Vintage Home and Farm

We started off the day picking pie cherries from one of our trees and baking a pie.  These were the first pie cherries I'd ever had.  I was dismayed at first when I tasted a cherry fresh from the tree -- they are indeed horribly sour and not palatable as fresh fruit.  Pie cherries are very different from the sweet Rainier and Bing Cherries I've grown up eating fresh by the handful.  Today's pie was an experiment to see if it was worth the effort of picking more than a bowl full. Well, I can tell you, sour cherry pie is delightful. The cherries are slightly tart but well balanced by the cinnamon and sugar in the filling. The sweet and tart taste reminds me a little bit of rhubarb pie. The small tree out by our old milking shed is just loaded with cherries, which made it easy to quickly gather more.  After picking two more big bowls of the cherries, I pitted them and stashed them away in the freezer for future pies. At noon, it was time to he

We needed to build a few more nesting boxes for the chicken coop, and rather than go out and buy wood, we decided to re-purpose a pink 1950s-era bookshelf that was in the cellar.  There's already an abundance of shelving down there for my canning, and so the pink shelf seemed better suited as nesting boxes. It worked out quite well.  All we did was lay the bookshelf onto its side and fill the openings with straw. Our five new hens instinctively knew what to do.  They quickly made themselves comfortable in their new nests, and within a few days one of them had laid an egg. I have never seen such a tiny chicken egg. Our older hens didn't start out with such little eggs. We're not sure which hen laid it. It's almost too cute to eat.  Almost.