It's almost spring!!!

We've all got spring fever around here, and it's really showing this week by how much money we've been spending! We decided that we didn't want to order the minimum of 25 from the hatchery we had planned to order from and chose to order 8 chicks from mypetchicken.com instead. We spent as much on shipping as we did on chicks, but we're getting the smaller flock that we wanted. We didn't have any references from anyone for mypetchicken, so we're taking a bit of a risk. Hopefully it works out in our favor. If not, then we may end up ordering 25 chicks later on and having a larger flock afterall. Either way, we're soon to be "egg farmers" as my son used to say.

These are some of the "working girls" we chose: Black Australorp, Golden Laced Wyandotte, and "Easter egger"

And these are the "pet" chickens that the kids chose: a Japanese true bantam and a Silkie bantam

They won't be arriving for several weeks, but we're already preparing by running around to various farm stores looking for feeders and waterers, checking prices on litter, and reading lots of chicken books and websites. Our biggest hurdle has been finding organic chicken feed. No one in our area seems to carry it, so we're looking into ordering pre-made organic feed online vs. making our own with grains that are available from our food co-op. So far, making our own is in the lead, especially since I'm already a big believer in raw, organic food for both people and pets.

We've also been ordering gardening seeds, plants and gadgets this week. I ordered a small seed dispenser for planting lettuce, carrots and other small seeds. I've put that inexpensive purchase off for years, yet I continue to grumble about "wasting" seeds every single year. How silly! So, I finally added one to my cart this year. On a whim, I also added a pot maker. It's a cool little gadget that makes pots for starting your own seedlings from paper.

We spend a small fortune in seeds and plants each year, so I want to start saving more seeds from year to year and growing more of my own seedlings. We start a few things from seed that are difficult to find, but I'm still buying most of my tomatoes and peppers and a few other things as plants. That gets kind of expensive with the large garden plot we have. Besides, there's something extremely satisfying about saving seeds from plants that you grew yourself and watching them turn into healthy, thriving plants again the next year.

We have several varieties of many of these fruits and veggies, but this is a general list of the things we are growing this year: bush beans, pole beans (for the bean teepee), beets, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, chard, sweet corn, pop corn, cucumbers, eggplant, endive, ornamental gourds, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce (leaf and romaine), watermelon, okra, onions, peas (shell and snap), sweet bell peppers, hot peppers, pumpkins, shallots, spinach, yellow summer squash, zucchini, and tomatoes. Oh, and lots of flowers for Catherine, of course. She fills many, many vases of flowers during the summer, so we have to make sure we have plenty to pick. We don't have any potatoes, sweet potatoes, herbs, or garlic yet, but there's still plenty of time for more shopping!

The kids are also in the process of planning their own garden alongside the family garden. We haven't had a separate kid's garden for a few years. They've just been helping out with planning and taking care of the family garden, but when they saw the kid's pack from Seeds of Change last week, they decided they wanted to plant that this year. Together we came up with a 12x12 "garden in the round" plan with a statue surrounded by flowers in the middle. They are mostly planting miniature versions of things such as Tom Thumb lettuces, little round carrots, mini corn, mini bell peppers, and cherry tomatoes. In the big garden they also wanted to try different colors of some of their favorite foods, so we will be planting multi-colored carrots, various colors of tomatoes, red okra, green, orange and purple cauliflower, multi-colored sweet corn, red lettuce, and a few other rather psychadelic looking veggies. Boy, are we going to have one colorful garden this year!