Friday Favorite: Old Photos
Four or five years ago I went through all of our old family slides and picked the best ones to be digitized. I sent them off to a small company in California and they returned them on a DVD. Every now and then I love looking at them, there’s something so fun about them. Here are a few of my favorites (I’m the younger girl):
I’m hoping to be able to digitize a few more photos when I’m back in Ohio later this year, there are so many and it’s always more convenient to have them on the computer. Not only that, they’re backed up several places for safe keeping!
Have you taken steps to preserve some of your old family photos?
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Ahhhhhhhh
Yesterday was a busy day for us, we left the house early in the morning (after feeding all the animals and walking the dogs). We spent all day running here there and everywhere. Our first stop was a restaurant supply store because we needed to purchase a few supplies for our pig slaughter (which is scheduled for this weekend). Next we stopped at a trailer store and purchased a small utility trailer which we’ve been sorely needing with our small cars. We then headed up to the grain mill to stock up on animal feed, 1000 lbs of which was loaded up in the car & trailer. While there, I stopped by a small yarn shop to pick up a few skeins of yarn.
We then headed down to the hardware store to purchase a few items needed to turn our back porch into a slaughter house. When we finally arrived home late at night a quick supper was in order since Mr Chiots had a fire dept. meeting. Thankfully I was able to finally get my feet up not much after that. Dexter also wanted to help wind the yarn I purchased, but he didn’t quite understand how to do it.
We like to maximize our trips for gas and time and thus about once a month we have to spend an entire day running errands to get supplies like feed and other necessities. It makes for a long day, but it does save from having to make shorter trips more often. The gas savings are also appreciated!
Do you like to make errands weekly or do you like to save them up and get them all done at once?
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Fermented Chicken Feed
I’ve been reading about chicken nutrition for a long time, in my reading I came across fermentation of feed. Since I know how healthy fermented foods are for humans, I decided to give fermenting a try for the chickens. My chickens have been on my own homemade chicken feed for six months now and they’re all thriving.
I noticed a few changes when I started my chickens on fermented feed. For starters, the yolks on their eggs are much bigger than they used to be. They also have much smaller poop, oh yeah, and it doesn’t stink like it used to. I’m not really surprised by this, the same thing happened when we put our pets on raw food.
Not only are they healthy and happy, they’re still laying like champs. I’m getting 12-15 eggs per day from my 18 layers, some of which are older ladies.
I mix grain from a local grain mill, mostly wheat and oats that are fermented for 5 days in a big bucket by the wood stove in the kitchen. The chickens LOVE the fermented grain, the ducks to too, so do the guineas, and the pigs. Everyone gets fermented grains.
This feed is local and organic, I also love that it’s soy, corn and GMO free. The best part is that it’s 85% cheaper than the organic layer feed I used to purchase. It even costs me less than conventional chicken feed would, about 50% less than that, you can’t beat that. Healthy chicken and more money in my wallet! If you have chickens and want to know all about it, I’ll be recording a podcast about this as well and writing a post about it soon.
Have you ever heard of fermenting chicken feed?
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Winter Crafting
I’m pretty excited about winter to arrive. While I’m still spending every spare hour of daylight working outside, the sun sets at 4:30 so I have a good portion of time in the evenings. Usually I catch up on work and write my blog post, then I have a little extra time or reading or crafting. This winter I’m planning on making a quilt from old clothing and I’d like to crochet a wool afghan for the living room.
I haven’t crocheted in years (except for a scarf I made Mr Chiots a few years ago), so I need to brush up on my skills. I purchased Reader’s Digest COMPLETE GUIDE TO NEEDLEWORK: Embroidery, Needlepoint, Knitting, Applique, Quilting, Patchwork, Macrame, Crochet, Rug-Making, Lacework, which is the book my mom owns and the one I originally taught myself to crochet from.
To get back into the swing of thing, I’m going to be making myself a scarf. Yesterday I found this scarf pattern, which should be perfect for this lovely handspun wool lavender yarn from a farm in Ohio.
The past couple evenings I’ve been practicing my stitches, in the next couple days I’ll start my scarf.
Do you have any crafty winter hobbies?
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Cultivate Simple 53: Reading is FUN
On this weeks episode talk about some of the books we love to read and listen to. We also answer some questions from last weeks podcast. If you add any of these books to your personal library, be sure to use our Amazon Affiliate Link. It doesn’t cost you anything but put a bit of change toward the blog and podcast.
For those of you looking to increase your cast iron collection and want a larger pan, I highly recommend the Lodge Cast Iron Pizza Pan. It’s a nice size for cooking loads of food, works beautifully for roasting in the oven and I use it on the stovetop for heating up our pizza.
For those of you wanting the skillet cookie recipe here it is: One Pan Dark Chocolate Chip Cookie Skillet
Some of Susy’s favorites:
Some of Brian’s favorites:
Classics that we LOVE
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:16:46 — 53.4MB)
