Dyeing Eggs with Onion Skins

We spent the morning dyeing eggs to bring to church for Pascha (which is this Sunday). The tradition is to dye the eggs red, but there really isn't a good way to get eggs really red without using yucky dyes that come off on your fingers when you handle them. Last year we came across this natural way to dye the eggs and it's my new favorite. I've been saving onion skins for several months, and we've saved up several dozen of our own eggs just for the occasion.

Here are the eggs before


and the bags of onion skins (yellow ones)


I made the dye first by boiling the skins


Here is the strained dye cooling before I poured it on the eggs


These are the eggs after boiling in the dye


The finished product, I really like the dark reddish brown color.

New Baby Chicks

We ordered four new chicks for this year. They are "easter eggers" which means they will lay very pretty blue-green eggs. As an added bonus, they have very cute puffy cheek feathers. They came in the mail four weeks ago, so this is a bit late, but here they are:

This is what they looked like when they came out of the box


This was last Wednesday, when they were 3.5 weeks old, and we took them outside for the first time


they aren't little puff balls anymore, but they're still really cute


they let the girls handle them


the girls named this one Turtle, she's the sweetest


this one is Sunshine, we think she will be white


and this is Bean


and Ivy


Anna with Turtle on her lap


The big chickens are spending most of their time in the pen we built them these days because they like to tear up the garden beds and we have seedlings in them now. :)


We are busy working on plans for a new improved coop so they will be more comfortable when they are all outside full-time.

So Much for Spring.

We had a late ice/snowstorm Saturday that has slowed down the blooming of our shrubs and trees. I don't know exactly how much snow we got, but we were lucky...we had a blizzard warning with up to 2 feet of snow in the forecast and most of that went southwest or northeast of us. We just got mostly ice.

The good news is that as of this afternoon it was almost completely melted and even though all of the blossoms on our trees are gone, I'm sure that they will leaf out soon. I did cover our lilac bushes, because I couldn't bear to think of a whole year without the lovely lilacs. They seem to have fared well, I'll post pics when they bloom :)

Ellie's New Toy

Here we have the cute little girl pushing something in her stroller...





What could it be, that beloved toy she's playing so nicely with?



Why, it's Log!

Kids in motion

Spring!

After being sick for most of the past week, we were playing outside this afternoon and I noticed these on our bushes:




I love spring!



Anna does, too.

Backyard photos

It's another strangely warm day for February, and the little girls are playing nicely on their "balance beam" outside:




A few animals joined in,




and another little girl.


Gratuitous chicken shot: