Wow! So much time has passed.

     It is spring again, finally spring, after an especially brutal winter. We lost Buddy, our faithful chocolate lab mix. We gained Max, our Rottweiler/Aussie mix, the new big baby of the bunch. Our chickens started laying and provided well through the winter even though it was so cold. Snow fell, and fell, and fell. And it stayed around. We lost power for a week at Christmas and camped out in our house using the stovetop for heat. Aaron cooked up pheasant breast road kill over the campfire Mark kept going to melt snow for wash water. And we ate spaghetti sauce and grape butter, and pickles, and eggplant/spaghetti sauce from the arden well into the fall.  What an encouragement to us to start again this spring.  

     And we got more chickens.  Twelve new babies.  Six Plymouth Barred Rocks for Mark and six Araucanas for me.  I want the green and blue eggs, you see.  So they are all growing up together, and we need to finish the new coop soon.  At about 10 weeks, it became apparent that I would not be getting eggs from one of the new chickens.  She, or should I say HE, was crowing in the mornings and growing beautiful rooster plumage.  Had to be one of my Araucanas, and not the Barred Rock, of course.  So back he went to DUCK N COOP, the local hatcherie we use.  

     So Iwill try to do a better job of blogging our experiences from this point on and forget about catching up any more on what I missed, because, boy, have we already had a spring of it!