Easter Egg Mystery Solved.....

Sooo, we thought the chickens were being "naughty girls" and laying their eggs far and wide, but alas, we were mistaken. Here is a photographical essay to illustrate what really happened to the eggs!

"Where are all the eggs?" says Farmer Rose. "Those hens have been laying 7-9 eggs a day between the 9 of them, and now I find just one egg in the nest box. I think we have to have an Easter Egg Hunt!"

"I will pen up the chickens in their "tractor" (movable coop) so that they will have to lay their eggs in the nest boxes!"

"Hmmmm, the hens have been penned up from 5 o'clock yesterday until 5 o'clock today and there is only one egg in the tractor nest box! Have the hens been holding them in out of spite???"

"I guess I will check in here." (This is the door where we clean out under the roost).

"Fifteen eggs! Enough to account for yesterday and today! Hurray, mystery solved!"

Gardening is hard!

Chickens helping remove bugs and weed seeds from newly-tilled bed

Gardening can be really difficult, frustrating, exhausting and overwhelming! The work is hot, tiring, and often physically painful. We have to juggle so many different pieces - seeds, planting times, soil amendments, garden layout, seedlings, building beds, fencing, mulch, tools, where are my gloves, how can I garden when the lawn needs mowing, and why don't I just give up and go inside and write a blog post? Oh yeah, and how am I going to have time to garden, raise animals, and make an Ozark Local Foods website when I barely have time for everything else that I still have to keep doing (cooking, cleaning, driving, complaining, eating, sleeping, and occasionally yelling at Rose to make sure she keeps homeschooling herself)? And how can I make raised beds when the #$%& shovel hits a rock every time it goes 4 inches into the soil!?!?!? Tilling was supposed to make everything easier, not harder! Till once then superior no-till methods forever after was the idea... Well, I am going to do it! No matter how difficult and tiring it is, it is worth it and I will do it. I know all of you will support me too and keep me going when I want to give up, and in return I will entertain you with funny stories and pretty pictures, like the picture above and this semi-funny story. The other day I went outside to mow with our spiffy new push mower. I thought about picking up the rocks that I had thrown out as I made the spots for the trees, but it somehow didn't seem that important (or fun) so I just went along and started mowing. At one point I hit a rock, and I was pretty sure I heard it hit the side of the house. A minute later, Rose was yelling, "Mom, a rock just came through my window!" Luckily she was in the other room on the computer using Khan Academy (awesome website BTW) and did not get hurt. The moral of the story: Always listen to your intuition, and always pick up rocks before mowing.) PS I spent the next 3 hours removing everything from every inch of Rose's room (have you seen her room? There was a lot of stuff to sort through!) and removing shards of glass. At least I didn't have to mow.