Sweet Lemon Acres

I love to be outdoors, but many times I'm not sure what to do once I get outside. "There is always something to do," James tells me often. Now that we have chickens to care for and produce to grow, I finally feel like the kids and I have real farm chores. Rylee and Wyatt have been such good helpers with these things so far, Wyatt especially. For a kid who didn't want anything to do with the chickens when we were picking them out at their original farm, he has impressed us so much by the way he takes care of them. From checking to make sure they are all accounted for to understanding how they like their food to be in their feed trough, he is a good little chicken farmer. On Memorial Day, Wyatt and I found a new chore. We walked the corn field and picked up rocks for 90 minutes. I like to walk around our property, but sometimes I wish it was more of a productive walk, rather than just for leisure. Let me tell you, digging rocks out of the dirt for an hour and a ha...

It's always fun to do things together as a family, but we have noticed how different the dynamics are when someone is missing. Particularly when one child is gone. Our son is so much more calm when there isn't a sibling to antagonize. We do a lot with the kids one-on-one. Usually it's Rylee and I together and James and Wyatt together. You know, girls doing girl things and boys doing boy things. Lately, Wyatt has become quite the mama's boy (okay, he's always been that way). He always wants me to lay with him at night, he makes me breakfast in the mornings before I get up, he picks me flowers and he is always hugging me. He's quite the little sweetheart. I feel pretty bad for James though, because the kids are always choosing me over him for nearly everything. Maybe it's because I'm the easy-going parent and he is more strict....who knows??  Regardless, it's always disappointing when the kids pick mommy. On Thursday, I asked Wyatt what he would li...

We've discussed raising chickens on and off over the past year.  "I don't want to clean the poop" and "It's just another thing to do every day" were among the reasons the chicken conversations never went very far. Once James decided it was time to get chickens, I was in a "yes" mood....so we got right to work fixing up the small outbuilding that would otherwise need torn down. What was supposed to be a one day project, turned into a couple of weeks, but that's okay. "If we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it right," James always says.  While we were working on the building (and when I say "we", I mean James of course), we both did some research on raising chickens and also looked on Craigslist for people selling the types of chickens we were looking for.  When the day came that we were ready to go pick them out, we jumped into the truck with a large box to haul them back in and discussed chicken name...

Hello there! I am so excited to get back to blogging!  Let us share how the Sweet Lemon Acres blog came to be. James has always wanted to be a farmer. Traditionally, farmers in our area raise livestock and/or grow corn and soybeans. James knew this was something he would never be able to afford to start. After watching a documentary recently, he started to think about other things he could raise on our farm. A few weekends ago, while we were enjoying a date weekend in Cedar Rapids, we discussed the possibility of raising chickens and vegetables. The weekend prior to this, we planted our first very small garden and were both so excited to grow our own food!  Our kids were equally as excited and helped get the planting started. Hopefully we will get some more sunshine to help our food grow! As I've been wanting to get back to blogging (took a little siesta as I just had too much on my plate), I decided now would be a great time to start a new blog as we begin to try new th...