Ciao!

After two incredible weeks, I'm back from Italy! It was an amazing trip! The first week mom and I traveled to Rome, Venice, Verona, and Bologna. My favorites from the first week were Verona (such a cute "Italian-feeling" town) and Murano Island in Venice (I'm obsessed with all the glass work!). Here are a few pictures:







The second week we were joined in Tuscany by my sister-in-law, her mom, my aunt, and my cousin. We had an indescribably great week cooking, site seeing, drinking vino, relaxing, and laughing!

Here's the whole group:


Melissa and Liz making biscotti


The villa


Our view from the villa


What an amazing experience!

Spring Update

I know I've been MIA for awhile. Sorry! No excuses! But here's what's going on...

Our blueberry bushes are doing great. Look at our first berries!


The chickens are laying eggs like crazy! We actually keep getting double yolk eggs that are twice as big as the normal eggs.









We are also now in the process of training them to be "free ranging" and they love their time grazing.




The garden is planted! We've started eating lettuces and radishes.


And this weekend we planted sweet potatoes and cleaned up the other potatoes.



I leave for Italy in 5 DAYS! I'll post pictures when I get back!

Prepping the Fruit Trees for Spring

It's time to start getting ready for growing season and our apples trees needed some serious TLC!

Here's a good website that provides some suggestions
http://www.diylife.com/2011/02/23/pruning-apple-trees/

Here's what we started with....

It's hard to tell in the photo but the tree is very overgrown and has way too many branches. The last few years we struggled with fungus on our apples. The fruit needs air and light to grow healthy and to help prevent disease. As you can see, our apples were not getting much air or light!
This is a picture of one of our trees at the end of last season.


Step one--get the right tools. "For smaller trees and detailed pruning, they use pruning loppers, hand shears, and a hand saw" CHECK!



Step two--Start cutting
1. Always start with the big cuts first and then move to more detailed pruning
2. You want the bottom branches to be longer than the top branches
3. And you don't want any branches growing straight up or down, which can create structural issues
4. You want the branches at a 45 degree angle off of the trunk, which will be strong
5. Eliminate the little suckers
6. Remove dead limbs
7. Don't take out more than 30% of the live growth. This will hurt production!
8. Step back and assess your work to determine if your done.

The website also had a helpful video http://www.diylife.com/videos-partner/how-to-prune-trees-516921798-79

Step three--Clean up


Final product
Hopefully you can see the difference!

Much more airy!

Look at all the branches we removed!

The birds have landed!

We picked up the gals on Saturday morning at the farmers market! Meet Rosita, Angie, Maxwell Smart, and Barbara Walters...



Within two hours Maxwell Smart had figured out how to climb into the hen house and she laid our first egg in the nesting box! Good thing she got the last name Smart!


By the end of the first day, all the ladies had laid an egg. Although none of the other ones figured out the hen house. We have some training to do!


We've had nine eggs already! I poached the first egg for Sunday morning breakfast. Mom also used our eggs in her chocolate chip cookies, which were amazing (thanks to the eggs!).

Here are some more pictures:




And our uninvited poultry visitors:

Coop part 2

Here's the finished product!



The inside with the nesting boxes and the roosting poll.


And the door to the ramp that leads down to the pen.

Coop Building Part 1

We spent some time this weekend getting started with the coop. Here are some pictures...

You gotta start somewhere!


End of day one, the pen is complete (minus the fence on the top)


Day two, we got some help from my brother.


By the end of the day we almost had the hen house done. All that's left is adding some doors/gates, putting shingles on the roof, and painting it.


Inside the hen house is a opening in the bottom which will have a ramp attached to it so the chickens to come in and out, it will also allow us to close them in the house at night. There is a pole for them to roost on at night. And there are two nesting boxes. I'll post pictures of the inside next time.

TGIS...Thank God It's Spring (almost)

Spring is in the air and I'm so ready! Chicken coop is being built this weekend (look for pictures next week), blueberry plants were purchased last night (nine plants producing 8-12 pounds of berries each!), and our first real conversation about this year's garden was yesterday.

As my dad and I were finishing our berry order, my cousins Andrew and Laura called to get some advice about their garden. That's when I realized...between my dad's experience and knowledge and my enthusiasm, we have a lot of information to share about gardening. So, I decided to give my dad some special attention on the blog (kinda like Deb's quotes section). I will be periodically giving gardening advice from Big Tom. The first piece of advice comes from a question posed by Andrew and Laura:

When do you till your garden for the first time in the spring?

Big Tom's Advice: As soon as the ground is dry enough to get a tiller through it. Even if it's pretty early in the spring (or technically late winter) it will begin to break up the dirt. It may even snow after this put it will be a good start to preparing the garden for the spring planting. Plus, it will help the dirt dry out quicker the next time it rains.

Stay tuned for more advice :)