Friends and family

my going away party

 Family and friends, the most important thing to me and my greatest motivator, besides God of course. 

My church was small, I became friends with all the teens there. We were a crazy group that had the best of times together, parties, youth events, and church. We would always be in our circle talking about the stupid and funny stuff that we did or didn’t do. 
Those were some of the best days of my life. But as I have discovered this past year, things change. My friend Abby went away to collage in California, and I left, and not long after that a really good friend of mine left my old church too. Our lives would never be the same again, for the people who left and the people who stayed.
But we will always remember our good times and hope God blesses us with more.

youth trip.

 I don’t get to see my BFF very much, once a week, and we can’t hang out, and hardly have time to talk. I miss her so much. <3

My other group of friends was at my co-op, that was even a crazier group of kids we had a blast, most of us were in drama(so fun) and did comedies for gallery day. 

My friends are true friends that I can count on, and even though I’ve lost contact with most of them I know they were and are trues friends.

My going away party was a blast I had a whole bunch of my teenage friends over, and we played games, ate food, and stood around the little contained fire. My friends are the best and most of them Christians. My dad says he loves it when I get together with my friends because its so different from when normal teenagers get together. 
So to all my friends out there I love you and miss you all! And thanks to Abby, Ellie, Ryan, Amber, and all my other friends for helping me adjust to my new life.

And my family, gosh i miss them. I love my family and my little cousins, they are the best. 

Two of my cousins Rose and Elanor who are 6 and 4, they are my joy, we love to play together and do all kind of fun stuff and dress up, and I used to baby sit them all the time. After I moved I heard my aunt talking about how she was having two teenagers from her homeschool group baby sit Rose and Elanor, that did more than break my heart.

My cousins and me.

Two girls that my aunt had never meat were going to babysit MY cousins, I should be babysit them! But I knew I couln’t , and that made me want to cry.

All my cousins seem to get bigger every time I see them! My cousin Adam, gosh he gets taller every time I see him, he is seven and I still remember holding him on my lap when he was little. I was little too! I would have only been 7 or 8.

 I love my cousins so much! And I miss my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and ALL of my cousins, some of which are in TX, and some in PA. 

So love to all of my family <3!

Family and friends mean the world to me. People who don’t have time for friends or family have no life! 

God gave us family and friends to be there for us and for us to be there for them. Family and friends are a gift from God don’t keep love them and appreciate them. 

Victoria. . .

Eggs

Eggs. Everyone uses them, eating, baking,  and cooking. They're a basic staple to life. Something that is always on your grocery list.

Unless you have you own chickens. With our own chickens we don’t have to buy eggs from the store, except for the off season for the chickens (winter).

left is our egg, right is store egg

We get nearly six eggs a day, which means 28-42 eggs a week. Yes this number varies much because our chickens are still coming back from their slow winter.

But that is still a lot of eggs! 

And we get to choose what goes into the chickens and that decides the quality of the eggs, you feed a chicken awful food you get and very low quality egg, you feed a chicken good food and let it forage for the rest you get a high quality egg that is worth the title Good. 

Also the taste of our eggs to the taste of store eggs, even the Wegmans organic, is so much better. And we can tell the difference. One egg yolk is even brighter and healthier looking than the the other can you guess which? Our egg. The bright orange one. 

Eggs are kind of like raw milk, if you don’t get them from a animal that has been treated right and given the right kind of food, space, and outdoors you're going to get net very nice result. When I was a kid I hated milk, I never put it on my cereal and NEVER drank it, but after my mom started getting raw milk it was beyond good, it was wonderful!Same with the eggs I never really ate eggs much, and didn’t really enjoy them when I did. So after awhile my mom convinced me to try one of our egg (I had used them for baking and such but never to eat by itself) and I did and LOVED it! 

When you get milk and eggs from the grocery store you're not getting the real thing, you're getting a pathetic imitation that was given to you the cheapest way possible. Not the way God intended them to be. 

So love and care for your chickens(if you have any) the right way =)

Victoria. 

Differences

City vs. Country

They are completely different life styles with many different kinds of people and places.

1. City is loud - Country is quiet.

2. City life is always go, go ,go - Country life you have time to relax.

3.City life everything is at you doorstep - Country life you have to drive aways to get places.

4. Citys there is more buildings - Country there is more space.

5. City you don't have lots of land - Country you do.

6. City there is not much wildlife - country theirs lots.

And the list goes on. Good things about the country and city, bad things about the country and city.
I've been out here a total of 7 months and I'm already a country girl. maybe I always was. When I lived in the city I never minded getting dirty, I always liked outside, I loved animals, and always just wanted to run, but I was trapped by my small city backyard. I never knew how much I would love it out here until I came.

That's a difference in me that I never thought I would see. Some of us are born to be city people, some are destined to the hills of growing land. Where do you belong? 

God will show you, he showed me.

Victoria

Co Co

Today my subject was chickens, and now my subject is Co Co.
The little fuzzy foot rooster was our favorite. He was so cute, the way he tried to crow in the morning with a little voice that almost squeaked.
After dinner I went to try on the new dress I got today and show it to my dad.
When I came out after hearing crying from my brother Co co was dead. Dead, an never coming back.
My dog had got him. He was done for quickly
and and anything but pleasantly.
One other of our minis is missing and we have reason to believe my dog might have gotten it too. We won't know until night fall, but we have searched high and low for it. They usually stay with the others. please pray for us.

Victoria

Chickens

Chickens. It was one of our number one priorities when we moved and sure enough only a month after we moved we owned chickens! 

Six total (then)

We never could have know we were heading for something much, much bigger.

As we watched our six laying hens get bigger and lay their first eggs we discovered how interesting and funny chickens are. If you don't own chickens you will never know what this is like, but surprisingly they are so fascinating! We can watch them forever just as they go about their daily lives. And we also learned things about chickens I never would have guessed: 

1. Chickens are cannibalistic by nature
2. The sound you usually link with a chicken ( Bok, bok, bok) is called the egg song and it is sung when chickens are about to lay their eggs or they are practicing for when they lay their first egg
3. chickens get themselves clean by bathing in dust.

A few months after we got our first chickens we had already named them all and dropped their names because there was only one unique one in the batch. We named the one unique Skittles because she was so skittish when we first got her. The name stuck and she became our favorite.

 One day I was sitting on the couch watching TV when I heard a weird noise outside, I got up and looked, I began shouting and screaming, Skittles had gotten into the dogs fenced in yard and Levi (our dog) had a hold of her and was trying to drag her off the deck. I had reason to scream, my dog, though a city pup all his life is the best bird catcher there is! In our small neighborhood yard he brought down countless birds, a bunny, and a few possums. But that’s another story.

What mattered most was I knew Levi could kill her and it wouldn’t be a pleasant death. My mom, brother and I went thundering out and Skittles got away from Levi and got under the deck where he couldn’t get her. Feathers were everywhere, allover the deck and Levi had feathers hanging out of his drooling mouth. In the end Skittles suffered minor injuries and returned to her flock a few days later. 

the chickens

Since the first six chickens came they haven’t seemed to stop! And we now have 41 chickens! Still only six are laying eggs, the rest are to small, and we have many roosters that need to be sold and a few hens that we are getting rid of too. 

When our flocks kept increasing and we kept hatching more we had to come up with names for our groups. So here it goes from largest to smallest all the chickens we have:

The Chickens-

These are our first six and the only ones laying eggs at the moment.

But still most of the time that's one egg from each, every day! 

We have three speckled, two black, and Skittles who is also black but a different kind. 

The Little's-

the Littles and a few Minis

All but one of these almost chickens we ordered and we got them three days after they were hatched! The one we did hatch was in the first batch of eggs my mom ever hatched we got one boy and one girl sadly the girl chick died a few days after it hatched. So the little boy has grown up to be another one of our favorites and we call him Lincoln, he is the same kind of chicken as Skittles and we hope to breed them when Lincoln gets older.

The Minis as babys

The minis- 

Yes the minis, recently set free In to the outdoors after being cooped up(ha ha) in a brooder in the work shop for weeks. These adorable things are now big enough to go out side.

Watching them forage is such a joy and they are so Cute! 

The new ones- 

Yesterday we picked up week old chicks! They are so cute! Sadly though these chicks will grow up to be meat birds. But I know some chicken has to die for me to eat it so I would rather it be the Organic home raised chicken from my backyard than a miserably mistreated chicken from some chicken plant. 

The hatching- 

The New ones

And last but not least my mom is doing a Easter hatch along on the online forum she belongs to, everyone who is participating in the hatch along sets their eggs on the same day and they will all hatch on Easter! Well my moms are going to hatch the day before Easter because we have places to go on Easter and we can’t be at home staring in the incubator! 

So do you think I have enough chickens? So do I! 

But guess what? Were getting more! 

My mom calls it chicken math so here is the equation for my family 

6 chickens + my family + land = 41 chickens

It was almost like we had none and then we had to many! But it’s to late now. 

It seems like a complicated equation but it’s not.
 Here is a hint there's no math involved! Once you get chickens you will know what I mean.

I would love to sit here and tell you all about my cool chickens more but you would never get to the end of this post. =)

So stay tuned for more chicken updates in May. 

Victoria.....sorry about the delay. =(

Buzzy Bees

Yes my family is determined to be as self reliant as possible! 

We have Chickens, a garden in progress, baby fruit trees, and Bees! 

Well...we don’t have them yet. They are due to arrive, all 24,000 of them, on Saturday April 5. Yep this Saturday my home takes one more step to self reliance. 

And amazingly it’s only been 7 1/2 months! 

To tell the truth I’m a little scared of Bees, but I know that if I don’t mess with them they won’t mess with me. 

And with the scary disappearance of most of the honey bees it almost seems like an obligation, if you have the land for it, to help pollinate.

To anyone who is unaware of our daunting lack of honey bees you should watch this movie. 

The Vanishing of the Bees

And even if you DO know about the disappearing of the bees you should still watch this. It bring the seriousness of this situation in to better light.

Sadly since I have no bees yet I can not write about the personal experience of having bees, what it sounds like, what it looks like etc...

But I am looking forward to golden honey right from our own beehives! There’s nothing better than your own honey( if your raising the bees right) 

I know it is going to be weird and different having bees. Listening to their buzz and see them flying all around. I do know that soon we wont have to buy gallons of honey from Costco (my family eats a lot of honey)! 

God made bees for a very important job so let’s thank Him for them!

Victoria 

Apple trees

Apple trees seem to be the main income in the little town of Gore VA. And though I have not personally seen these apple trees in bloom I know they are going to be magnificent. 

Standing on top of a hill near here you look down and see miles of apple trees, unique houses dotting the land. Even now when the trees are bare and they are just the frames that will one day produce beauty and  fruit, they look magnificent marching in their neat rows over hilltop after hill top. I’ve seen them in their summer green, their fall harvest, and winter skeleton. 

I am waiting for their spring bloom! I’m really hoping they bloom soon. If they do I’ll post pictures.

Apple Tree Market

When I moved here I knew I would encounter little hole in the wall grocery stores and convenience stores and have to get used to the rough edges of the country. But, there is a place less than 20 miles from my house that is one of the coolest, well kept, wonderful little store/ common market type place I’ve been. City or country! 

This local family run business is one of the best out there. 

They have fresh local produce, freshly baked pies and breads, trickling springs ice cream, meat, eggs, milk, honey, locally made art and decor, and a whole lot more!

 The little store had a big impact on this city girl. I loved it right from the start and was always trying to make excuses to go there and get something yummy. And after the seemingly long off season for the store they are open again! 

If you live anywhere near Gore Va or are going to be passing by on a trip you NEED to stop here! I highly recommend them. It is great place that will impress you! 

So click this link to see their Facebook page =)

https://www.facebook.com/appletreefarmmarket