Photos From My Weekend 5.24-5.27

Okay, Monday, time for work. Oops, scratch that it's Tuesday...no, Thursday? Shoot, what day is it actually??! 

This has been my internal monologue each morning for the past few days. I don't know what it is about a long weekend, but as soon as you throw in that extra day, I lose all sense of time! Not that I'm complaining, this weekend was a great one. I filled my three days with adventures, down time with family and friends, a little shopping, and lots of great food. Now, I'll hand it over to my phone pictures to do the talking...

A huge vintage haul, and the beginnings of some very exciting new developments!

My parent's back-yard farm. It's totally normal to have free range chickens in the suburbs, right? 

Hiking the trails of the Wissahickon Valley 

I hope you all had a lovely weekend as well and that you got to enjoy the beautiful weather with family and friends. The perk of the long weekend is that it's almost the weekend once more, and this one is shaping up to be quite awesome as well, but more on that later :)

Tiny Terra Ferma or How We're Getting Involved with our Community

It's been a year (and 12 days) since we moved into our house in Manayunk. In this time we've enjoyed the food, drinks, and shops in our little nook of Philadelphia, but when it comes to meeting new people, we haven't crossed that bridge yet. We've taken baby steps in the right direction; we signed up a volleyball team for the Manayunk Sport and Social League, but it's mostly just been sport and very little socializing with the other teams. It turns out meeting new people is hard in the real world (there's a lesson they don't teach you in school)! So, in an attempt to branch out, the other night we went to a fundraiser dinner hosted by the Manayunk Food Co-Op at a new local garden supply store Tiny Terra Ferma on Main St.

The event was held to raise money for the Manayunk Farmers Market that will have its first season this Summer! I'm such a sucker for farmers markets (and this one is going to be held RIGHT across the street from our new apartment, eek!), so when we found out about the event while stopping by the store one day, I knew this would be right up my alley.

And what a night it was! Local farmers cooked delicious food (wild mushroom pilaf and fresh mixed greens, yumm) and the Philly Cow Share had awesome burgers. There was hard cider from another local fruit farm (crisp and dry, and packing quite a punch!) and live music from a local band.

It was a great night, made even more enjoyable by the fact that we were able to meet some people who live in the area and have a passion for good food! Every conversation seemed to end with "I'll see you around the market!" (Is that where adults make friends?? Not a rhetorical question, people!) I'm very excited for the market to start this weekend, and I've been thinking about going to some of the co-op meetings as well to get a little more involved with the project. And, I mean, any place where the main topic of conversation is food, is the place for me :)

Introducing our chicks!

I know, I know, I teased you with a picture of six fluffy little chicks on Saturday, and then never gave you the full scoop! Well meet the gang below (no, we couldn't resist naming them after the cast of Friends):

Rachel and Phoebe are red pullets, so we already know they're ladies and are going to grow into Rhode Island Reds. The rest of the gang, however are a toss-up in the gender category. They're Speckled Sussex and the came as straightline, so we won't know until they're a little older if they're ladies or gents. While we hope they're all female, if we do end up having a rooster we can just sell him or make a trade for more chicks. Or as the helpful man at the Tractor Supply Store told us, we can "take him to our local Amish man to get him processed." Please tell me we're not the only ones who don't have a Amish man on call.

                         Rhode Island Red                                            Speckled Sussex

For anyone out there toying with the idea of back-yard chickens, but worrying about start-up cost, it's suprisingly quite low. The chicks themselves were $2 each, a bag of food was about $20 (and will last for quite a while), a giant bag of pine shavings for bedding was only $5, and besides that all you need is a heat lamp, a place to keep them until they're ready to go outside (we're using a large plastic storage tub) and food/water feeders ($10 each at the Tractor Supply Store, but may be cheaper on Amazon). All together our checkout was about $67. Not too shabby considering with 6 chickens you can get about 2 dozen (amazing, delicious) eggs/week for years! Plus endless enertainment -- we find ourselves just watching them jumping around and looking for non-existent worms in the non-existent dirt, they're just so funny!

Now, the next step for these back-yard farmers is building them a coop! We have joint custody planned with my brother and Jackie, we're housing them for the first month and then we'll be moving them into a coop in their much more spacious yard. In the meantime we'll be helping them clear out an area and set up their new digs. And in four short months, eggs for all!

So are there any other back-yard farmers out there? If so, I'd love to hear any tips or stories you have for these newbies!