BEGINNING

I've been putting pictures and info about my attempts to raise chickens on our family web site, but with the different pictures and news posts its getting hard to keep anything in chronological order. So I've decided to blog, that way the updates and info should flow.

Let me give a little background.

Starting last summer I started to feel a need/yearning/indigestion to get back to simpler times and to be more self-sufficient.

I put in a few tomato and cucumber plants, and planted green beans and squash. If I had depended on this "garden" for more than a meal I would have starved. Did I mention that I planted all but the beans in tires? This was supposed to cut down on weeding and watering, and make the plants grow better. It didn't.

Also last summer I found out about the Amish produce auction. Now this was great fun. The prices are a little less, but you have to buy in bulk for the most part. You can't beat the ambiance; Amish, Mennonite, farmers, basic middle America, and tourist all mingling. The grandkids get to see horses up close and working, and you realize that you can live a lot simpler.

I have a few walnut trees on my lot which for the past years (since we moved here) I mainly cursed for the mess, but I would also pick up several Wal-mart bags of walnuts and put at the end of the drive-way. Our neighbor would pick them up and take them to people at his church who shelled them and sold them for their fundraiser. The neighbor and the church people would also come over and gather walnuts. Last summer was a bad year for walnuts, or so people kept telling me, so the church people weren't messing with them. The walnuts were messing my place...so I started bagging them. I had my brother and my neices and nephew bag them. We ended up with 30 bags full. What to do...what to do... My brother came into visit so I told him we were going to take the walnuts to the Amish. I figured we could sell them at the auction or just dump them on someone. The auction didn't want them, but an Amish guy there bought walnuts, so he sent us to his house and told us to tell his son to take of things. BONUS! We went to an Amish farm, they (the son @ 14 years old, the mom, and two young kids @ 3 and 5 years) hulled (using a gas powered huller) and weighed the walnuts and paid us for them. I think it was @$15, not enough for the gas to and from, but well worth the adventure. Oh, I'll be going again this summer.