Ivy and Baby Chicks

More daylight and warmer days has us messing around outdoors. This past weekend Brooke came over to help us pull up some more ivy in the backyard. We're seriously close to clearing the backyard of the foe! Hopefully the chickens will help us keep the sneaky tendrils from venturing back onto our side of the fence.

We had one very entertaining surprise hidden in the ivy. I had just gone inside to turn off the soup on the stove when I heard Brooke shriek. Coming out to see what the fuss was about I found Nathan and Brooke laughing. Turns out as she was pulling up a section of ivy a critter poked out its head and looked at her. Ha! It was a long lost dog toy from a previous resident!

Speaking of land clearing, Nathan, family, and neighbors worked hard last week to prep the new farm and family garden plot. We'll be having a section and we're both super excited to have full-sun growing conditions for several crops this summer! This Friday, I'll be joining the crew to help lay the landscape fabric and hopefully plant some of our happy seedlings.

On the business side of the farm, the strawberries are starting to ripen! Nathan brought me home one of the early fruits to sample and they are going to so delicious! Makes me excited to plant some of our own strawberry plants this year.

These warmer days still have our hens laying gorgeous eggs. It's like Easter every day collecting eggs. Gathering eggs never gets old.

Speaking of eggs, we surprised our broody silkie (Millie) with three baby chicks on Saturday. Surprise! Your golf ball and wooden egg hatched! They were so cute together, but Millie was not a good mom and we had to take over parental duty. She refused to get up off the nest to show them where to eat and drink. After 36 hours, the chicks were super hungry and starting to get dehydrated. Now we get to enjoy their sweet peeps in our dining room.

The past two weeks we have successfully added yogurt and milk back into our diets which has been lovely. Even though I didn't consume a lot of dairy the last few years, I ended up really craving it during the elimination. My body must have been needing some nutrient it provided. We've also had some fun in the kitchen with testing two new recipes from our paleo cookbook. The agave corn-free "corn"bread actually turned out delicious and we made a second helping to share with friends on Thursday.

With Nathan was drooling over all the Easter candy at the grocery store, we tried a homemade version of reeses that turned out delicious!

We also used the leftover shredded cabbage we didn't need in our soup recipe to try our hand at homemade sauerkraut. Assuming all goes well, it will be fermented enough to taste by Saturday.

Poor little Daisy sprained her foot Thursday evening and was still limping on Friday, so I took her to the vet to make sure nothing more serious was wrong before the weekend. They didn't feel anything broken, so she was told to rest and take an anti-inflammatory for a few days. She's been properly spoiled with cuddles and soaking up the warm morning sunshine as well.

That's all for this week. I'm sure you'll find yourself with loads of cute chick photos in the coming days.