Thoughts On Sustainable Living And Egg Cartons

I thought I might share with you today some of our ideas and plans for becoming a little more self reliant. This morning while making eggs for breakfast two thoughts crossed my mind. The first thought was the two egg cartons we had in our refrigerator were made from two different materials. One egg carton was made from Styrofoam and the second was made from cardboard. It actually depends where we shop at to which type of egg carton is available. The nearby little grocery has cardboard cartons for the eggs. The larger supermarket which is thirty minutes away has the Styrofoam egg cartons. I have thoughts about each type when it comes to living a sustainable lifestyle. If you are raising laying hens for eggs. You might want to have a stash of the Styrofoam cartons. When I knew I was going to be raising chickens I started saving my egg cartons and asking my family and friends to save their egg cartons. I could wash the egg cartons and reuse them multiple times. Now , I have not had laying hens in a while now and I actually prefer the cardboard style egg cartons because I can put them in the compost pile.
The second thought that crossed my mind when making breakfast was that we need to get some more laying hens. I believe that would take us one step closer to being self reliant. After Breakfast I jumped on the computer and found some chicks on Craigslist. Ha ha! I might be on my way to getting some chicks over the weekend. I will be keeping you posted.

On a side note. Nothing to do with sustainability. It has been a sad spring this year. We lost all the fish in our Koi pond. We had around 50 Koi and goldfish. We had raised most of the Koi and goldfish from small fry. Some of our Koi were over 15 inches long and 12yrs old. Our pond is about 5 & 1/2 feet deep. Well below the frost line. These fish have survived many winters in our pond. The only conclusion I can come to is this winter was far too cold too long. It is sad but we will have to start over.

I will leave you with just a few photo memories from my archives.

I hope you enjoy this beautiful spring day!

Todays Walk (Yesterday)

Every day my husband and I take a walk around our yard. We usually do this early in the morning but once in a while life gets in the way and we put our walk off until evening. Today was one of those days when we got busy and did not take our usual walk. I decided as he left for work this evening I would grab my trusty companion and take a walk myself. Along the way I snapped a few pictures with my phone so I could share the last of our lovely flowers.

King Arthur my companion. I love his very serious expression!

 

First stop our goldfish and koi catching the last rays of the sun. While I skimmed the leaves off the pond King Arthur went off chasing cats. Lol, some companion.

 

 

 

I am fairly certain these are the last of the season. I just love the late blooming roses. My pansies seem to love the cooler weather.

After my walk I had to sit on one of the benches to the left and just enjoy the last of this fall weather. Well, I also had to wait for King Arthur to finish his hunting adventure. Have you been on any adventures lately?

Koi Fry and Frogs

We have been real busy this week with tons of yard work that has been put off until now. While skimming lawn clipping off my koi pond I was amazed to see so many baby(fry) koi. We have had our koi produce before but we only had a few hatch and survive over the years. Well, this year we have at least one hundred or possibly more. I had no idea the pond conditions must have been perfect as it takes a lot of work to get koi to spawn and eggs to hatch. I wonder if it was our busy schedule that made us leave the pond take care of itself.
I am sharing a few pictures I was able to catch today. I had a hard time capturing a close up of the fish. They can see me approaching and do not want to get their picture taken. I guess they could be camera shy. I was able to get some great closeups of one of our pond frogs.

We are now going to be busy extending and deepening our second pond to accommodate our new pets. I will have to keep you updated if I do not get too busy.