www.books2read.com/rl/lovestories
Becoming Emma is the sequel to my recent Goodreads Giveaway, The Little Irish Gift Shop. For more about my Irish novels and all my books, visit www.susancolleenbrowne.com !
Author Susan Colleen Browne shares recipes, tales of backyard farming and raising chickens...You can also discover more about the homesteading life in her latest memoir, Little Farm Homegrown!
www.books2read.com/rl/lovestories
Becoming Emma is the sequel to my recent Goodreads Giveaway, The Little Irish Gift Shop. For more about my Irish novels and all my books, visit www.susancolleenbrowne.com !
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Seeds overlooking a wet winter garden! |
If your seed collection looks like this, you may want to get crackin' and order your spring supply! In 2020, lots of people got into food-growing for the first time, and the way I hear it, seed companies couldn't keep up with the new demand. Last spring, John and I actually couldn't find parsnip seeds anywhere, and for the first time in 10 years, we didn't have a parsnip harvest.
Although spring seems very far away--at the moment, our beds are sodden with the winter's rain--we've already ordered our 2021 seeds. We generally go with a local organic seed company, Uprising Seeds, www.uprisingseeds.com . In a pinch, I'll buy High Mowing organics, also carried by our community food co-op--where I also source seed potatoes. In any event, I prefer to use local seeds, since I've found you get the most vigorous plants and highest yields with seeds raised in a similar climate as your own garden!
I discuss that in detail in my Little Farm gardening guide, still available for free at your favorite local retailer...and you can also get the freebie in PDF on my website! www.susancolleenbrowne.com
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Free ebook online or get the PDF! |
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Feel-good Irish story |
At
30, arriving at her new home, Emma discovers the shop is full of surprises.
And so is geeky Fitz... Brimming with heart and humor, The Little Irish Gift
Shop is just the beginning of Emma’s unforgettable journey to her heart’s
desire.
The Giveaway will be in Kindle ebook format, available to Goodreads’ members in the US, and runs through January 31—I hope you’ll take a look!
The new Fairy Cottage mini-series begins in Seattle, but the Emma Carey books are very much part of the world of my Village of Ballydara series, set in County Galway, Ireland. New Release: Book 2 of the mini-series, Becoming Emma, is now available!
For more about The Little Irish Gift Shop and Becoming Emma, you can visit me at www.susancolleenbrowne.com or see me on Facebook, at Facebook.com/Susan-Colleen-Browne !
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Heartwarming sequel |
One day last week, I was finishing up my afternoon wintertime chores. As always, I focused on my most important task: looking in on the hens before they turn in for the night. (By the way, you can pretty much tell time from your laying hens—they turn into their coop to sleep exactly at dusk, rain or shine, no matter what the season.)
Hens are all about routine. About 15 minutes before
beddy-bye, our girls will generally dial down their perpetual foraging. Which
is a nice word for the way they tear up the ground, creating huge divots all
over the place and move piles of dirt from one spot to another, almost always
near the man-door into the pen. Then they’ll wander into their pen to mill
around their waterer and feeder. I’ll talk to the hens, ask them about their
day, and shake their feeder to redistribute the grains. I’ll also agitate the
waterer, and encourage them to get a sip or two.
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The hens often pile up dirt behind the white man door into their pen! |
Then, because the girls tend to get kind of cranky before
bed (I think it’s some kind of hen anxiety about getting the best roosting spot
in the coop), I’ll leave the door into the pen partway open, in case anyone wants to go out for some last minute dirt-scratching. And off I’ll go to toss the day’s kitchen
scraps on the compost pile and chop some firewood, then take a quick walk down
the road to work out the kinks from wood-chopping.
By the time I’m done, it’s nearly dark and the girls are on
the roost, so I’ll secure the pen for the night. But on this day, that’s not
how it went down.
I went to the pen to close it up, and found the man-door
already shut, and a mound of blond feathered creatures huddled up right up
against the door. They were hunkered down so tightly they appeared to be one
animal.
They’d somehow managed to push the man door closed (again,
all the dirt moving around the entryway) and had locked themselves out. And I
didn’t hear them complain about it because I’d been walking. So the girls did
the next best thing to roosting: piled in together into the dirt to keep warm
and secure.
All five seemed fast asleep, although they couldn’t have
been there for more than a few minutes. So I talked to them to rouse them. No
result. I prodded them a bit. “Come on girls, wake up—you don’t want to sleep
outside all night, do you?” (And be food for bigger critters?)
One girl sleepily shifted out of the mound, then finally a
second one, but the other three ignored me. I was able to move the door, but
not one hen got it: Here the door was open for them, every instinct should tell
them to get inside and go roost as usual! But they were too discombobulated to
even take a step around the door and enter the pen.
It was up to the human to set them straight. I opened the
man door of the coop, then began ferrying the hens, one by one, from the hen yard
onto their roost. One or two were compliant enough to let me grasp them, but
the others flapped their wings, trying to get away, buck-buck-bucking all the
while, and did not like being messed around with.
The last hen in the mound was nestled right down in the
dirt—and had a proverbial cow when I extracted her from her little nest and
carried her into the coop. There was much agitation and kvetching and to-do-ing
as the flock got themselves positioned onto the roost—in the correct pecking
order, I assume—and seemed to dislike me very much. (After all I’d done for
them!)
The next morning, I wondered if the hens would still be mad
at me. Or worse, be afraid of me. But they were back to their usual sunny
dispositions. Apparently no harm done, except that I felt terribly guilty for
upsetting our girls.
My big takeaway from this experience: make sure that pen
door is wide open at bedtime, and the doorway is cleared of that day’s dirt
piles! Do you have any hen-keeping advice? Please share it here, or visit me on Facebook!
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Feel-good Irish story |
In
this sparkling novella, Dublin girl Emma Carey jumps at the opportunity to
start fresh in America—her old friend Fitzwilliam has offered her a job running
a picturesque Irish shop in Seattle. Arriving at her new home, Emma
discovers the shop is full of surprises. And so is geeky Fitz... Brimming with
heart and humor, The Little Irish Gift Shop is just the beginning of
Emma’s unforgettable journey to her heart’s desire.
The Giveaway will be in Kindle ebook format, available to Goodreads’ members in the US, and runs through January 31—I hope you’ll take a look!
Book 2 of the series is a brand-new release--Becoming Emma is now available! See it on Amazon, Kobo, or Apple Books!
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2nd book of an Irish Trilogy! |
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Hens in the yard, near the big stump |
You may wonder, why don't we raise our own chicks? Well, our place isn't the safest, when it comes to vulnerable animals. It's kind of a long story...First of all, out of our 10 acres, well over 8 acres are thick woods. Also, John and I built our homestead in a piecemeal way, and by the time we decided to get hens, 4 years after moving here, we didn't have any space for chickens close in. So our coop and chicken run are a ways away from our house: beyond our main garden area, our 4 woodsheds and one of our orchards.
Alan and Gretchen's place is far more open and thus safer: most of their 10 acres is cleared. Also, their hen operation is right next to their house, and they have a lovely Border collie watching over their birds. Most importantly, they made us an offer we couldn't refuse!
I feel we've really lucked out with the Buff Orpingtons. They’re gentle, friendly hens, which is a nice change from
the four bullies (Black Sexlinks) we had in our last bunch. Strangely enough, for
all their aggression, those black hens had the worst startle reflex I’d ever
seen—the slightest move from you, and they’d leap away, squawking in terror.
Happily these new girls always come to greet us (sure, we’re
bringing feed, but still). They’ve been good layers from the get go too! From
my experience, young hens will lay fairly well through the winter—we’ll see
what happens next year.
What else is new: John and I have improved safety measures firmly in place for them!
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At the edge of the yard, where the best weeds are! |
We know how happy chickens are to forage around the largest
area possible—and it’s true, for the first couple of months, we let this flock run
around the orchard adjacent to our food garden. But within a few weeks, they
had torn up the ground into mud.
We have another, much larger fenced area next to the
orchard, which we cleared out of the woods for our previous flock to forage in. When
we’re working nearby, we’ll let the new kids scratch around in there. Otherwise
given the predators here in the Foothills, we restrict these girls to either
their covered, caged run, or a small yard with a 6 ½ foot fence.
Hopefully, they’re not so very bored in there—the yard has a little stump they can jump on, though by now they've scratched the weeds into oblivion. In the cage, there's more fun to be had. Besides their feeder and waterer, we have a large, big-leaf maple stump they like climbing on, with plenty of perches for all five birds.
There’s also an outdoor
covered roost if they want dry feet…and John created little roof over their
feeder as well. They often hop up there too, and seem to be looking in the
window he built into the adjoining shed. We only keep feed in the shed, so it’s
a mystery what they’re looking at. Maybe it’s the visiting mice…or maybe they
can smell the feed better up on the roof!
If, despite all these features, they have nothing to do, there’s
something to break the monotony…The girls have the thrill of John (or the Rooster,
as we call him, since he’s the only male on the place) spoiling them: visiting
every day to toss them some scratch. After the young lady at the feed store
told me scratch grains are like hen candy, I have to keep an eye on John so he
doesn’t give them too much! (Overdoing the scratch seems to upset their tummies
a little. As a result, coop cleaning turns into a far more unpleasant chore
than it needs to be, if you get my drift.)
If you have any tips for keeping hens, I hope you’ll share
them here. You can also visit me at www.susancolleenbrowne.com ...or starting this week, reach me on Facebook!
PS—Due to technical issues, I couldn't post to this blog for
a few months. But the problem was finally resolved a couple of weeks ago—and I'll be posting regularly from now on!
For this year's holiday season, it may be challenging to find the "Merry" in Christmas, or the "Happy" in holidays. With so many people going through hard times, sharing the usual seasonal greetings don't feel quite right to me. But sometimes, you can find hope out there... I wrote this holiday piece in 2013, after a very difficult year. Rereading it brings me comfort and joy--maybe it might do the same for you...
This difficult year began even before 2013 arrived. December of 2012, the holiday season promised to be already sad—John and I were facing
our first Christmas after his mother passed away, and he was also grieving over
the loss of his childhood home, which had just been sold. I was cooking our New
Year’s Eve dinner when we found a voicemail on the phone—from a hospital in
John’s son had been in a car accident, hit by a distracted driver. Collin’s
injuries were serious; after extensive surgeries, he was in no shape to care
for himself, so John spent six weeks in
It was a lonely time for me—worried for Collin, and trying
to look after Berryridge Farm by myself in the darkest days of winter. With
John away, I learned to be more self-sufficient, but I also got a taste of what
widowhood might feel like.
John’s birthday begins one of the loveliest months of the year in the Foothills—the sun doesn’t set until 10 o’clock. But this June, it dawned on us that we were facing a plague of tent caterpillars, such as we had never, ever seen. So it began, our month-long battle: we hand-killed caterpillars at least five hours a day, and sometimes up to 8 hours to save our orchard and our many dozens of berry plants.
I can’t describe how revolting the experience was, but I will say it cured me of squeamishness. The long days of squishing insects, bracing myself to kill other creatures by the hour, seemed endless. By the first of July, however, the caterpillar plague had pretty well petered out. But I felt like I’d lost one precious month of my life.
There's a verse in the Old Testament that has become part of the Christmas story: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” This Christmas, I see that it has been the light that has brought healing. In August, I went to the Oregon coast with our granddaughter and spent time with my daughter and her two little sons. At the beach one evening, I watched the setting sun and the silhouette of my granddaughter frolicking in the surf, saw the golden-pink light bathing my grandsons’ rapt faces as they played in the sand, and I felt an incandescent joy I hadn’t felt in long time.
In November, John and I went to visit his daughter and her family in Los Angeles. Seeing the kids’ bright little faces, being called Grandma by the children for the first time, walking on the beach in the warm sunshine, when at home it would be dark and cold, I felt my heart lift even more.
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Holiday warmth |
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Christmas figurines |
"Merry Christmas, God bless all of you. All of you on the good Earth."
Take good care, and this year, may you create holidays that bring you comfort and light.