Update from Kelley Corner Farm

I know it's been awhile... but we have been having a fun and busy summer! We enjoyed our month long visit with our dear friends the Everitt's from CA! We played, we swam, we ate, we even went on a three day camping trip to VT! Of course I am a nut and seemed to forget my camera every time we were together!!! I will link to their blog when she posts some pics (hint, hint, hint).
This month we have had the pleasure of watching our baby cousin Benjamin! He is such a little cutie pie! The kids loved playing and talking with him, especially the girls! In June we had a specially delivery from a friend who was getting rid of her chickens! Two Silver Laced Wyandottes and two little Bantam Sebrights! They traveled to our house in the back of Daddy's truck in cat carriers!

Here is one of the Bantam Sebrights. The bantam chickens are 1/4 to 1/2 the size of a regular chicken making them super cute and easy to handle! The coloring on these are so pretty too!

They seemed to quickly make themselves at home!

Lucy our watch dog seemed to like them too, the other chickens though were another story! Miss Golden Feathers (in the background) is a super big bully and is definitely at the top of the pecking order! The two groups (old and new) stayed away from each other for about a month but now seem to be getting along much better!

We have been having an issue with our beautiful yellow tomatoes! At first I thought it was the chickens so we put a two foot fence around the garden to keep them out. When the tomatoes continued to be munched more and more each day I figured out it was a chipmunk! Online I read that they will eat juicy produce from your garden when the weather is dry and they are looking for water!

I decided to try a remedy suggested by an online garden site! Hot pepper and water sprayed on your tomatoes!! It worked for a day or two and then I realized I needed to make another batch and re-apply!

Everything in the garden is looking great this year! Including the sunflowers:

It is so nice to have fresh flowers on the table!

I have been canning like crazy! Three kinds of pickles, zucchini relish, peaches picked from a farm in Maine, crab-apple butter and jelly!

Mollie is becoming our resident "Chicken Lady"! She loves to capture them and lug them around the yard. The other kids do also, in fact I found Ethan on the deck swing with "Penguin" one of our Black Australorps!

Pat finished the egg boxes yesterday afternoon! We located them inside the shed on the wall shared with the coop so they wouldn't take up any floor space in the coop.

To my surprise some very large chickens were staring back at me!!!

Also to my surprise... as soon as the boxes were finished I located our first egg!!! It was on the floor in the coop when I went inside to inspect what the boxes looked like! I guess we finished them just in time!!!

Hope everyone is having a great summer! I am planning to keep the updates coming and not have such a long "dry spell".

PS- What do you think our "farm" name? I know we are not really a farm but it is fun to have a name and pretend right? It does feel "farmish" this year with chickens running around in the yard and the garden doing so well!