Blue Eggs and Chestnuts

This week we seemed to have picked the pace back up from the holidays. We had a pretty good run of unseasonably warm weather, and we made the best of it.
We started out working with the Easter Egger birds. We have twenty Americuana birds, and they all lay either blue or green eggs. We also have another couple of dozen mix and match birds that we've bought, hatched and otherwise collected over the past few years. The reason we have so many birds is, each year we lose nearly all of them to hawks, coyotes and foxes. But this year we added six guinea birds to the flock. They are noisy little critters, but they have done an excellent job of keeping predators away from our girls, so now we are averaging two dozen eggs a day, most of them blue. The good thing is, the blue eggs seem to be attracting traffic from the main road to our roadside egg sale. We guess blue eggs are a rarity?
We've had to open our second coop up during the day, because we didn't have enough boxes for all the girls to lay at once. We found this girl up on the deck under the cook stove. When she got up, there were ten eggs in a pile.

So we've been opening the smaller coop, just to let the girls have more room to do their business.

On a side note to chickens, we've had a problem with the girls getting up on the deck planters and kicking the dirt out. Big Man pulled from his Army experience and rigged up a land mine field to deny access to the terrain. It's just mouse traps, screwed into the deck to keep them from flying off when the girls trip one. So far it's kept them off the railing, but they are not very happy about it.

The warm weather gave us the perfect chance to decorate the house and get the lights out. We always turn on the Christmas lights the night of Thanksgiving, it's one of our little traditions.

Warm weather gave Big Man a chance to start splitting his new load of oak wood for the smoker.

And speaking of smoker wood. We put it to good use on Thor's Day. We smoked another half brisket.

While Big Man was working the pit, Cupcake whipped up her soon to be world famous hashbrown casserole as a side.

On the food related posts, we made another batch of cheese cake cupcakes. This time just straight cheese cake, no pumpkin. We were right, these are way better.

And it's that time of year for chocolate cake. No box mix here, all scratch made.

Chocolate cake

And if you're going to have from scratch chocolate cake, you know we are going to make a pot of boiled custard to top it with. This year we perfected the thickness. Cupcake says her grandmother would be proud.

All blue eggs, all the time

Thickening up nicely

Sticks to a spoon

Two and a half quarts, should cover the cake

The last post has a double shot of digging. We claimed two chestnut sprouts in Pop's yard this spring, with the intent to transplant them to The Acre after the trees went dormant in the fall. We've had a few good frosts recently, so we figured the trees were good to go. We went to dig them up, and the one big one had roots three feet deep. We thought heart attacks would come before we got it out, but we prevailed. The second sprout was only a shovel deep.

It didn't look that bad

Almost three feet

Big sprout in, roots and all

Small sprout, much easier to plant

And then there was "Fraidy Mutt". She got a wild hair and decided to dig out the dirt from one of our flower pots on the deck. But she played it cool, and asked for a lawyer when questioned by Big Man. Charges are pending.

"Anyone see who was digging in the flower pot?"

"I have no idea where all this dirt came from" "These are not my pants"

"I did bad, Bunk"

We ended the week with wings.
K&K