What kind of chicken am I?

I am a cross between three different kinds of chickens.  Any guesses?

 

This is my mother or my aunt.  They are a cross between two different kinds of chickens.

I know most of you won’t care, but I think that the rooster is beautiful and he was hatched in our house so it is kind of different for me.  The hen is not much too look at but the two black hens gave us a lot of eggs over the last few years and we lost one this last summer during the heat wave.  They were one of the first chicks hatched when we returned from Arizona.  These pictures were taken last April when we still had green grass.

Random

I took the kids out the day before Thanksgiving to take pictures.  Next thing I know they are all grabbing pets to have their pictures taken also.  They turned out to be some of my favorites!

Amy is an Anatolian.  They are used to guard livestock.  We got rid of the livestock but got stuck with her because Mark bawled and bawled the day I tried to sell her.  Yeah, I gave in.  She refuses to come into the house which I am VERY grateful for because if you’ve ever seen our lawn when the weather warms up it looks like it snowed.  Seriously!

Teyla is a Cocker Spaniel.  She is dumb as a brick.  She drives everyone crazy, but is still very loved.

I told our vet that while we loved our other pets if anything ever happened to this dog the entire family would be devastated!!  He said, “so she’s in the will”?  Absolutely.  We have had Sydney for nine years this February and she has been the best dog.  She is half Blue Healer and half what looked like Australian Shepherd.



Justin, “put on your serious face Mark”.  A little too serious, but I love this picture.  We don’t have many good pictures of Sydney because she is afraid of the camera.  So this will be nice to have.

Halloween 2011

Alex and Mark getting into ‘character’.  Alex is a serial killer and Mark is a Zombie.

Mark’s face make-up turned out so cool!  It was even more awesome when his face started falling off toward the end of the party

I think Alex forgot what ‘character’ he was supposed to be.

This is Rebekah and her cousin as newborn vampires.  Yes, think ‘Twilight’.

Justin got home from work sometime after the party started.  Very proud of his Angry Bird in a Santa hat!!!

Mark’s pumpkin was a combination picture.  On one side he freehanded the Batman symbol and on the other he freehanded ‘Minecraft’.  It is a game.

Rebekah painstakingly traced this from a book we had and yours truly got the job of cutting it out.  First, we grew these pumpkins and the flesh was about two inches thick with a hard outer crust.  Second, it is kinda cool that you cannot tell that I lobbed off one of his horns and that his lower jaw was barely hanging on!!!

Sweet Potatoes

About a month before I planted the pumpkins, I planted some sweet potatoes.  There are only 5 vines in this box!!!  We did a little better with them than the pumpkins.  They were expensive to buy and we ‘might’ have gotten a little better yield if we had waited until the leaves turned.  Of course, we didn’t know when to pick them and the first one we found was HUGE.  It was a lot of work keeping both crops watered over the drought.  As it turned out we probably should have watered the pumpkins less, but we won’t know until we try again next year.  We tried these crops because the price of everything keeps going up and I thought we should try other things.  To be honest though, I HATE gardening in the summer and I even had to force myself to plant some lettuce this week.  It was fun trying new things!!

 

 

Uh oh!!  Turns out we did have to dig to find our treasure

Again, the cattle panel was to help keep chickens out.

Pumpkins

I planted 12 seeds.

We grew 10 plants. 

We harvest 3 pumpkins!!  Two big ones.

This little one grew into the cattle panel that we had covering the box to keep the chickens out.

It will be turned into the pie that John will be baking.

Delaware Hen & chicks

Justin posted this on face book, but I wanted to post this here as well.  I had decided to plant some lettuce in the garden and the chickens were EVERY WHERE!  This summer we had tried to contain them for a little while but they started dying from the heat, so we let them out again.  Monday night we gathered every last chicken up and a couple of turkeys and put them in the chicken run.  Wednesday afternoon this hen and her chicks showed up in the yard.  It was a shock to everyone.  She and her chicks are now safely in the brooder until they get a bit bigger.  This will give us time to get a fence around my garden, again.

Take off your glasses!

Rebekah was over at her Aunt Jeanie's house and all the girls were showing off how flexible they were.  Rebekah LOVES the fact that she can do this!