Spring is Here

Spring arrived on our little homestead a few weeks early! Well, ever since January, the stubborn spring flowers have been coming up. We even had violets spring up in the beginning of February! So, to say our winter has been on the mild side would be an understatement.

Here are some pictures of our early bloomers plus a couple cute birds visiting our bird feeder:

Sweet little guy!

White Crocus
The first flower to appear (not counting the very early violets)
There are some purple ones blooming now!

Another bird visitor

My red currant is showing buds! Yay!

Daffodils growing like crazy in our yard.
Why the previous owner planted them here is beyond me!

A bulb I planted back in October. I can't remember what it is.

Daffodils!
(There are plenty)

Budding Bartlett pear tree

The strawberries are growing too!

We've had two snow storms since they've starting growing and budding, but it doesn't seem to phase them too much. Now I really need to get going on planning our garden and starting some seeds!

Happy Early Spring!

An Owl Visitor

A beautiful barred owl 

Look who came to visit us the other day! There were actually two in the trees, but we didn't see the other one until they both flew away. And then just a few nights ago I was loading my daughter up into our car. It was dark out and I heard 3-4 owls hooting loudly to each other in our trees. We hear them fairly often from a distance, but when they're in our treeline by our yard, they are loud! It was so cool! It was too bad it was so dark, because that would have been neat to see.

Dyeing Mishap

Today I was dyeing my daughter's white comfort blanket a nice shade of blue. I sewed a bunch of her baby burp rags together into a large blanket, and even though she's 3, she still loves snuggling with those burp rags! Well, I didn't want 8+ years of stains showing (I used them for my son as well who is now 6), so dyeing was the obvious solution.

I put on my rubber cleaning gloves and was squishing the fabric in the dyeing water for about 10 minutes before I had to take my gloves off to do something. Little did I know that one of the fingers had a tiny slit in it and...

Yikes!

Of course it had to be my middle finger that was dyed! I don't really want any attention to be drawn to my middle finger, especially because I'm not the sort of person that just flips people off, you know?!

Next time, a thorough inspection of my gloves will be done before I start dyeing.

Sheesh!

From Pallets to Chicken Coop

Our own homegrown eggs are so close!!!

My husband and I are preparing for the project I've been waiting for most of my life: building a chicken coop to house some chickens! We got this great idea from Mother Earth News for building a chicken coop out of wood pallets. You can usually get wood pallets for free and we're lucky in that our neighbor occasionally ends up with pallets in relation to his job and doesn't know what to do with them. Now that he knows we're collecting them, he just brings them on over! Sweet!

Well, we only have 2 pallets so far, so it's going a bit slow. I guess that's okay though. The wood is free! Sometimes "free" takes time. :-)

I am so thrilled to finally be able to seriously think about chickens! It's always been so far in the distance that I haven't even settled on what breeds I want or how many. I'll need to bust out my chicken book and get studying.!

Homemade Brown Sugar

For me, brown sugar is one of those things that I don't really think about until I need it in a recipe. Usually I have some on hand, but the last time I needed it - I was totally out! I had no time to go out to buy some and it was Sunday. We usually don't go shopping on Sunday. So I was stuck! What was I going to do? Thankfully, I remembered that I had stashed away a recipe on making your own brown sugar with two ingredients - sugar and molasses.

I dumped about 2 lbs. of sugar into a bowl, poured on about a half cup of molasses and started stirring. It definitely turned into brown sugar but it smelled very molassesy. It also had little molasses clumps in it. That had me a little concerned. But I didn't have time to worry about it and continued to make the sticky rolls I was in the middle of making. Well, to my surprise the molasses flavor baked out and everything tasted normal! How cool!

So, if you are in a pinch and need brown sugar, be sure to have some white sugar and molasses on hand. You'll be able to save your own bacon without having to go very far! :-)

Colonial Projects

Right now in homeschooling, my son and I are doing a unit on the colonists. So we started reading about the Jamestown settlement and now we're reading about the Mayflower. As a historian, I am very careful about what we read when it comes to history. History is a tricky thing because primary sources are often very biased, and reading secondary sources can be even worse! It is very difficult to find neutral accounts of history, so sometimes it proves to be rather difficult to find just the right books to read. (Don't even get me started on Christopher Columbus!) For now we're using Mayflower 1620: A New Look at a Pilgrim Voyage done by the Plymouth Plantation. We will also be taking a look at 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving also done by the Plymouth Plantation. Their books look very impressive, with photos of reenactments of the events, and I love that they really seek to bring an equal point of view from the Wampanoag people. 

Anyway, I also found some fun books on Colonial crafts. I was surprised with how many I found! Our first project was knotting a fishing net, because fish was a very important part of their diet. My son is still learning how to tie knots, so I helped him a lot, but it turned out really well, I think!

The cool thing about this project is that it could be applied in so many ways - for the fishing for food aspect, a religious context with Jesus and the apostles who were fishermen, for studying jobs or industries, etc. It was actually pretty simple! We found the project in Projects About Colonial Life by Marian Broida in the Hands-On History series. I think some of the other crafts in there are a little pointless, but I'm picky when it comes to crafts, so that's really just me. Check it out!

Snow Candy

We're into our second day of snow here in Maryland. A lot of it had melted by the end of yesterday; sadly our sledding tracks were mostly grass. But, today's snow storm has more than made up for it and we have plans in the works for an ultimate snow fort for bombarding people with snowballs who are sledding on the hill below. Mwahahahaha!

Our 2 year old daughter has been obsessed with eating snow. Any chance (and any place) she can get it, she will. I had to sit down with her and try to explain which snow not to eat (snow from the car, the house, shoes and the good ol' yellow or brown snow) and the snow that was good to eat. Then we had the idea of collecting some clean snow in a bowl as it fell and putting a bowl out on our porch railing, we soon had some good, clean snow to eat! We got out some spoons and she sat happily eating her bowl of snow. Our 5 year old son suggested we pour maple syrup on it, so we did that and he was happy eating his sherbet-tasting snow.

Then, I remembered as a girl trying to make Snow Candy using maple syrup like in Little House on in the Big Woods, but I was disappointed because it didn't work. The thing that I think was left out in our Snow Candy making was that we didn't boil it. And that's the key to making candy! So, I thought I'd give it a whirl today and it was a great success!

So here's how we made our candy:

I boiled about a 1/2 cup of pure maple syrup in a small pot over medium heat. I didn't really measure time-wise, but I stood there, occasionally stirring with a spoon. The syrup got all frothy and bubbly after awhile, so I added a tiny lump of butter which helped a little. That's optional though. I had a small bowl of cold water that I occasionally dropped a drip of the syrup into to test its hardness. Gradually it went from making soft lumps, to harder lumps, then to being hard and brittle - we had made it to the hard-ball stage! Then I removed it from the heat, got my bowl of snow and poured it out in a steady stream all over the snow. Surprisingly, it didn't melt the snow as much as I thought, but sunk slightly into the soft, white powder. When I removed it, it was a fun, hard spindly shape - delicious for eating!

I think it would be fun to try putting large drops on some parchment paper and letting them harden there. That way we'd have little syrup mounds to suck on. I'm thinking I could make some good throat lozenges this way with honey candy and some essential oils as well! Hmm!

This is the second pouring, so the snow is more melted.
Also, the candy cooked a little longer by that point, so it's darker.

Yummy, golden maple snow candy!

Happy Winter!