Candling

With almost one week left in our chicken egg hatching exercise, we have candled all the eggs and have culled the bad ones (ones that ended up being infertile or “died”) As with such egg operations the success rate is quite erratic.   Out of the 6 d’uccle eggs we have culled 1/2 (one had a hairline crack and the other two were infertile. In hatching you expect to loose the eggs within the first week or at hatching time so we still have yet to see if these 3 make it. Unfortunately,  the black cochin batch has a worse percentage of “bad eggs.” Out of the dozen cochin eggs – 1 was fertile, 9 were non fertile and 2 had “blood lines” (meaning that the embryo went bad during incubation)    Thankfully, we aren’t relying on this hatching operation to expand our flock.    Next week we’ll be getting a shipment in of day old chicks.    With Jordanne reselling most of the order to local backyard poultry folks we are looking at ordering over 50 chickens!   Back in 2001 when we started our backyard flock we placed the minimum of 25 chickens can’t imagine what 50 peeping babies will sound like. Should be fun!  😉

Spanky helping out with sewing, vintage apron pattern and recycling old sheets

“Second Life” Aprons

Work on the aprons using old sheets are progressing thanks to the help of our kitty (well, not really but he does look like he is interesting in helping out) A friend gave us a vintage full apron pattern that we using. Pictures of finished product will be coming soon.

Pasadena Foothill-billies

We know our readers just love looking at our photos; however, one of the objections is “there’s no people in the photos.” I know, I know.  When it comes to taking photos we much rather take pics of the garden, animals or the exciting projects that we have going on. So it’s great when a photographer comes in with a writer who’s doing a story – they can take photos of the folks behind PTF.

Back in January a writer and photographer assigned to do a special story for the German newspaper,FAZ, on the urban homestead spent a day with us and took these photographs. [btw, we’ll let our readers know when the story runs; however, I am afraid it will all be in German and we’ll need to get someone to translate it.]
Photos are courtesy and copyright Chris Kelly

Jordanne hugs Blackberry, Jules picks winter salad mix, Justin & Jules talk
about biodiesel Justin talks about the deep freeze, obligatory family photo, Anais, Jordanne & Jules Anais makes bread, Anais juices oranges (by hand), Justin hauls out the homebrew biodiesel Jordanne feed the goats, Jules with winter squash harvest, Anais & Jordanne read incubator instructionsOK, enough of our mugs. Next posting some photos of the urban homestead.