What Anna Taught Me 

Lessons learned tending a flock, WORKING our land, wrangling our kids, loving each other, succeeding, failing and making a life one season at a time. 

Some Like it COlD 

Chickens and ducks live together well, but they are not the same. Nothing makes this truth more clear than winter. Chickens take shelter inside, Ducks happily sit in wind, rain, snow, and ice. There is a certain beauty and madness to watching the ducks happily hang around in a snowstorm, but I mostly presume their chicken buddies assume they are quite insane!

Growing Roses is not for the faint of heart

Roses, like life,  require pruning. The more mercilessly you remove the dead weight of spent branches and expired blooms, the more you will be rewarded with the glorious bounty of roses. But it took me a long time to trust myself enough to prune a rose bush with as much authority as it truly needed. This is true for my life as well. 

jumping the chick

You know you are country, truly country, when you take your chickens on a field trip.  And even though my husband is trying to hold onto his last shred of urban cool with that NAS t-shirt, this is the moment we jumped the shark-- or the chick- as the case may be. Anna's pre-school class was studying eggs- and chicks just as our first round of girls this spring was hitting the "teen chick" stage and was old enough to take a trip across town to visit a classroom full of three year olds.