Grrrr.

We use mulching hay for just about everything. Chicken bedding, mulching our garden, the rabbits nibble on it, and use it for bedding. One day, while I was at school, Taylor went to our local feed store to replenish our supply, and they gave him the wrong bale of hay. We stupidly decided to use it anyway, and turned one of our beds into weed paradise.

This morning I pulled most of the weeds, and re-mulched with a new bale of the right stuff. We can still use the leftover seed-ridden hay for animal bedding, and the rabbits prefer it to munch on.

Potatoes

Right now, our best-growing plants are the potatoes. They took weeks to finally show up (we thought they had maybe rotted in the ground), but once they poked their heads out of the soil, they looked great! They started out as these teeny purple plants, and now they're close to two feet tall and a luscious green color. Later in the season, we can dig em out, and have purple mashed potatoes.

A hidden bounty

Every other week or so, we scrape out all of the dirty, pooped-on hay in the chicken coop, and replace it was some fresh, clean, unstinky stuff. It gets pretty fluffy until the hens pack it down by walking/pooping on it.

A couple days ago, I cleaned out the coop and threw in some hay. Then something weird happened.

Prius, who'd been laying eggs almost every day for a month now, didn't lay one. And then the next day, she didn't lay one. And the next day, there wasn't one. And then, this morning, there also wasn't one. I decided to climb into the coup to investigate.

Lo and behold! After shuffling some of the hay around, I found her hidden nest. Inside were four blue eggs, nestled in the clean bedding. For a second there, I thought we may have a problem! She was too young to be molting, so I couldn't figure out why the flow of eggs stopped. Now we know to be a bit more thorough searching for eggs in the bedding.

Leftover bacon fat

We're pretty big fans of bacon. With so many fresh eggs, it's very tempting to throw on a piece of bacon to go with our breakfast. Over the past couple of weeks, we've wound up with a ton of leftover grease. We decided to mix it up with some of our chicken scratch and food, and gave it to them. They absolutely loved it.

Next time, I think I'll try making cookies with it. You can use it instead of butter or shortening, like in the following recipe:

1 c. bacon grease or lard
1 c. sugar
1 egg, beaten
4 tbsp. molasses
2 c. flour
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. soda
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. cloves
1 tsp. cinnamon

Sounds delicious!

Tangerine time!

The citrus around here is slowly coming into season. Every couple days a tangerine will drop from the tree, nice and ripe. We had one for dessert today, and it was great. Pretty soon we'll have oranges, grapefruit, and lemon as well. I've been looking into canning, and it should be easy (it seems like so many citrus fruits get wasted in Florida--- there's just too much too fast!). I'm also interested in candying some lemon and orange peel, which sounds scrumptious. I wonder if we could boil down some juice and freeze or can that too.

Garden salad

We're starting to eat more and more out of our garden. Yesterday we picked a little cucumber, some salad greens, and tossed together a lovely little salad.

What a cute little cuke!

Topped with some blue cheese dressing, it was delicious. Most people don't care for them, but I love raw collards. They're a tiny bit tougher than lettuce, but I think they add a nice flavor to a salad mix.

Yolk-less egg

Here's something you won't ever find at the grocery store. Taylor and I went into the coop and found a teeny tiny blue egg. We cracked it open, and all there was was albumen (white).

It still tasted delicious. It'd be pretty neat if these happened more often--- they'd be perfect for recipes that only called for whites.