homesteading | one young love

Apparently I wasn’t kidding when I called our chickens our gateway animal. This weekend we decided to add bees to the list. With great encouragement and lots of help from our friends at My Local Honey we have been getting ready for our fist hive. Jake, Canaan and I made the trip out to a near by bee farm and picked up our starter pack which we then loaded up in the car (yes thats right, over 10.000 bees in the back of our 4runner) and brought home. Jake got straight to work loading them into their box – he was super excited. I can’t wait to harvest our very own local honey at the end of the season!

Note – I’m pretty sure after reading this post my sister-in-law might never again visit our home but don’t worry Lace, theres a bee suit here with your name on it! And we promise to share our honey!

Oh and now that the chickens are in their awkward adolescent phase they have been promoted to the out doors. Things are really moving along over here! And if it didn’t already feel like a zoo around here, take a look at the neighborhood pet.That is a peacock and it is on our house or according to Everly ‘upstairs’. He stopped by for a visit the other night while we were having friends over for dinner. Just a little meal time entertainment! Yeesh!

So after all getting settled in to the new place we decided the only reasonable thing to do was to get chickens – you know, since we don’t have much else going on – we thought adding 4 more living things to take care of was a good idea. Truthfully, it’s our dream to live on a farm one day with the works, cows, goats, pigs, chickens, a giant garden. If we want the dream farm we have to start somewhere. We’ve been wanting to get chickens since I found out you could have them in the city, we’ve just been waiting for the right place and now that we have one – chicken it is!We finally had our first weekend together as a family and so we loaded up and headed to the feed store to pick up some chicks. Everly was so excited, we had been talking about ‘chichens’ all week.So many to choose from! We picked four and brought them home. Our main criteria was a ‘quiet breed’ to keep the neighbors happy. Ok, color coordination might have had something to do with it too – because I’m always a little bit aware of aesthetics.I think Everly forgot about the chicks by the time we got home because all she wanted to do was hold the chirping box. But then… She was so excited to hold them. That all changed once they started flapping their wings, then she was content to just pet them and watch from a safe distance. She loves her new ‘birdies’. We can’t wait for delicious fresh eggs!This handsom guy was a part of the fun too. I think his fluffy hair resembles the chicks, what do you think?