At the Wittekind Homestead: Update for 08/01/12

We couldn’t be more thrilled.  Finally, we get to announce the arrival of our first eggs! I checked the nesting box in the morning, but after noon, it occurred to me that my daughter might want to check too to make sure I didn’t miss anything.  Sure enough, she came in with two, oh-so-precious chicken eggs!

I don’t know why, but I was expecting to find eggs in the morning when I went to “wake up” the chickens.  Like their first day of laying though, the two girls that gave us eggs on Monday didn’t give us eggs ’til about 10:30 AM and 1:00 PM respectively.  The jury’s still out for today though.  I’d be so thrilled if I walked outside and found that three birds are laying.  They’re all more than 22 weeks old, so it’s about time!

Also of note, we had a heck of a hail storm last night.  As the hail came thundering down, I couldn’t help but think, “Please, not the truck,”, and, “PLEASE not the garden!” The truck seems OK, but the garden took a little bit of damage.  My one cucumber plant had some hailstone-shaped holes in the leaves and both cukes had hail damage.  I was hoping that they could get more time to get bigger, but apparently not.  I brought them in and I’ll add them to a batch of pickles I’m planning to make.  Everything else did fine though.

And lastly, something that made us smile.  A neighbor that we hadn’t officially met before came over last evening.  He had seen that my daughter was trying to pick blackberries from our side of the fence row (with almost no success), so he brought us two quarts of blackberries from his canes.  He was apologizing for the quality of the berries on account of the drought, but ironically enough, his berries were much bigger and sweeter than anything we’d managed to get from our side.  We couldn’t have been more thrilled, and now I think I’m going to make jam!

That’s about it for this week.  Next time, I’m sure I’ll have some good stuff to report from the “egg watch” department as well as the “2012 garden experiment” department.  Hopefully the rest of you are finding just as much success along your path to liberty as we are.  What did you do to claim more of your liberty this past week?