hey! we are chicken crazy and ive wanted a silkie for awhile, but you can order as few as five at a time. where are you located, if you still have any left?

Ok so how about something like this. Still neutral. It's strange, I enjoy color and pattern but I have a tendency to change my mind and do things like get all red pillows to replace the all blue ones so I don't want to get stuck with something I love now but maybe not for 10+ years. I photoshopped the hood, range and the cabinet inserts that will go in the top (they match the window on the opposite side of the room and will be lit up). Ugh so beige. Taupe crackle

farmgardener, Yay! Congrats on the okra. I am glad it is producing. Desperate times, like this year, sometimes all for desperate measures. It sure has been a weird year. Jacob, Your garden looks great as always and it is so good to hear everything has recovered so well from the hail. The drought news from your area is not good, but in the next seven days I expect you'll get some drought relief, and so will we. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for all of us. We're in Severe Drought here now with increasing fire activity that is keeping me away from home and away from my garden---poor, pitiful, heat-roasted and drought-dehydrated mess that it is. I'm just hoping rain falls soon before we can advance to Extreme Drought. At this point, though, in our area we only want rain if it is going to bring hard downpours of rain---those half-hearted thunderstorms we keep getting that are mostly dry storms with lots of lightning (which starts fires) and very little rain just make things worse at this point since the lightning striking in dry fields can start fires so easily. Here's the 7-day Qualitative Precipitation Forecast, offering us a glimmer of hope. Now, y'all, don't take this thing too seriously because it updates multiple times daily and can be all over the place with regards to amounts. Still, as we watch it evolve over the next few days, we should have some clue about how much rain to expect. 7-day QPF Larry, I loved Little Lucy and was so unhappy when the seed company that carried it dropped it from production. It was so pretty and so productive. Rebecca, Hmmm. Baby Bubba usually produces a lot. Know what I'd do? I'd hit that sucker with Bloom Booster type fertilizer to push it into flowering. I don't know why it is being lazy this year. It isn't like we are cool and cloudy, so it ought to be happy with the weather. I am so happy that Seeds of India worked out well for your co-worker. Please tell her how thrilled I am to hear that their garden is doing so well. I was only able to work in the garden yesterday for a little while. I deadheaded flowers, dodging all the bees who take it personally when I start snipping off blooms. I did a little weeding, but there's not many weeds at this point since I've worked so hard to mulch heavily and remove each weed when first noticed. I have one path that gets a bit weedy because I never have gotten it mulched. Mulching that path is on my To Do list but I never seem to get around to getting it done. I harvested okra. I talked to the tree frog who was sitting on top of my sun umbrella. I scared the deer to death by walking out of my garden while they were trying to sneak into the driveway to steal the doves' cracked corn. We had four fire calls yesterday. I didn't go on the first two as they were relatively small and minor, but the third was a big one and we were out there for 7 hours in horrific heat. The thermometer on our fire dept. vehicle showed 121 degrees at one point, and that was because we were being heated up by residual heat from the adjacent fire, which was just a 100' or so from us at that point (but not moving towards us). It was so hot out there, and so dry. When we finally made it home, we rushed off to town to grab a quick hamburger. Wqe'f fed the firefighters cold cut sandwiches and chips, but we still were starving when the fire was extinguished anyhow. On our way back from town, wolfing down our hamburgers as we traveled down the highway, I saw a familiar orange glow in the night sky and told Tim that our fire had rekindled. He didn't want to believe it and thought it was somebody else's fire---maybe across the river. (This is what I call magical thinking....wanting something to be true so you just believe it is......). We went to investigate and, of course, it was our fire. So, we sounded the alarm and then spent the next two hours back out there again. Having a wildfire rekindle is not unusual because when hundreds of acres burn, there's inevitably smoldering trees and logs and such that will flare back up----there's not enough water in this county to soak down hundreds of acres, so you just do the best you can with what you've got. Now, as I am typing this on Saturday morning, Tim is back there on a very small rekindle. It probably is going to be a rough day here again today since it started out with a fire call around 7 a.m. So, I guess we are having the August I expected and dreaded----a drought-decimated garden full of grasshoppers, and fires daily, and with the fires seeming to increase in number and severity daily. I'm hoping we'll start getting rain soon and that conditions will improve. Even in 2011 when it was hotter, drier and we were much deeper in drought than we are now, we got our first hint of drought relief on August 11th, so that gives me hope for this coming week---that maybe we'll be getting some real drought relief within the next 7 to 10 days. The forecast looks kinda good right now, but then you really cannot trust a forecast 7 days out, so we'll see. I hope you all have a good day today. Dawn

Yay for the violets, Nancy! And...you still have summer squash? The bugs killed ours long ago. Even the C. Moschata. I am pooped. So tired. We shopped today and I don't have to tell anyone that shopping is very unpleasant right now. However, Dillards allows you to try on clothes and I found a dress. It's not exactly the bohemian/fairy princess dress that I wanted. But it fits nicely and its a forest green color...and it's Robin Hoodish (not really), so I bought it. Paid more than what I wanted to pay, but it's done. DONE! Came home around 3 and sliced, breaded and froze okra. Then figured out how to use my pressure canner as a water bath canner and pickled some okra. On my own. The lids sealed so hopefully we're good. My house is getting to the point that I am very unhappy. I know a clean house isn't the most important thing in the world....but I enjoy a clean home. It just feels nice to me. However, a clean house isn't anywhere in my near future. I am hoping the robot vacuums are cheap this Christmas. That will at least help. We are celebrating Mason's BD tomorrow and that will be fun. It's at a very good restaurant that I haven't been to in a long time. Then grocery shopping and then maybe starting more lettuce seed. In between all of those things is animal care. Lots of animal care. There's always one of them doing something they shouldn't be doing or somewhere they shouldn't be hanging out. One of the fat buff orpingtons has figured out how to get out of the chicken yard. And she isn't swift. She is dumb--beautiful but dumb and wanders over by the dogs. So, I'm constantly leaving whatever task I'm working on to catch her or entice her back to the yard. And everyone is always hungry all the time. The 3 young pullets mingled with the main flock today. It went very well. Having a good rooster helps with that. They're roosting in their own coop, though. It will be a gradual thing as always. Momma Blossom will be tired of her chicks soon and those two chicks will need to move to the pullet coop at that time. Although, at least one of those chicks is a cockerel. Tom may or may not start doing meat birds and these two could be the start of it. They won't be THE meat birds, but they might be the parents of. I've named the one I think is a girl. Her name is Gwendolyn, which is sorta funny because Gwendolyn (actually related to Jennifer/Guinevere.) means white ...and Gwendolyn is a dark cornish. I'm simply rambling now.