Our broody hen



Abigail sitting on her clutch of eggs



   Abigail is our Giant white Hen, she is around 5 years old, maybe closer to 6. She is a lesson in buying baby chicks from a mixed group at a feed store. I wanted to add a few more chickens to my flock one spring and decided to just get 2 or 3 from a local feed store. They had a mixed group of "brown egg layers"

   I did not consider that they might not all be egg laying type and picked out 3 cute little fluff balls of unknown breed. Two of those fluff balls turned out to be meat birds, Abigail and our Dark Cornish hen Izzy. Technically they do lay brown eggs when they decide to lay but they are not good layers by any means!!! Just this year Abigail decided to go broody and she is currently sitting on three eggs we allowed her to have. If she stays with the eggs they should hatch around the 12th of September. I've never had a hen hatch out her own eggs so I am excited to see what happens! Keeping my fingers crossed :)

I admit it, I’m addicted to chickens. I love there silly antics, enjoy hearing the rooster crow, love the cute fluffy chicks, enjoy the fresh eggs and think they are just beautiful!! We have a limit on how many chickens we can have here but it’s really hard to stay within those limits. There are so many rare, unique and interesting breeds of chickens not to mention the fun of incubating or watching a mother hen being broody. I have to keep myself in check! We currently have 16 chickens, 4 of those are roosters. Our flock is a mixture of many breeds from the common Rhode island red and Barred rock to the ultra rare Gold Campine. This past spring I decided to try incubating and hatched 6 chicks, 3 roosters and 3 hens. Then our Giant White, Abigail, went broody. I’ve never had a broody hen so it was all new to me. At first we tried taking all the eggs away from her but she kept stealing new eggs, then we gave her some wooden eggs but she wouldn’t give up trying to hatch them. We were told we would either have to give her some eggs to hatch or separate her from the other chickens with no eggs until she stopped being broody. We finely gave in and let her have 3 eggs that we have put X’s on so we know which ones are hers and which are ours. We certainly do not need more chickens but I’m excited none the less. Now we wait!!

Arkansas- part 2

Our Arkansas Property in the Ozark Mountains

    We spent the rest of our vacation looking but none of the properties we saw was what we were looking for. The day came where we needed to pack up to leave and we decided it couldn’t hurt to call that land company about the property we found a few days earlier. We were shocked, not only was the price cheaper then all the other properties we had been looking at, the down payment was small, the interest rate was better then the banks and it was a simple loan we could pay off anytime without penalties!! It was perfect! We snapped it up and have never regretted it. It’s paid in full now and it’s a great feeling to have the empty canvas waiting for us to start homesteading on :)

Arkansas part 1

Your moving where? Why? That's the two questions we tend to get when we tell people we've bought land in Arkansas. I can't blame them, when we first started planning our homestead, Arkansas wasn't anywhere in our plans. We considered Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, we even considered Montana and north Idaho, but not Arkansas. I hardly knew the state existed! Then one year we wanted to take a vacation somewhere different then our normal trips to the east coast mountain ranges and an ad for Arkansas caught my attention. That year we went to the Ouchita (pronounced Washita) mountains near Paris, Arkansas. We stayed in a cute little cabin on someones farm and set off to explore this new land. We visited Magazine mountain and Devils Den, we explored more caves then I had ever seen before. There were beautiful, clear, cool lakes, creeks, drop offs that were down right scary and yet it was a little reminiscent of Florida where we currently lived. Even though it was very hot when we visited, the state was in a drought and I was attacked by some angry ground bees on one of our hikes, somehow I fell in love with the wildness and peaceful feeling that place gave me. My husband felt the same. After that I started researching properties in Arkansas and that's when I came across Mountain Home. Lakes, waterfalls, rivers, close to buffalo national park. It seemed like the perfect place to look and so we planned our next vacation to look at land there the very next year.
. I believe God opens doors when your willing to step out in faith and that is just what he did for us. We went up to look without enough money to buy a piece of land, we didn't even have the 50% down most banks required for land purchase. We figured we would just get an idea of what was available and go from there. The Realtors were probably the least helpful and least friendly I've ever came across anywhere, they handed us a list of properties for sale with some general directions and sent us on our way. We drove everywhere it seemed and saw some very beautiful country side. On a trips to look at a one of these properties another piece caught our eye, it was a beautiful field of lush, green grass with a for sale sign from a land company. We had a list of wants for our land, it had to be at least 1/2 pasture, it had to have some flat land to build on, it needed to be wide so we were not within spitting distance of our neighbors and we wanted a water source. This property had everything except the water source! We knew land companies were often more expensive with high interest rates and ridiculous terms, so we took down the number but did not call them at first. We kept looking...

What is homesteading?

  Homesteading, according to Wikipedia, is a lifestyle of simple self-sufficiency.
For my husband and I, it's all about cutting out the middle man, eating better, living closer to creation and living a better, less stressful, more fulfilling life with less money.
  Homesteading is not necessarily a thing that you do but a way of life that can be lived in the city apartment to the country spread and all levels in between. If you have the desire,  you can implement the homesteading life no matter where you live or what your level of health. Composting, backyard chickens and container gardening are just a few things that can be done by many people even without having much land.  Everyone envisions something different when you mention homesteading. When I think about homesteading, I think of gardens, livestock, orchards and a pantry full of homegrown food. Ask my husband and you'll hear about solar and wind power, efficient heating and cooling ideas and thoughts about building your own house and other structures.
  Don't be discouraged if your not quite where you think you should be, instead be creative and figure out how to implement your dream of homesteading right where you are!

The Dream

  Ever since I was in my early teens I had a dream of having a self sufficient homestead. I envisioned fields of green grass with contented cows for my dairy and beef. Happy chickens laying healthy eggs, goats being silly, lush gardens and productive orchards supplying all the food I could possibly eat. There would be a clean, clear, bubbling spring for water. Basically everything I needed to survive would be supplied from a piece of land that belonged to me. It was a big dream and I would fantasize about how perfect it would be. I studied breeds of animals and plants, theorized which climate would be the best and just couldn't wait to take an empty canvas of land and start making my masterpiece!!
  I like to blame my parents for putting the homesteading gene in me, especially my mother who should have been born in the pioneer days of log cabins, no electric and surviving off the land. We were very poor while I was growing up but it seemed she could make meals out of nothing. She would can our garden vegetables, make preserves from the wild berries we picked on the Virginia hillsides, make bread, sew cloths and many other incredible homesteader type things to keep her family happy and healthy. I'm sad to say I didn't pay attention to much of the inside things, I was too busy with the animals. Outdoors with the animals would be where you were likely to find me or roaming the hills or studying natural health. I am so glad my mother is still alive and kicking to help me actually learn all those things I should have learned long ago!
   Life has a way of getting in the way and that is just what happened when I turned 19.  I went to visit some family in another state and met this incredible man with much wisdom, great ideas and good looks to boot. We were married 16 months later. He had a good paying job and we decided to stay by his job until we were better set up to head to the homestead. Almost 14 years later we finely are within reach of getting onto our little Homestead dream, in the mean time we do our best to enjoy some urban homesteading right where we are....