Late TUSAL and some progress

This spring has been incredibly turbulent for us! One thing after another. Last week, my brother-in-law had a stroke. It turned out to be a relatively small one. He was very lucky. It totally upset all of us though. Thankfully he is home now and doing well.
Anyhow, here is my very late TUSAL.

Lots of orange from the pumpkins and her hair.

I completely underestimated how long this design would take to complete. All of those swirling vines, etc take a lot of looking at the chart, which slows things down. The basket also took forever. I know there are many mistakes in that basket, but they will have to stay there! LOL!

For a long time, we have wanted to have chickens. Years ago when we moved in, there were chickens living on the property. They had basically gone wild. Needless to say, they did not meet with a good end with all the raccoons around here.
Keith was furloughed from his job for 3 weeks in April. This came as a surprise to us. We certainly were not ready for it. Financially we took quite a hit, but we made use of the time to construct a chicken coop. We had fun doing this!
We ordered the day-old chicks from McMurray Hatcheries. We ordered the "Rainbow Layers" mixture. Looking at them now, I cannot believe they came in this little box. Here I am picking them up at the Post Office.


 We got them April 1st, so they spent the first month of their lives in a plastic box in my foyer.

It is amazing how quickly they grow. They seem to double every other day. We were up to three containers before they were big enough to put them outside (Thank God)!

It was not without its harrowing moments!

Here they are at 4 weeks old, finally out in the coop.

The weather has been warm, so we have been experimenting with letting them out of the pen. Of course this required putting up fencing to keep them out of the neighbor's yard. We still have more areas to fence, but so far they seem to keep to the wooded areas in the yard. I have to keep an eye out for hawks though. We have quite a few of them here.
Here is a picture of Millie that I took this morning:

They will be 9 weeks old tomorrow. They should start laying eggs between 22 and 24 weeks. We should have eggs by October!

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Keith harvested the first honey of the season. We got about 40 bottles. We were hoping for more, but it seemed like a short spring for the flowers. Hopefully, we can harvest again around the 4th of July. The bees seem happy though.
Back soon!
Erica