Really nice shot of those eggs Nancy!! I am curious about what emerges from them too. I have a little tiny Western Sand Cherry, and I noticed the other day that is is covered in frass, and the leaves are chewed. I eventually found a little inchworm of some sort on the plant. I guess a lot of people would be mad that their plant was eaten, but I felt really happy that I had provided some food for another creature. Guess that is what makes us a little different.~~Angie

way back when i farmed for a living we saw an ad in the catalog that we ordered our baby chicks. we ordered a dozen straight run araucana chicks. and paid 50Cents each plus shipping. which we thought was expensive. But once they started laying pastel colored eggs in green and blue and pink and tan. we were real happy with them and we sold the extra fresh farm eggs. everybody wanted the easter eggs! I set up a incubater in the celler and hatched out lots of eggs and also traded eggs with a friend who also had the chickens too. to have a bigger gene pool of chicks. a few years later i was taking 12 dozen eggs to work each week and always had requests for more, i got a promotion at work and gave up farming to move to another town to work. in the ads in the sunday paper this week i saw an add selling baby auracana chicks for $3.00 each.

We have helped the bluebirds for yrs providing them w/ boxes. We’ve noticed that younger birds will lay usually 3 eggs & older ones lay 4-5 eggs. This spring we had a pair lay 5 eggs & from past experience, probably because of the size of the box, that @ least one will either die from suffocation or from being @ the bottom too much & not get enough food. When we’ve had only 3 eggs, everyone was healthy. We chose to discard 2 of the five eggs so everyone would make it. Everything seemed to be going fine until one morning a coon must have tried getting into the box. The whole nest was packed tight into the opening. I pulled the nest out & found the new born babies in the bottom of the box. I tried repairing the nest & putting the babies back in, but I think they had been hurt too much when the coon was in there. We even have a predator guard on the entrance hole, but didn’t phase him. The parents seemed to try for a few days, but realized their babies were dead. I decided to take everything out & just leave the clean shavings in the bottom, hoping they’d start a new family. I always clean everthing out anyway after the babies have fled the nest. Well, it seemed like that’s what was going to happen. I saw the male & female on the top of the box seeming happy. We checked this morning thinking we’d find a new nest being built, but no. She laid 2 eggs in the bottom of the box on the sawdust. I’ve never seen this before & we’ve been doing this for 40 yrs.

I was alone on Thanksgiving once (hubby working in Singapore) and cooked a cornish game hen in a cast iron dutch oven on top of the wood stove. I used the dutch oven cover to cover the dutch oven it to make it more oven like rather than letting all the heat escape. My hen turned a beautiful golden brown and was delicious. After the hen was done, I also baked a pumpkin pie in the dutch oven on top of the wood stove. It was the best pumpkin pie I've ever made. Why did I do all that cooking on top the wood stove rather than on my perfectly good gas range/oven you ask? Because I was alone, had plenty of time on my hands and I was thinking about how the pioneers cooked their food over a fire and I wanted to see if I could do it. Turns out I could and did.