herb pics

Small bee pollinating my echinacae flower.

Are honey bees are busy working hard!! This is some Sumac that they are just crazy about! After this is done blooming I'm hoping they will move down to my herb garden and give it a little help.

Here is the front view of my herb garden. Some of the plants include: basil, pinapple sage, bee balm, St. John's Wort, Greek oregano, shasta daisy, Echinacae, Lavender, and also some blueberry bushes.

Herb garden

Side view of my herb garden. We also have white concord grapes across the rail in the back of my herb garden. They have yet to produce, but we are still hoping they will do something soon. They may not be getting enough sun, so I guess we will have to wait and see.

Garden & Herbs pics

It has been a while since I have posted. We have super busy here!! So much going on with the farm, garden, and not to mention with the kids! I haven't had much spare time lately!! Anyway, now that are garden is finally taking off here are some photos. I also took some pics of the my garden, it seems to be doing much better than last year. I attribute that to our new buzzing friends!! They are very busy pollinating everything around here. I really hope they move on down to the garden as well. Maybe this will be our best year yet?? I'm hoping for that.

Honey bees are buzzing!

This is our second attempt at honey bees. The first batch we got last Fall, but unfortunately, they didn't make it because they didn't have enough honey stored up to make it through the Winter. We even supplemented with sugar water, but I guess it wasn't enough for their survival. We ended up getting 4 frames of brood, worker bees, some drone bees, and of course one queen that were all local bees. The whole purpose of getting bees is to be able to help my son with his allergies. I have read numerous studies about how good raw honey is for allergies since the bees pollinate whats around your area. My son has horrible allergies to just about everything in our area, so maybe next year when we start getting honey it will help him. Honey is also good for making candles, soap, and for baking. I use it often in the place of sugar in my recipes. I just love it!!!

So far our bees are doing great!! I checked on them today and we had put a new frame in the hive a few weeks ago, and they are starting a a bee hive on it already!! They are very busy and productive right now. I practically need a smoker just to give them sugar water; they swarm real bad when I try to mess with them. I attached a few pics of my proud bee hive. We plan on selling honey some time next Aug. so they will have all Winter to eat and prosper. We don't want to take any honey this Summer because we are afraid they won't have enough to survive on for the Winter. Check the blog periodically for updates on the bees. We will probably add a Super this Summer to help make even more honey. Check back for raw honey for sale.

Family

Here are my youngest two. We were enjoying a day at the Memphis Zoo.
Here's my sweet little girl. She is 3.5. She never gets tired of pics as you can tell!!
Say Cheeeeeeeeeeze!!
Life is good!!
Dexter boy genius reading his book at the age of five. Yes, he is really reading!! He learned to read of the tender age of two!! He reads on a 5th to 6th grade level now. Smart boy!! I will have to homeschool him as the schools will not have the resources to help him excell. I can't imagine him starting kindergarden only to start learning the alphabet!! " Mrs. Tudor we need to see you for a conference again!" My poor boy would be in so much trouble because he would be bored out of his skull! LOL!!

Farm buddies

Here are more of our farm buddies. These are some pics of our khaki cambell, cornish/rock meat birds, and some are Dorking pullets and a couple of roos.

Farm animals

Here are our Spanish and our Hamburg roo. We think we probably have two Spanish hens, but we are not sure since they develop so slow.



Here is Cornelius our Rhode Island Red. What a proud boy!!

Here our all of our girls and our Wellsummer rooster. He is quite the beautiful boy!! We trade "Benny" for two khaki cambell ducks. Unfortunately, he was picked on by another roo so his tail feathers are gone!! He is impressive still! What's a few missing feathers right?

Whoops!! How did they get in there?? I guess we could consider them part of the crew!! LOL!! These are our two--Noah-5 and Micah is 3.5.

Here's my handsome husband, I'm not sure why he looks so mad though! LOL!! He is holding our Wellsummer rooster that we just got.

Here are some pics of all our crew we currently have on board. We hope to add even more to our chicken yard.

Huge egg laid by our Rhode Island Red

Woah!! That's one big egg!! No wonder she didn't lay two days later!!

Check this huge egg out!! I can't believe this came out of her!! Poor thing!! She just gave birth to like three eggs at once! When we did finally crack it(of course I had to eat it, I couldn't resist) it turned out to be a double yolker, we really thought it would have been a triple!! Nothing beats cracking one egg and getting two!

broody Wyndotte with turkey poult babies