Quail~

 Last summer I bought about 20 Coturnix Quail. They live in our aviary with the doves and pigeons. The quail occupy and lay their eggs under pine & fir boughs on the floor of the aviary .

Quail eggs are extremely nutritious. "Quail eggs are incredibly nutritious , and even more nutritious than a full-size chicken egg !  Quail eggs are higher in iron,folate, and B12." ( Quoted from article written about quail in the Spring 2019 'Backyard Poultry' by Amy Fewell .)

My husband has been making tasty treats with my quail eggs. In a week or so I will try to incubate the eggs to produce a new generation of quail for our home because quail have a very short lifespan of about 2 years and my quail are almost a year old.

 This is a picture of our aviary taken in February. We had snow until this month. We still have snow in our woods and some of the lower hills. Our aviary is in our front yard and we can view it from our windows and the front porch.

The quail share their side of the aviary with my white ring-neck doves and 1 Frillback pigeon. The other side of the aviary houses 2 pairs of Frillback pigeons and 1 pair of King pigeons.

Easter Blessings

 We celebrated Easter on Palm Sunday this year. Our sons and their families are celebrating with their other grandparents on Easter but thankfully they were able to be with us last Sunday. Easter is our Christian celebration of the resurrection of our Lord & Savior, and truly is celebrated by us with thanksgiving and praise all year long.

 Our home is very small , but the size does not limit us to sharing meals with those we love and care about. We just bring out the portable buffet table and set it up in the living room.

 I set the table with the china my Aunt Ruby and cousin Christine gave me. It was Aunt Ruby's china for many years. She celebrated her 100th birthday in 2017.Ruby's daughter Christine threw an amazing party for her mother, and Aunt Ruby had all her "faculties" and was able to visit with her many loved ones and friends. ( Aunt Ruby has since passed on into eternity and I remember her as a very special blessing in my life.)

 The china pattern is Spode's "Rosebud Chintz" from Copeland, England . I have the teapot and gravy boat too !

 There were only 5 grandkids here for this year's Easter egg hunt.My husband hid the eggs all over our front pasture. I suspect the older children in this picture won't be hunting for Easter eggs much longer, but the youngest little guy in the picture, our youngest grandchild, has a blast hunting for Easter eggs. ( When did our grandchildren grow up so fast ?)

 Easter Eggs !

"I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me shall live even if he dies,and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die."  Jesus ~ John 11 :25, 26

It's That time of Year Again ... Lambing Time !

 Our oldest grandson was here visiting us over his spring vacation. I can't believe our very first grandchild is old enough to drive himself here over the mountains and far away from his home to visit us and help us out, but he is, and he did. He has helped us install the fencing around our pastures amongst other labor intensive work projects at our new home. Here he is holding newborn twin lambs.

 A new lamb learning to nurse. ~This is Miriel, one of my Jacob Sheep ewes. She also gave birth to twins , both ram lambs ( boys). Thus far I have been very busy with lambing time, and also incubating and raising my new laying flock and also raising 100 fryer / broiler chicks for our freezer. Until mid-June I am going to be one busy lady tending new lambs, chicks, and hopefully my geese and ducks are successful at hatching out their own eggs. We'll see. Spring has definitely sprung and the snow has almost melted around Laughing Dove Farm.

Thus far I have 11 new sets of twins and a set of triplets. I have 5 more ewes left to have their lambs and I am very thankful God has allowed all of my lambs to be born healthy and they're thriving. God is so good to me , beyond anything I deserve. Praise Him !

I Have to JUST Do It ! ( Blog)

One of the last times I posted on my blog I wrote about my dog Whimsy and a walk in our woods with her. Whimsy is still a big part of our lives and here she is as she followed me around just a few days ago. You can see in the background we still have snow here at Laughing Dove Farm.

 The view from my wool shop porch shows a lot of snow in our driveway, across the pastures, and the snow covered hills just across the gravel road that runs in front of our home. ( And there is still snow on the porch , it just drifts in.)

 This is our front pasture. It is in front of our home, the gravel road, the road to our home, runs parallel to it . There are hills and mountains just across this gravel road and bountiful wild life, including moose, bear, deer, elk, coyotes, wolves, cougars, lynx, bobcats, and numerous wild fowl. ( We have captured more than a few of these on our own woods' game cams.)

 Last year I acquired two Finn sheep ewes. I have needed much more white wool than my Jacob sheep provide and bought Mona & Martha. They are due to have lambs any time now, and this will be their first time having lambs. I am pretty excited about this. Here Mona & Martha are enjoying sunshine , WARM sunshine after our very cold and frozen weather.

 Britta is one of my Jacob sheep ewes ( female) and she and her sister Jacob sheep are all due too. I have a total of 17 ewes due to have their lambs within the next 2 or 3 weeks. I will not be getting much sleep in the next few weeks.

 It has been awhile since I blogged. Every day I think about blogging and what I might write, but then I have been away from my blog for so long I don't know where to begin. ( This is the view from our driveway on a very cold and frozen February day last month.) Today I decided to JUST DO IT !

This is our driveway only a month ago. The driveway is still snow and ice covered and my blue truck is firmly entrenched in ice just waiting for our spring thaw . This past weekend I saw my first robin of spring, and yesterday the swallows had returned. The ice and snow are melting, we'll be maneuvering around big puddles soon and the snow melt from the hills and mountain across our road flows down our driveway, through our pastures, into our creek, then into our pond and over and through our neighbors' farms.

We've been loving winter here, and are now excited about spring. We've ordered way too many seeds , and know we'll not be able to plant until at least mid April because our veggie garden still has over 3 feet of snow in it, but we've started seeds indoors in optimistic anticipation of a glorious and bountiful garden.

I am hoping to be consistent with my blogging, especially because my husband said he very much missed my blog posts. For no other reason alone I would blog, but I really miss my blogging friends. One of the main reasons I quit blogging was because I love reading and replying to other bloggers but for some reason my computer treated my responses and comments to other blogs as a virus and would not allow me to comment. ( I tried everything I could to figure out how to take care of that problem, even consulted an"expert" who could not help me at all.) I am going to blog away again and work on being able to comment on the blogs I especially miss.

That being said, we are very much loving our new home and even though we're retired, we're busier than ever, but now we're busy doing what we've deemed important to us and our family, and if we want to take a day off and go fishing or camping, we do !

A Walk In The Woods With Whimsy

I took a walk in our woods with my dog Whimsy .

I have a pack for her to wear and she carries our water bottles. For this hike I also tucked 2 bags of cut up pumpkins and squashes from our garden into the pack. I scatter the cut up fall produce for the wild turkeys and deer that live in our woods, they LOVE squash and pumpkin.

Isn't it beautiful in the woods in the fall ?

This is the view of the back of our home from our woods. Just look at the fall splendor in front of our home. 2 weeks ago there was snow covering those hills .

Whimsy with her now empty pack. She always enjoys our walks and I love having her along.

The Grand Show

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere ; the dew is never dried all at once ; a shower is forever falling ; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise , eternal dawn and gloaming , on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." ~ John Muir

This is a picture I took of sunrise at our place from the living room window on the first day of autumn , my favorite season.

Pumpkin Time !

 " October is the jewel set in the hand of time."  Gladys Taber

 October finally brought in real autumn weather here in north-eastern Washington , here at our new home, in our fields, our forest, our gardens. I remember anew why autumn is my favorite season.

 Look at all the pumpkins and squashes we've harvested ! The pumpkins and squashes in the pictures are just a few of the pumpkins we harvested from our own vegetable garden.

 Here is the garden this month. The cornstalks are dry and ready for us to cut and use to decorate porch posts but before they dried up they produced a great amount of very sweet corn . The corn was truly the very best sweet corn I've ever eaten. Maybe it is true sweet corn fresh-picked from the garden and cooked right away IS the best .

You can see our fields and woods in the background. What you cannot see are the wild turkeys, pheasants, and deer we see in the fields every day from our windows. We have a hard time tearing ourselves away from the windows in the mornings as we sip our coffee while watching the wild life. We can also watch our sheep and chickens from the windows. And we watch the seasons change ...

 ...now turning green fields gold and brown, coloring the leaves bright orange , red, yellow, and brown before they're blown away making way for November's dark wet freezing ways. The pumpkins are frosted every morning and just a few days ago we had snow on the hills across our gravel road.

 I picked all our pumpkins and squashes last week to save them for our own use. We grew all our pumpkins and squashes from seed of the pumpkins and squashes we bought last year. I am particularly fond of the blue 'Meat Eater' squashes. They last for many months if stored in a cooler dry place and are quite tasty. ( I store them in the loft in my wool-working shed.)

 I decorated our front porch with a few pumpkins and squashes. During the afternoon hours our front porch is the warmest place around our home and our Viszla Hawk chooses to nap here. In the summer this porch is the perfect place for my husband and I to sip our morning coffee while watching my sheep and gazing at the hills and low mountains across the gravel road. ( The hills that had snow a few days ago.)

 " Pumpkins were a staple food for early Americans , who inherited the vegetable from the Indians, and learned many ways to cook it from the Indians , too. In those days pumpkin was cut in small pieces, strung on a cords and hung in front of the fireplace to dry, then stored for year-round use. Everything was made of pumpkin, from beverages to soup , from pie to bread, from custard to cake, and even a kind of flour. The pioneers tired of their diet of pumpkin, but they were saved from starvation in many a lean, cold winter."  from 'The New England Butt'ry Shelf Almanac by Mary Mason Campbell

My husband and I are especially thankful for our abundant pumpkin and squash harvest because not only do we love good baked squash smothered in butter and brown sugar, our chickens and sheep love the pumpkins and squashes cut up and raw. This helps us immensely with the feed bill and also provides them good nutrition to carry them through the cold winter months.

We are loving our new home and the very distinct seasons here and right now it is PUMPKIN TIME! 

" He causes the grass to grow for the cattle , and vegetation for the labor of man, so that He may bring forth from the earth , and wine which makes man's heart glad..." Psalm 104: 14,15