Terrific rabbit Christmas story!

I'm just posting this link to a terrific and heartwarming rabbit Christmas story -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTTjBL1Rfgc&feature=em-share_video_user.  Thanks JRSKICK1 for sharing this!  Merry Christmas!

First Egg!

Well, our wonderful chickens have produced the first egg!  As you can see in the photo, it is very dark brown, which makes me guess it might be from our French Copper Maran hen.  You can also see, from the key we put in the photo for comparison, that this egg is not very large.  This is common for first eggs; pullets lay smaller eggs initially, then larger eggs as they mature.

We wanted to compare our egg to a store bought egg, so we first floated it in a bowl of water.  Our brown egg lay on its side on the bottom of the bowl -- a sign of freshness.  The store bought egg floated with the blunt side up, showing that it was not as fresh.  We had bought the eggs about 10 days earlier, so certainly they weren't as fresh as our own egg.

In the photo of the eggs on the plate, our egg is on the right. You can see how nice and orange the yolk is.  This is a sign of a hen given a more natural environment.  Ours aren't free range, but they do have a nice outdoor pen, are on dirt that they can scratch for worms, etc., and get plenty of fresh greens from around our property.

But the real test was in the taste.  Since there was only one home grown egg, we decided to scramble the eggs so we could both have a good taste.  In this photo, the upper pan has two store bought eggs; the lower pan has our home grown egg.

You can see the color difference carried over into the scrambled eggs. the home brown egg was more yellow, and although I tried to scramble them equally, I could swear the home grown egg was fluffier.

And, yes, it was MUCH tastier.  It not only tasty on first bite, but it had a longer lasting flavor than the store-bought eggs. 

We're hooked, all right.  Home grown eggs pass the test for flavor with us!

Bees, Take 3

It turns out that keeping bees is not as easy as keeping rabbits! (Yes, we keep rabbits, too).  Here's a picture of our latest ladies -- Italians, in two hives.  This is our third year of beekeeping. Year 1 went very well with one hive of Italian bees and 14 1 pound jars of honey as a result.  Year 2, a bad year for many beekeepers, was abysmal for us. No honey for us, and not enough to keep the bees alive through the winter.

So, on to year 3! We'll keep updating the blog regarding our progress through the year.

Welcome to Soleone!

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog for Soleone, a practical, renaissance farmer experimenting with farming techniques to incorporate traditional methods, organic techniques and fun to achieve terrific, earth friendly, fresh food. Join us on our journey!

Where did we begin? Well, the vineyard wasn't exactly first, but this is a good intro picture -- you can see we start from the beginning. Stay tuned for updates!