learning about that day. 

And here is Alice Waters Philosophy <3 This is basic and something we all should learn, adopt and do for ourselves! 

So many of us know what is bad for us to eat, we all know unhealthy habits but not as many of us know what is GOOD or how to tip that scale to where we are putting more of the good into our food choices and our eating habits. Learning is one of the greatest gifts we are given and we are never too old to learn. The concept os growing food for our families out of garden spaces in our own yards isn't something that is new but not enough people know how to do that. There is such a huge difference in the taste and quality in food that we grow ourselves over food that is bought in a store and not enough of us are exposed to that! With programs like this we are teaching our kids important life skills that are going to make a huge difference in their lives, in their families lives and even in their communities! 

I'm feeling so inspired right now....and I hope you are too! 

IT'S OFFICIAL!!!!!!!

I have some very exciting news that I am wanting to share with you all.......


My friend Sarah and I are starting a non-profit organization called non other than "Farmers in the dale". Our vision for this organization is to have families and individuals host backyard gardens or small farms and then donate the harvests of food to our local community of impoverished families that can't afford or do not have access to fresh produce. We will be hosting a free farm stand weekly all year round in various areas of our town especially those in food deserts who have to travel distance to get access to fresh produce.

In Kern county we have 3 food deserts! I didn't realize that we had any and having 3 really surprised me! Some of you might not know what a food desert actually is? A food desert is defined as "urban or rural areas where residents do not have access to healthy affordable foods. These areas have limited access to supermarkets and in some cases are saturated in unhealthy food options like fast food restaurants or convenience stores that do not offer healthy food or fresh food options. Food deserts affect a large portion of the American public."

Arvin, Lamont and weedpatch are the 3 food deserts that we have here in Kern County and though these areas are often considered "Agricultural" areas, the residents that live in these areas have no or limited access to stores that carry fresh produce or are unable to afford the produce that is grown there. So our "Farmers in the dale" are going to try and reach these rural areas as well as other areas in our town where families relying heavily on public assistance programs can get fresh, organic produce to feed their families for free. A lot of people don't realize that these public assistance programs limit greatly the accessibility or ability to buy fresh produce based on the small amounts of funding they are given. if you only have $3 to spend a day it's often more practical and logical to spend that limited amount on cheap, boxed, highly preserved convenience foods then to spend $3 on a bag of grapes.

When you are hungry your body goes into a survival mode that triggers the need for as many calories as it can possibly get access to and processed foods hold greater caloric value over fresh produce, though the produce is ultimately better for your body nutritionally, when you are hungry and your body is trying to survive, it is looking for greater calories. The problem with not getting enough fresh produce and healthy food into your system is the health problems it creates. Kids who eat nothing but processed foods that are filled with sugar or broken down into sugar in the bodily system have very negative affects on their growing and developing bodies and brains. So many children these days go to school hungry or loaded down with sugary breakfasts, it is having negative affects on the abilities to focus on learning. Imagine sitting in a desk with your tummy growling and you're so hungry you feel physically sick and can't concentrate on anything the teacher is teaching because your thoughts are on the time, when will lunch time be here? When can I make this pain go away? or for the child that had sugary cereal and cheap processed food for breakfast is fidgeting in his or her seat because the sugar gave him negative energy that needs to be run out at recess, he can't focus on what the teacher is saying because any minute now the bell is going to ring and he's bursting with the sugar high the processed food has given to him. After awhile his body crashes because the sugar energy has been run off but it also brought down his blood sugar levels to a very negative level. Now he can't concentrate because he feels physically bad, shaky, weak.

My best friend is a Kindergarten teacher, she teaches in an area where the families are poor. In her school they have a garden, she teaches a lot on where food comes from and encourages kids to get interested in agriculture and farming because no matter how the world progresses, FOOD is a basic human need. A lot of her kids are getting access to what real produce looks like straight on the vine for the first time in their lives! So many of her students have never tasted carrots or seen what a radish looks like in person. Los Angeles and the surrounding areas have a lot of food deserts and though you can occasionally find a small farm here and there in an area that is mostly city, there's a great need for fresh food and healthy produce there and I'm sure if you research your own areas of town or the towns surrounding yours, you can find a need too.


So here we are, organizing our organization, getting things ready to launch, recruiting volunteers that are willing to host gardens or small backyard farms or donate produce from their already established gardens and farms, getting our tax ID and all the other legal legitimate things that go into starting a non-profit, creating an official website, launching social media pages to help connect us to the families in need and the families that are wanting to help....I'm amazed at how much work goes into these types of things but I know it's all worth it! I'm hoping to encourage other people in other areas beyond our county of Kern to start their own version of "Farmers in the Dale" and to help the food deserts that surround their towns.

Beyond the free farm stand that we will be hosting weekly, we are also hoping to not just provide free fresh produce but to also help the families in need start their own backyard gardens to grow fresh food and to learn how to cook basic dishes using the food they are getting from our farm stand. We have such a vision for this organization and our excitement grows and grows as we get closer to the action of launching everything that will make us officially an organization. The support we are getting from friends and family helps fuel our excitement and also humbles us to know that we have such an amazing group behind us that are willing to help how they can and are offering different services and ways to help us make this a possibility. We want to create something that is going to reach so many in need and we need all the love and support we can get from the people we have in this wonderful community that we live in. As we get things going we will be informing everyone on all our social sites and I of course will be blogging about this beautiful adventure we are embarking on! Please check back often to see what we are doing :-) See you all soon!!!

Creating Comfort

My husband asked me this morning "How did you sleep last night honey?" I slept like a rock....we were both falling asleep on the couch last night after a long day of working in the backyard that started somewhere around 7:30 and didn't end until after 5:45 last night. My husband decided he wanted to redesign our back patio so we bought some new lights for our patio and an outdoor fan and found a great deal on a wicker patio furniture set plus a wicker love seat and some sturdy outdoor pillows. He got started right away with the lighting and fan installation because he knew it would probably take awhile. We bought an adorable house in a fairly quiet neighborhood that was built in the early 60's and it has been so much fun making it our home. Sure we could have gone the route of a newer more modern home but my husband has very anti-cookie cutter feelings when it comes to houses in a neighborhood and though our house is from a track of 4 or 5 different variations, every house is uniquely painted with uniquely matching rocks or stone accenting. We didn't want an HOA for the obvious reasons that my country heart would want a huge garden and some sort of farm type animals residing in the backyard, I don't want anyone telling me I can't have fresh eggs from a few squawking chickens in my own backyard. Fast forward 4 years and here we are finally getting to our backyard and making it a spot that we all can enjoy. I love my backyard, I have this awesome 50 ft raised flower bed with a cinder block wall that holds it all up, plenty of space still for the kids and dog to run around and behind the bedroom section is the other raised flower bed that Derek just built for me. Our patio needed the work we put into it yesterday, the chairs are comfortable and we enjoyed some quiet time sitting in the evening and watching the chicks settle on their roosting poles while the kids ran around playing in the grass with the dog, freshly transplanted herbs in new pots all lined up on the cinder block wall below my cherry tree and the setting sun...it was a perfect evening.

Last weekend we took a trip to the beach and along the way home I stopped and took a picture of what I call "Heaven"....I love a big green lush field of produce under misting water spouts and the sun setting, it was gorgeous and I captured a great picture of it. We all have places that we feel comfort in, places that give us the cozies and the season of fall especially gives me that extra bit of cozy feeling when I can sit somewhere pretty, enjoying a view or now my own backyard and sip a hot cup of tea and curl up with a good book or hold hands with my husband while we casually chat about stuff and laugh about things. It's nice to create a comfy space for yourself to enjoy and important to bring beauty into your life like that. I imagine places out in the country that have those amazing wrap around porches and the porch swing or a rocking chair, how comfy to have a space that you can be outside in and make you want to be outside to enjoy it.

Here's my little bit of heaven to share with you guys....doesn't it fill your heart with Happiness? it does mine and maybe I'm strange in that way that green fields of food make me feel happy.

new wicker furniture for our patio....

The end result turned out lovely. I love this new space to enjoy with my family. 

My little man watering the herbs out front for me. They all got transplanted and placed in the backyard. Both my kids love to help me in the garden and I am very passionate about teaching children where food comes from and how to grow it, we need future farmers, we need kids and families that care about growing food. 

It wouldn't be fall without beautiful sunflowers everywhere and here is one from my front garden. I love the colors I got from these sunflowers, they're all dark red and bright orange, absolutely beautiful! 

Finally enjoying our new space, you can see our chicken coop in the background and the cinder block wall of our raised flowerbed. Any day now our little chicks will start laying small eggs for us to collect and as they grow and mature the eggs will get larger. I can't believe they're already big enough to start laying! 

So whether you have a small backyard patio space or a corner in your house, find a space that you can create some comfort in and start enjoying that space every day :-) 

Raised garden

I have the best husband, any time I have some sort of crazy project I want done or crazy idea, he does whatever he can to help me make it happen! My chicken  coop was built on my original raised flower bed and with the intention of having plenty of room for chickens and veggies we built it pretty large....but my chickens love the veggies I plant inside there so it has been quite a hassle trying to grow veggies and keep the chickens from eating the plants before harvest time! So I wanted a raised bed for a vegetable garden in my back yard and that was the project we tackled today....

              It takes a lot of soil to fill in a 12X4 space

Got the location mapped out and the supplies ready. I'm so thankful my Husband is handy, he built me the nicest raised bed! 

Of course he had little helpers helping him too! 

He attached a weed proof cloth to the bottom so the remaining grass doesn't cause problems later. 

The kids helped us fill in all the gaps with organic garden soil. 

He placed PVC pipe and fixed them to the sides so we can slide some rebar down into them and put up the bird proof netting. It's ready for planting......Thank you honey for helping me build this project. 

Kara, Kara quite contrary, how does your garden grow???

I get asked a lot of questions about growing a garden or just growing plants in general so I figured I would let you in on some of my gardening techniques. Besides growing our own garden at home growing up, I also worked for a Nursery and spent a lot of time listening, studying, and talking to our Horticulturalists. I learned a lot and ate up every tidbit of free info they were willing to divulge. We would have people from all walks of life bringing in plant samples and dirt to show to our guys and figure out what was going wrong and how to fix it and make it even better!

I have a pretty laid back old fashioned approach to growing my garden, it's simple and easy and it works! When you grow your own food, you're always needing to think about what's next a season ahead of time. I start my spring garden in the winter and my summer garden in the spring. Now it's time to start planning for my winter garden and though it's still a long ways off (especially for those of us that typically experience warmer weather well into November) but seedlings need time to grow and a lot of patience and love. I like to grow my garden mostly from seed so that I can insure first of all that all my plants are Organic and secondly that they're from a sustainable source (I love the sustainable seed company though I do order from other companies as well). When I'm really on top of my game for that season I'm using my own seeds that I've saved from previously grown plants... but that doesn't always happen. I'm actually trying to get better at seed saving.

A healthy garden needs a healthy home so the first thing you need to do is prepare your soil for planting. Now not all soil is created equal and I have been fortunate enough that my soil started out  healthy and needed next to nothing to get started but if you have doubts as to what type of soil you have or if it's healthy enough to plant, take a little sample into your local nursery....For the love of your garden please DO NOT take your sample into Lowes garden center or Home Depot or any other such establishment and here's why, those folks have hourly employees that have very little to no knowledge at all on what it really takes to grow a garden. You might be getting Todd the paint department boy who is covering Jackie the garden center girl for her lunch break and just because Jackie works in the garden center doesn't automatically qualify her as a seasoned and trained horticulturalist so it's best to take your dirt and plant issues to someone who knows a little more about what's going on in the world of things that grow.

Now that that has been cleared up you're ready to start preparing your dirt given that your dirt sample came back clean of disease or other issues (yes dirt can have disease, look at the issues industrial farming is facing with over growing, planting the same things over and over again and contaminating the dirt with chemicals, that poor dirt has no chance of being healthy to grow healthy crops...no wonder GMO is becoming such a big deal bc they need plants that can withstand the damage that has been done to the dirt that makes growing healthy plants an actual possibility) One sure sign that you have healthy dirt is by digging up a section and looking for worms, if you have some healthy crawlers underneath your dirt and you have a lot of them, you should be sitting pretty. Worms thrive best in good soil and they also help to make your soil good. If you find yourself wanting to speed up the process of making your dirt extra healthy you can always purchase yourself some worms and then set them free to do their thing.

Alright let's talk some crap here....literally....Dirt loves Poo! Chicken poo is by far the best hence why I have backyard chickens! Rabbit poo is probably the next best poo you can sprinkle into your dirt. You can buy bags of poo for your garden but be warned that too much can burn your soil and cause plant issues so you'll want to mix it into an organic planting soil 1 part poo to 3 parts soil. One of the best ways to get nutrients into your dirt is thru a compost pile that's made up of your own home scraps, I'm talking egg shells, coffee grounds, veggie scraps, veggie and fruit peels, grass clippings from mowing the lawn, etc (basically anything that has been grown in the ground can be turned into compost to be put back into ground, circle of life-plant style!) I'm still in the process of making a compost area for my garden. If you're interested in doing that for yourself but don't know quite what to do, it's simple, you basically make yourself a pile in a corner of the yard or in a composting bin where you can leave the stuff to rot. It's very low maintenance, the occasional turn with a pitch fork or shovel to allow the underneath layers to soak up some sun and weather and help it rot even more. When it looks like dirt, it's ready to go into the garden! Simple!

Let's talk weather....Mother Nature is a smart girl and she knows that a good dose of weather helps dirt along too. While you're waiting for summer to come to an end, it's a perfect time to let that beautiful sunshine work hard on your dirt and put the nutrients into it that it will need for those winter months when sunshine vitamins are needed. Churning up your garden spot and turning your dirt over every once in awhile is a good idea to do. If you have weeds in that area this is a good time to get some natural weed killer by placing a tarp or weed cloth over the area and let the sun bake it to death. I don't use chemicals in my garden even though my husband has begged me to shoot those darn weeds with some round up. Round up lingers in dirt for 7 years and yet you still have to use more each year to fight the weeds....it's best to avoid the toxins and just burn the weeds under some weed cloth. Weed maintenance is pretty easy once your garden is in. Just like the summer sun is good for your winter garden, the cold wet winter weather is also good for your spring/summer garden! Let the weather work for you whatever it is and know that Mother Nature is doing her part to help your garden grow as well.

Now let's talk about the plants...even though I grow a garden year after year, I never grow in the same spot....My garden still stays in the same area of my yard but I move locations of where I plant things the next time I plant them. Root systems are intricate much like our bodily system, we need variety to survive and be healthy and so do plants. If you have one spot where you always grow your tomatoes, you risk losing nutrients from having no variety there. Does that make sense? It doesn't mean you can only plant tomatoes in that one spot once and that's it, I give my soil an every other season kind of trade off...where I planted tomatoes this summer, I will plant bell peppers next summer but then I'll switch back to tomatoes in that spot again the following summer (see what I mean) Every plant variety though made similar systematically, brings it's own special thing to the dirt it gets planted into and it leaves traces of it when it's pulled out. Soil systems are a whole different world of their own and much of the nutrients that we ourselves ingest from eating our homegrown goodness comes from the health and nutrients of that dirt system that grows our edibles. This doesn't apply to root systems for fruit trees, though they do have a life expectancy and shouldn't be grown past a certain amount of years. Plants don't need too much of your attention but it's good to pay them a visit every day or so to make sure they're doing good, make sure they're getting enough water or not too much water and to make sure the pests aren't enjoying more of your garden goodies than you are. Chickens by the way are excellent pest control!

A good garden system in my opinion is one that has all aspects of farming life working together for the goodness of what your body needs. (Animals to make the soil healthy, chickens to keep the pests at bay, bees to pollinate the plants, worms to churn up the soil...all working together and thriving and doing their own thing that helps bring good health to your garden.)

Hopefully you've found this post useful and helpful and informational. I'm sorry it was so long but there's a lot to cover when it comes to growing a garden. Once you have the healthy dirt portion down, everything else is easy! Good luck with your gardens and comment below any questions you have that I might be able to answer directly :-)

Chicken enemy #1

While sitting at my computer desk this morning I hear a strange sound....a familiar sound......a destructive sound....so I got up and went outside to investigate where I discovered one of the killers next door had found himself sectioned off in a different part of his yard and he was chewing thru the fence, trying to break into my side of the yard! Ugggghhhh not again! I smacked his protruding nose as he stuck thru the missing slot and quickly found something to block the hole with but this dog is a professional board chewer and a little block isn't going to keep him from chewing further and eventually breaking into my yard. In my haste to find a way to block him I decided to string up some chicken wire but I needed a staple gun, thankfully my Grandparents live down the way from us and They were able to loan me the use of their heavy duty staple gun and also help me string up the wire to block the dog. 

Fortunately chicken wire works in a pinch but unfortunately it isn't a very strong wire and though it's designed to keep chickens in their pen, it isn't really designed to keep predators out. Luckily for me though my parents will be helping me string up some chain link this afternoon. Clearly the owners of these destructive puppies aren't taking their destruction seriously enough and it's up to us to protect our side of the fence. 

This puppy ate that board within a 10 minute period of time, breaking into my yard is obviously easy for him to do and my chickens are at risk of getting attacked! I can't handle another chicken massacre, it would break my heart! As a backyard farmer, work is never done! Even with the small brood we have there's always something going on that needs to be improved or taken care of or worked on. I'd like to trim back my grape vines and completely rebuild my coop when the weather cools for fall. I feel my hens need to have a sturdier pen that won't just keep them in but will be strong enough to withstand an outside attack. 

I'd also like to redesign it for my future garden.....I need more space to plant and though my chickens are prey to other animals, my little tender winter plants are prey to some hungry foraging chickens that love anything green and growing! Lol 

There's still some time before my plants will be ready to transplant into my garden and it's nice days like today that make me want to work in my yard...we never have 70 degree weather in August!!!! 

Being simple.....

Almost an entire year ago now I hurt my back pretty bad...I'm sure it had been a long time coming from that initial accident that has put me on the mend since September, growing up raising farm animals and wrestling sheep doesn't exactly save your body from the occasional ache and pain or wear and tear. Raising animals can be very physically taxing on a body, cowboys and cowgirls are tough folks! I raised sheep and pigs and goats for years, I raked and shoveled pens, lifted bails of hay and straw into the back of our car and then hauled them into our barn, Loaded and unloaded bags of grain, dragged sheep up roads for their "evening walks" (sheep weight rough 100+ lbs sometimes 150lbs) and flipped them on their backs to sheer their bellies (which often times required me physically lifting them off their hooves when they wouldn't cooperate) top that with 15 years of being in Ballet and forcing my body into unnatural poses and bends that put strain on my skeleton and then I carried two very long rather hefty babies in my belly, i've got a few very weak links in my chain making me more susceptible to un-alignment and back/knee pain. I've always been physically active my whole life, we would spend all the time we could outdoors. I love to hike, bike. fish, swim, explore, run and play with my kids outside too.

Last night I felt pretty great, my back is finally feeling good again and I've been trying to get back into yoga. I read where handstands are good for lower back pain and releasing the pressure that we carry in our back so I decided to try one (outside of course in my backyard) and wouldn't you know I would injure myself....not in the way I was imaging that I might as I flipped my legs over my head and found my balance but when I came back down from successfully hardstanding, I landed my right knee very hard on top of my curious Dog's head! She had come over unbeknownst to myself to see what I was doing and sniff me and I came down pretty hard and fast.....She yelped and ran to her bed and my husband ran and got me some frozen grapes to lay on the injured spot. Needless to say we both left hurting and my poor dog was worried about me while I was laying in the grass with a grape ice pack on my leg. My knee is still swollen today and I have a gnarly bruise, I can't even touch the lump that is swollen but I don't think anything is broken....just another injury to add the the many on my list of growing up and doing physical things.

I try to live a simple life....I try to quiet things down as much as I can, I try to let life flow how it's going to flow and not fight it. A knee injury that has me down for a few days means a few days of much needed rest and I try not to stress myself out with over doing the "To Do" list. I homeschool my kids which sets us up for a pretty relaxed day at home, we don't rush through our mornings to make it on time for a bell but rather wake up, enjoy breakfast together at our leisure and head into our first part of schooling for the day. I've found that things go better when I let them lead which means sometimes we start out reading and other times they're more focused and want to get down to math or science first thing, other times they just woke up with too much good energy that has to get out so we play in the backyard for a bit before we get started..... Living simply shouldn't be complicated and I try to keep out what makes it complicated to me, when the pressure builds up too much in my simple life and I am feeling stressed by too many things, I take a step back, reevaluate/reprioritize and get back to the basics. Sometimes that includes separating myself from social media or being a bit of a recluse, not for too long but long enough to just feel the quiet in my life and let go of some of that pressure that has built up in the burdens of the outside world and the noise that I feel comes from society and the world around us. No one said you couldn't reshape your life to how you like it or that you can't start over however many times you need to make it feel right to you and that's what I do. I do it whenever I need to.

This week i've spent more time outside, the mornings and evenings have been cooler and I was actually able to get my seeds into pods and started for a winter garden. My husband cleaned our backyard up a lot this weekend, moved boards that were blocking the area of the existing garden and chicken coop where the grape vine is growing, he put down some weed control mesh that kills off weeds and makes weeding virtually unneeded (love that!) and every night we have enjoyed some time spent watching our hens (big and little) enjoy life in the coop. The babies are still exploring a lot and it's funny to see them fly on top of the hutch or get a little lost in the corn and sunflowers that are growing in the coop.

This special time in the evening has become just what I need to slow things down and enjoy time more and be present in the moment happening right then. My kids are playing in the background, my chickens are being cute and funny, my dog loyally sitting by my side and my husband puttering around the yard and coop, figuring how to improve things or moving stuff around or even pausing and enjoying everything for himself.....it really is one of my favorite things right now to just sit there in that moment and enjoy what is simple, what is happy and beautiful in our own backyard.

Teenagers......they're nothing but trouble!

Tonight we've decided that the kids are big enough now to let them have free range to the larger coop so we removed the cage portion of their little home and have let them roam free for the evening.......This will be their first night in the big open coop and in typical teenage fashion, they're staying up late! The older ladies have already settled into their comfy roosting spots but the kids are still pecking around at the ants and other creepy crawlers that were hiding under a layer of straw (which got removed from the pen tonight after the small rainfall this afternoon made it smell damp and gross)......Never mind that I'll be up all night worrying like true mother Hen how my babies are doing and if they're safe. More than likely I'll be hunting amongst the sunflowers for baby chicks that stayed up way too late and couldn't find their way back to their little hutch.


The ladies are watching from the roost and I can imagine "rolling their eyes" at the sight of these 4 little crazy birds with a new sense of freedom and curiosity of their newer surroundings.

At least now that the hutch is free maybe it will encourage the older gals to start laying eggs again!?! One can hope. 

For being in the "ugly" teenage stage of their lives, I think our birds are especially cute. It's funny watching them fly about the coop or even run through the sunflowers (which probably feel like a forrest to a little bird) Goldie was getting a little more curious about the open door to the backyard. I kept trying to catch her but they're so fast now! I love these little sweeties and it's so fun that they each have their own little character! Even our big girls are showing more of their personalities now. 

It makes my heart so glad to see my little brood growing up healthy and happy! It was so heartbreaking losing our first 3 but time is healing that wound. I sat out in the backyard this evening and watched all of them enjoying their time out, watching them interact with each other and even seeing a few late evening worker bees buzz busily amongst my sunflowers while my two kids played together in the yard.....my backyard is starting to feel peaceful again. I can't wait to start getting my winter garden put in and enjoy more evenings on my back porch. For the first time in awhile I had to make my kids come in and take their baths! LOL I love when my kids want to be outside and are truly enjoying barefoot adventures in the grass, pretending to be pirates or playing in their playhouse. 

Now if I could get my teenagers to go inside their hutch and go to sleep! 

You are what you eat....

A few weeks ago I ordered a fabulous book from amazon called "Made from scratch, Discovering the pleasures of a handmade life" by Jenna Woginrich and wouldn't you know her first chapter is on raising Chickens! This is a gal after my own heart and even as someone who grew up raising farmyard animals, I still learn so much as my experience with them goes on. I don't know why it never occurred to me that even if you are raising your own backyard flock, if they don't eat an organic diet, it doesn't mean they're giving you organic eggs just because they're in your backyard and dining off the grasses of the lawn or the greens in your garden (like mine)....It's worth the little extra money to buy organic feed for the animals you're raising, I'll leave it up to you to extend that to family pets, I'm not about to go out and change the food of my dog and cats but then again I'm not consuming anything from those animals either.... Eggs are something that should be organic and free range and fresh and healthy from a healthy hen who has access to greens and grass and dirt and all the other benefitting factors of a natural environment including organic grains to help fill in the gaps from which she might be missing from a free range diet. For those of you who know me personally know how I am about Organic, I'm a big advocate for Locavore and Organic (Locavore is a person who consumes foods that are grown/raised locally and seasonally)

Over the weekend my cat got a wrapper from some sort of organic fruit snack that one my children had unwrapped and dropped on the ground. After finally discovering he did in fact have something stuck in his throat and that I wasn't going to be able to just dig my fingers in and fish it out, I took him to the ER vet and the poor baby had to be sedated to get it removed. The vet came out and showed me the piece of wrapper he had found and asked if it looked familiar....yep right across this corner piece of wrapper were big green letters reading "ORGANIC"....at least he was trying to eat healthy :-) A friend of mine said "Kara's cat for sure" after finding out about the organic wrapper and we can all laugh about it now that my cat is feeling better and organic wrapper free. Organic is a word that is being really overly used right now but "Natural" has become a some what negative word, Organic is the only word that we have for how things should be raised/grown and when I read this morning from my book about how normal "natural" chicken feed is processed and treated with chemicals and pesticides, it clicked that the diet I feed my chickens matters if I want to have organic fresh healthy eggs coming from my hens. It makes sense to raise babies on Organic feed so that those babies grow into healthy hens. Right now we used a purina brand laying feed and chick starter which is treated with antibiotics.....

My husband broke my chick water feeder yesterday while refilling the chicks water so first thing I had to do today was go buy a new one. Usually when I go to my feed store and need chicken feed I just holler out that I need some lay pellets and some guy brings it out to my car for me while I pay at the register. It never occurred to me that they might have organic lay feed so I browsed around a little more today and found that they do indeed have organic lay feed so I bought a bag. My girls aren't laying right now but they should start up again pretty soon and when they do, they'll be giving me ORGANIC eggs :-)

The kids are in their "Teenage" stage now, baby fluff is falling out and being replaced by little feathers and they're looking really ratty these days. They've also discovered the hutch and love to sleep in it at night. Sunny of course led the pack, she was the first to climb the ladder and the first to get a cozy spot inside the hutch.

It didn't take the rest long to follow her lead and find that they too like the cozy feel of a hutch at night to sleep in. It's kinda cute how they sit by the door and look out. Inside is a little roosting bar that is raised a few inches off the floor and I'm sure it won't be long before they figure out that they like to roost on the bar. My babies are growing up fast!

Where are my eggs???

Well we've had our chicks and hens for 2 weeks tomorrow and it has been 2 weeks since our Easter egg hen gave us a single egg, it's the only one we've gotten from both of our hens. I've tried everything I could think of to encourage laying but to no success.....and then it occurred to us that they might be molting. Molting is a thing chickens do typically in the beginning of fall (or in this case, late summer) when they grow new feathers and expel old feathers, sort of similar to a snake shedding it's skin and during this period of molting they don't lay eggs. Well that solves the mystery of why we aren't getting eggs. I'm sitting on my couch tonight and happen to look out at the girls jumping up to their roosting spots and see them pull out some feathers and let them go.....yep molting for sure! I guess I can stop searching for eggs like an obsessed egg crazed lunatic.


Here's our lovely ladies in their cozy roosting spots for the night. This is when it's easier to go out and pet them and talk to them and get them more used to us. They're fairly tame for being grown but still a little stand offish to us during daytime hours. Chickens roost at night as a form of protection from predators on the ground. If you ever want or need to catch a chicken, wait until roosting hours (an hour before sunset our girls are up getting ready for bed) chickens are pretty much blind at night and flightless too which is why they roost as high as they can get. Our chicks don't yet roost because they're still babies but as they get to be older in a few weeks, they'll have that same instinct to seek higher places to sleep.

  So this past week we had some crazy weather for July, rain and thunder and lightening storms for a few days (and then crazy humidity for us) Saturday when the bigger storm rolled in we relocated the chick hutch into the coop so the bigger ladies could take refuge inside from the storm and we brought the babies in for a dry night indoors. Moving the chick hutch is a lot of work plus it's heavy so we decided to acclimate the babes early to the older hens in hopes that they'll all be so used to each other by the time the babies start to outgrow that little pen that we can just transfer them all into the larger coop. At least that's the plan and the hens don't seem to mind the babies at all but they still have the safety of the wire between them.

I have a lot of friends that ask me what our setup looks like so here's some pics. This is the chick  hutch. We bought this setup at our local feed store for our original hens who were also babies when we got them. It has a side door to access the upper level where the hens lay eggs, a back door and a flap that shuts on the top of the wire section, it also pulls apart so you can have a free standing hutch without the wire cage section.

And this is our larger coop that's about 50 feet long and 7 feet tall. My husband (and I) built this last summer to give our hens more running room and free range to my garden. Had I known that chickens will eat a garden down to nothing, I would have made their coop smaller! It's kinda shabby looking but we were building in the dead heat of summer and just trying to get something up that would contain our hens that had outgrown the chick hutch. As you can see I still have some of the less tastey veggies (and plenty of weeds and chocolate mint) growing inside. We will renovate this at some point because I want more of a garden space and we could probably do a better build job in a cooler season. 

Here's my little Goldie posing for the camera. The babies have grown so much in just the 2 weeks that they've lived with us. They're starting to be a lot easier to catch and they respond to my talking to them.

Kaitlyn and her little sunny who is getting more white and brown feathers every day...It will be neat to see what they look like in a few weeks after all their baby fluff falls out. 

Here's Edward and Blackie, he is learning to be really gentle with the babies (although he thinks it's funny to make them fly by chasing them around a little) She's our smallest baby and by far our fastest to catch! You can tell she's the runt of the group, she kinda does what everyone else tells her to do and she's very clingy to the other chicks. 

                                      

Growing chicks

Well it's been a week since we bought our chicks and hens and I am amazed at how much they have grown in one week! We've gotten into this sweet little routine of spending the late afternoon with them, I let the kids get them out of their pen to run around in the backyard and truly feel the benefits of free range. We hold them for a little while and then go back out in the early evening when the hens begin to roost and collect the babies and put them in their little pet carrier for the night.

I'm super paranoid that something will happen to them at night so I like to bring them into the house to be safe. Last night I was a little later getting to them than usual and they were all huddled up toward the front of the cage where the door is, when I came out they almost hopped into my hands trying to get into the carrier for the night, I guess it's good that they like their little routine.

In the last few days they have sprouted more prominent tail feathers and their wing feathers have filled out, they even hop of the ground and flap trying to fly a little. It's funny to watch them try out their wings. This is Goldie, she's mine. You can already tell she's going to be a really pretty light colored hen with some reddish/brown accent. All our babies have their own unique personalities and distinct looks. 

Kaitlyn is crazy about Sunny who appears to be the most dominant chick. She's definitely the leader and the most ambitious and curious of the 4. She's been learning how to climb the ladder up to the upper part of their little hutch and she was the first to try and fly. She also keeps the others in check. lol

Even though they do enjoy their free time outside every day, they love their pen and are always trying to get back in when we have them out. Something about it feels safe to them, it's home....

My sunflowers are starting to open this week too. Sunflowers are my favorite flower and I have about 15 of them in the chicken coop and 6 or 7 out in my front flowerbed. I love watching their little faces move toward the sun and their colors of yellow are so pretty! 

Every year I grow a large garden, this year I focused more on herbs but did plant a few things. Bell peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and jalapeño. I forgot that I had onions in my garden inside the chicken coop and it wasn't until the other day that I discovered that they had actually grown into full sized onions! It has been 2 years since I planted them, I figured once they had bloomed it was pretty much over for them but was too lazy to go out and actually dig them up....good thing I left them! Apparently it takes 2 years before you get a full sized onion. 

Gradening is one of the many ways that helps my life stay quiet and simple...There's this need to be home more to tend to it, to pick weeds often, to go out early in the morning when the sun is rising and check all the plants, pick any veggies that are ready and just enjoy the quiet and peace a garden brings. 

Life can get so noisy, so loud, so busy and chaotic....I was standing behind a man today at costco and he struck up a conversation with me, asking me what kind of summer I have had and if I have done anything fun?...I named off the zoo and aquarium, swimming, lots of family get togethers,  dinners with friends, a little vacation at Paso and a few other trips out of town to which he replied "Wow that is a lot of busy!"....it's starting to feel that way.....I'm a little worn out LOL 

I like a simpler life, I like quiet in my life, calmness... time to smell the flowers, not a lot of plans going on at once, that's just how I am. Don't get me wrong, I have had an amazing summer with my family, my kids and I have made a lot of special memories and it has been so much fun...I'm just at the point where I'm ready to get back to a quieter routine, less busy, more at home, more time with my garden and my chicks. What do you like to do to bring calmness and quiet into your life? 

New Chicks

I decided to start a blog featuring our home grown life. We are a family of four plus 2 cats, a dog and as of today 2 chickens and 4 chicks. I grow a garden, love to cook from scratch, and try to be as self sufficient as possible. If I could have things my way, we would live way out in the country somewhere, live off our land and I would raise a bunch of animals and a massive garden which would supply the goods for the little farm stand I've always wanted but for right now we live in a small suburb in Bakersfield, CA called Oildale or as it's locally know and referred to as "The Dale". 

These last few days have brought a lot of change to our normally quiet little life, we had a very upsetting evening the other night when we came home and discovered our neighbor's husky puppies broke into our yard and then into our chicken coop and killed our 3 laying hens :-( needless to say there were a lot of tears from me, I grow very attached to my little pets. My girls were very sweet and would come up to us when called. They each laid me a delicious egg every single day.

I've raised animals since I was young! The first non-dog/cat pet I had was a rabbit that I showed at various rabbit shows and fairs. My Grandpa built me a gorgeous two room rabbit hutch that stood off the ground about 5 feet tall, it was beautiful and sturdily built. I belonged to a rabbit club. I don't really remember much about the club itself but I remember the first time I laid eyes on my sweet little Kizzy, she was a chinchilla colored lop bunny. I LOVED her so much! We added to our bunny brood with Thumper, a very sweet tan colored lop bunny and during a raffle at one of the shows we won an angora bunny named coconut. Our bunny adventures soon grew into other interests in farm type animals and before we knew it, we were joining a 4-H club and my parents were buying a house with some property so we could set ourselves up to raise larger animals (apparently farm animals are frowned upon within city limits). We had an assortment of chickens, goats, lambs, pigs, dogs, and of course rabbits. I would've liked to get into even larger animals like cows and horses but we had quite the stock of sheep and even began breeding our ewes and raising our own lambs for the local fair. It was a lot of work, a lot of responsibility, and a lot of fun! Now that I've grown up and have kids of my own, it's my dream to someday own enough land to have all the animals and the garden of my dreams while my kids are still young enough to grow up with it and appreciate a simpler life! Someday it will happen but for now I am pretty satisfied with my little backyard farm. 

I've wanted backyard chickens for a long time and when we finally were able to get it started, we went out and bought ourselves two chicks. They weren't baby babies but they were still very young. We started them out in a small coop and hutch that we bought at our local feed store and then upgraded them to a larger 50 ft run that my husband built special just for them on our raised flower bed. Just 7 weeks ago we decided to add another hen to our brood and bought our sweet little Lana, a tame brown hen that was about 6 months old, she had just started laying me little brown eggs. My heart felt so broken over what happened to my hens. Yesterday I took the kids over to our local feed store and they had just got a new shipment of chicks in that morning. We picked out 4 babies! They are so incredibly sweet! 

Who can resist 4 sweet little fluffy baby chicks? 

From left to right we have Goldie, Scooter, Blackie and Sunny

Of course my kids decided that since there were 4 babies, we each get one chicken for ourselves. Kaitlyn picked out a bright yellow chick that has little feathers on her feet. She named her Sunny. Sunny is by far the friendliest baby that we have, she comes up when she's called to. 

Edward picked a black chick with brown stripes down her back and a leopard print pattern of brown on the top of her head. He named her Blackie (but he pronounces it Bwackie) He is crazy about the chicks and wants to hold them non-stop during the day! 

Even our Dog Layla likes the chicks

She very gently smelled them and nuzzled them with her nose

and then she spent the rest of the afternoon guarding them! She wags her tail at them when they come over to the fence by her. LOL

We all love our new babies but my husband wanted fresh eggs right away and these little ones won't start giving out eggs until later this next Spring (even then it will take awhile before they are bigger eggs, it's a maturity thing)....that's quite a few months without fresh eggs so since our chicken run is so huge, we technically could have more chickens then what we had before so today I added 2 full grown young laying hens. I don't know how old they are but old enough to lay and young enough to not be old chickens. They're very friendly and like to be held and talked to according to the gal at the feed store. 

I couldn't resist this sweet girl, she has the neatest pattern to her feathers, normally they're a light to medium solid brown with brownish eyes but she has some red and white feathers and bright orange eyes. She will lay nice big brown eggs. We haven't found her a name yet but that will be coming soon....

This one is an Americauna or better now as an Easter egg hen. She lays greenish eggs! They're nice and large and the most beautiful color! We have two Americauna chicks also. I love colored eggs! She doesn't have a name yet either but she soon will!

And so a new adventure with new chickens begins. I'll miss my sweet girls from before, they really did bring me a lot of joy and laughter, they had so much personality. My husband and I loved watching them find their own special roosting spots each night, we could see them fly up to the roosting poles from our couch in the family room and I loved how excited they would get when we would walk outside to visit with them, they'd run over to the fence and look at us. Hopefully these new hens will come to love us also.