I am a terrible chicken mother. Two weekends ago, our family brought home 13 chicks from the local farm and feed store. We've raised chickens before but haven't for the past couple of years. To be honest, raising chickens from chicks is a royal pain in the ass. We swore up and down that we would never cross …
Category: Homesteading
Amateur Hour in the Bee Yard
A week and a half ago, approximately 30,000 honeybees were delivered on my front doorstep. I have to admit that I was a little surprised to see my purchase of three, 3-pound boxes of bees delivered. I must have a ballsy mailman. Bees in shipment are notorious for picking up “hitchhikers” or other honeybees in …
Oh Hap-BEE day!
What an amazing experience this afternoon! Today I had the pleasure of capturing and hiving my very first swarm of bees! This couldn't have come at a better time: on last inspection of H1, I had finally succumbed to the notion that they were in fact Queenless, and I was going to have to do another split. …
Bobby Pins, Brad Nails, and Beer
My bees are stuck up. They can be described as nothing short of what my dad likes to call “Upper Pithington Smithe”. I provide a stable, sturdy hive for them to call home. I fill their hive boxes with symmetrical frames, and measure them during each inspection for perfect width and “bee space”. I even …
Repurposed Grass Clippings
A couple of months ago, a coworker told me about an ingenious way he used grass clippings from his freshly mowed yard: in the chicken coop! This afternoon was our first mow of the season. After mowing, sweeping the yard, and pulling weeds around the front walk, instead of dumping the clippings into an ugly, …
Split – 21 March 2015
My hesitance to post about my bees was simply due to the fact that I didn’t want to jinx the girls before they had a chance. (My poor Chickens….) While I have not done an inspection since my split, I feel fairly safe in saying that the split indeed was successful, and I again have …
Jinxed
Now I’ve gone and done it. I’ve jinxed my hens. After introducing our girls, doesn’t it gosh-darn figure that once I write about them in detail, they start getting picked off, one by one? Granted, we have lost five hens over the past three years to predators (six if you count the teenagers that chicken-napped …
Peeping Chicken
So, would these be considered "Peeping Chickens"?!
Chicken Shit and Eggs
We started our chicken adventure in the spring of 2013. We bought six chicks, each member of the family picking out and naming their own. My husband and I tried reasoning with Alaina, the oldest. The scrawny little chick she picked out probably wouldn’t even make the truck ride home, we tried telling her. It …
… Ten Pounds of Whole Wheat Pasta…
Hello. My name is Cari, and I am a prepper. There, I said it. I am obsessed with buying in bulk. ... Fifty pounds of popcorn, ten pounds of peanuts, forty-five rolls of toilet paper... I have a storage room downstairs with two deep freezers and a six foot wide by six foot tall shelving …
viCARIously Speaking 