my books coming soon!

You can pre-order Made From Scratch now on Amazon! If you're mildly interested in mountain music, Idaho, farming, chickens, beekeeping, jerk bears, gardening addictions, baking bread, sewing, county fairs, japanese bantam chickens, dog sledding, people I meet or my blogs you'll enjoy it. It's half memoir and half instruction and I hope it gets a whole new crop of future farmers insprired to grab a chicken, bake a pie and generally get their hands dirty.

Preorder here son!

Awesome image by UK artist, Lucie Summers.

backyard chickens

Backyard chickens is a great resource for anyone thinking about getting a few hens. It has free information, a downloadable care guide, images, a forum, questions and more. It's for new chicken people, crazy coop designs, poultry lovers and gawkers alike. If you get inspired by it, and live close to me, I'll have about 3 little hens up for adoption in a few weeks. I decided to only raise nine of the twelve since I have the four big girls coming. So I'd be more than happy to help a friend get started. Most towns and cities allow chickens long as they are female and in a confined area like a chik-n-hutch (150 bucks!) or an eglu (about 500, but damn cool). This post is pretty much jabbing Kevin, Sara, Tim and people from Palmerton who want some farm fresh eggs in town. But hey, if your local or work with me, even better.

click here for the site

another one

This morning a co-worker stopped by with some of her handspun wool and we somehow got around to talking about bees. I explained to her how easy it was keeping bees, how you could get everything you need to get started for less than the cost of an ipod. Generally just how important it is that people start keeping more bees to help with the decline in their population. Did you know one hive can pollanate an area as wide as ten miles? Anyway, within the hour of our conversation she had ordered her own hive, gear and bees online! This is exciting stuff for me guys. For the first time ever I'll be helping someone else set up their own bees. The student becomes the teacher. I'm excited for her, and more pumped than I was before for my own hive.

You know what my hive is going to say across it in giant black letters??

BEADS?!?