around here.

It's been a busy summer around here.  Here's a little re-cap... (click on the links for full posts)

Finished our chicken coop.
Our baby turned ONE!
Made a BIG announcement!
Spent the day at the lake with friends.
A video of Caleb's first year.
Celebrated our boy's first birthday with a party!
Got our first egg!!
Lots of growing going on in our garden.
Visited the Children's Museum while my friend Jess was in town.

Also, see our weekly "the 52 project" photos here.

we have eggs!

Last night we found our first egg!!  It was a complete surprise as we had just read that we shouldn't expect eggs from our girls until mid August at the earliest.

Though this egg was small (with a yoke smaller than a quarter) it means that soon we'll be filling our fridge with loads of eggs!!!!  Can't wait!

chicken coop + chicken update

Remember when we got chicks?  Well they aren't so little any more!

Meet Red, the friendliest of all the chickens.

And here's Roo, the feistiest of the two roosters we ended up with... and turns out their not "Ameraucanas", but actually a breed called "Easter Eggers"!

He's very protective of this little lady, our only Easter Egger hen....can't wait to get some beautiful colored eggs from this beauty.

This spring, Dan saw a listing on Craigslist for a free wooden privacy fence, all we had to do was go take it down.  We immediately thought this wood would make a fantastic chicken coop, so we spent a few weekends tearing down and hauling 100+ feet of fence wood home!

Then it took another month or so of weekends to actually build the coop, but we're pretty thrilled by the finished product!

The back door is perfect for accessing the food and cleaning out the coop.  There is a mesh window on the side to allow for ventilation and we'll add an old window in the winter so they still have light but will stay warmer.

We added an easy access door to the hen boxes for egg collection....making sure it was low enough that Caleb will be able to collect eggs on his own some day!

It didn't take long for the chickens to set up home and go in the coop on their own once it gets dark.  We close the front ramp at night to keep them safe.

2014 Garden // May

This year we thought it would be fun to take weekly photos of our garden to show the growth over the summer.  We set up a tripod in our bedroom and each Sunday morning, we snap a photo.  Nothing is staged, as you can see, but I think it's fun to see the progress over the past month that we've made in our growing garden.  I'm especially amazed at how quickly the leaves on the tree in the foreground appeared.  

May 4th 

May 11th 

 May 18th

May 25th

Hopefully we'll be able to keep this up over the summer, it's amazing to see just how quickly things grow and change.

18/52

"A portrait of my family, once a week, every week, in 2014"

Caleb Roscoe: Checkin' on his chicks.

see more of our 52 project here.

{joining the 52 project at Practising Simplicity & Living Arrows at I Heart Snapping}

chicks are here!

We did it!  We finally added chicks to our little homestead.  We've been dreaming about this for months!

We got a variety of breeds to hopefully make our flock a little diverse.  There are 6 Tetra Tint Pullets (a cross between Rhode Island Red Male & White Leghorn Female) three are dark and three are light.  The other 3 are Ameraucana.  The Ameraucana are known for laying Easter eggs, but they are unsexed so we may end up with a rooster!

They are a little over a week old and we have a temporary home set up for them in the kitchen.  They'll spend the next month or so there until they have all their feathers.  Then they'll be re-located to the backyard where we plan to create a small chicken run for them to roam.  Now the pressure is on to get that chicken coop finished!

In a few short months we'll have our very own free range, organic eggs....right in our backyard!!