Welcome !!

Well I am finally realizing my dream. I've been dreaming, hoping, and wishing I had a blog but never really set my mind to actually doing it until today. We, as a family, have been doing some great things and I wanted to share them with you all.

We've basically gotten the garden in. We are hoping for a large garden with lots of fresh food for our family as well as enough to can for the winter. Speakin' of canning, I purchased a 22 qt. Presto canner off Craigslist this weekend.....thank you Denise for saving it for me until I could get over to Coeur d'Alene. That should see lots of use this summer. I've been scouring the local thrift-stores and picking up canning jars. We are planning on bread and butter pickles, pickled beets, beans, corn relish, jams and jellies of all varities. My best from last year was some lavender infused apricot jam. Both the lavender and the apricots were from the yard. Pretty amazing what we can do with things from our very own yard.

We added to our homestead in December of last year. We purchased the 15 acres contiguous to our home. It was a really big deal for our family. We had been wanting the land for years but had been told repeatedly that it would never be for sale because it was "family land". But low and behold we returned home after a weekend away to see a real-estate sign up and boy were we ever surprised and shocked.....after much offering and counter-offering it became ours. It was a BIG mess of wormwood, to which we effectionately named Wormwood Estates.

With the addition of more land, came the addition of more animals. We purchased a small portable chicken coop with 5 chickens from Jenna from Sandpoint. She was willing to part with them only because she was re-locating clear across the country to Vermont. Check out her blog, coldantlerfarm.blogspot.com. Anywho, we fell in love with chicken keeping and soon added alot more birds because not only are the eggs wonderful and flavorful but watching their cute personalities and antics is also habit forming. So now our flock contains Welsummers, Cochins, Jersey Giants, Rhode Island Reds, and a HOT sexy rooster named Sam. He is an Americauna. The portrait at the beginning of the post is of Mindy.......one of my first hens. Thanks Jenna, she is a love. We also added more animals but I'll save some of the introductions for next time.....