Vintage Home and Farm

Meet Captain, the meanest rooster this side of the Rockies. Captain drew blood today. Twice.  On two different unsuspecting souls. First Captain lit into my husband while he was out refreshing the chicken water.  Then after I got home from work, Captain clobbered me while I was refilling the chickens' ground oyster shell. (The chickens require calcium to produce eggs with thick, healthy shells, and oyster shell is a great way to feed them calcium.) I usually protect myself from Captain by holding a snow shovel in front of me while I go through the coop and chicken run.  He respects the shovel.  Mind you, I've never hurt him with the shovel (or with anything else -- I just hold it there in front of me and he keeps his distance).  Unfortunately, I mistook how far away Captain was when I turned and bent down to shake some oyster shell from the bag into their bowl.  Suddenly, from out of nowhere, Captain was behind me and kicking my ass with the spurs on the backs of his leg

It's been a lovely Easter spent with family and friends here at Vintage Home and Farm.  Late this afternoon, we went for a long walk.  When we returned home, my daughter and I were inspired to take a few photos capturing spring's renewal.  We didn't have to go far - we headed out into the yard. Cherry blossoms are beginning to fall like snow from an old tree near our driveway. I noticed that the lilacs are covered with tightly closed blossoms.  I'm eager for the blossoms to open and fill our yard with the lovely sweet scent of lilacs. The garden is doing well.  Here is the side garden, with lushly growing sage, parsley and rhubarb. I've never seen rhubarb bolt and flower like this before. Looks like I need to do some research on it to figure out what to do next year, as I'm pretty sure there won't be much of a rhubarb harvest now.  The flowers are pretty, though. Other signs of life in the garden include on

My daughter picked a dandelion today.  When she was three years old, she gathered handfuls of the cheerful weed whenever we went outside.  Now that she's in her teens, it was a bit unusual for her to bring us a flower of this sort -- until we saw the flower.  What a strange dandelion! It was growing in our field next to the horse pasture.  When I saw this flower, I remembered snapping a photo last spring of the horse pasture when there were a billion "wishes" growing in it. It was early morning and I was heading in to work.  All I wanted to do in that moment was run through the field and scatter the wishes into the air.  Instead, I got out of the car and went over to the fence to take this photo. I'm thinking this dandelion is the result of five or more seeds growing in one spot, merging all their flower stems and producing a blended row of flowers. Thought this odd flower was worth sharing!

To get a jump-start on the growing season, we started a number of vegetable plants from seed inside the house. We have a perfect southern-exposure window that gets sun all day long. Two grow lights at the top of a metal rack helps the tomato and pepper plants on cloudy days. The tomatoes have been transplanted twice now to larger pots. My garden diary is filled with notes about what has been planted and the empty seed packets are stuffed inside (I keep the empty envelopes so I can recall which seeds I used if they do well).  I also use the diary for tracking what seeds are in seedling trays so that I don't have to use plant labels until the seeds have actually germinated. Today I filled 72 more seed pods. It's getting kind of late to start more seeds in the house, but I'm anxious for the May planting season to arrive. I've used up all of the garden pots that I have, and so we've moved on to re-purposing yogurt containers into garden pots. Actu

We're trying to produce more of our own food on our farm.  So far, that's meant a large vegetable garden, fruit trees, and eggs from our lovely flock of chickens.  Now, we've decided to stop buying bread, crackers, tortillas, chips and other baked goods at the store, and instead bake our own. A bit more planning is involved, specially since I'm the one whose idea this was and who enjoys doing the baking.  I work full time, and so this means finding time on the weekend to do most of the baking that we need to get us through the week. We had a major chocolate craving on Friday night, and so my daughter and I baked a beautiful chocolate cake. This was a vintage recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook - "Black Midnight Cake" with cocoa frosting.  We had a little bit of shredded coconut left in the fridge, and so we sprinkled it in the middle of the cake (on top of the frosting that is in the middle) and also on top. Mmmm...so yummy.  I put it in t

A few hundred yards from our driveway is a 45-mile paved trail that winds its way along the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Port Angeles to Port Townsend.  With today's partly sunny skies, it seemed the perfect day to explore nature along the path by bike. We usually take the path that heads west, where we are quickly immersed in a mile of forest before the terrain opens up to reveal a rocky shoreline. As soon we reach the trail head, we walk the wooden planks of a trestle bridge that spans Morse Creek. The bridge affords views up and down the swollen creek, where snow melt and recent rain have caused the water to rush rapidly out to the Strait.  We stop a moment to enjoy the views. Then we head into the woods. Along our route, we notice that several small waterfalls trickle down the steep, saturated cliffs, which have been crumbling and sliding down into the sea. Someone has come along and blazed the path back through the mud. The forest has now opened up t