Ashley Hackshaw / Lil Blue Boo - Page 92 of 661 - Living a simple, creative life in small town USA. Bryson City. A Lifestyle Blog.

A Trellis for Growing Peas

April 20, 2016 by Ashley Hackshaw

I built this trellis for growing peas and tomatoes in the garden using a few tomato stakes and some twine. It was so easy to construct:

I love watching the sugar snap peas grow and look for something to attach their tendrils to:

Can you see the little hook of the snap pea plant below?

Here’s a closer look:

To construct it I used a hammer to pound three tomato stakes into the ground….each a few feet apart. I added the cross bars to the top and attached them using wire first and then twine:

I attached twine to the bottom and then added the zigzag by stringing more twine back and forth between the two bars:

Another view:

As soon as the sugar snap peas are harvested I’ll replant tomatoes there from the pots they are being grown in and I can use the same trellis for those too:

How I keep the birds away:

What’s growing in your garden right now? I’d love to know!

(You can find more gardening posts here!)

Safe Sunscreen

April 19, 2016 by Ashley Hackshaw

Is there a safe sunscreen out there? Many sunscreens use chemical sun blockers like oxybenzone.

What’s so bad about Oxybenzone? Oxybenzone soaks through skin, triggers allergic skin reactions, and can be a hormone disruptor.

You can check any brand of sunscreen you are using in the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Database to see where it ranks. (Note: you want it to be a ONE.) This is most important for kids:

“Children are not little adults. Pound for pound, kids are exposed to more contaminants in air, water, food, and personal care products than adults. Immature organ systems are often less capable of fending off chemical assaults. Subtle damage to developing bodies may lead to disease later in life.” –EWG

I’ve never been a big fan of the sun but living here makes me want to be outdoors all the time…and Boo too:

Last summer I looked up the sunscreens I was using on Boo every day. I learned they were ranked in the 4s. Not good. And they are ones that are marketed for kids! I also felt sick when I used most of them, a few times even breaking out in a rash.

So what sunscreen do I use now? Beauty Counter’s Protect All Over. It ranks a 1 on EWG’s scale. It uses non-nano zinc oxide, which is an effective, natural, and safe mineral sun blocker.

Disclaimer: I am a Senior Consultant for Beauty Counter. I love their products and my entire family uses them. Please email me if you have any questions!

Raising Baby Chicks

April 18, 2016 by Ashley Hackshaw

The chicks are three weeks old now…and still giving me constant entertainment. Raising baby chicks has given me a new purpose in life. I’ve got extra pep in my step. I am the annoying person who talks about their chickens to anyone who shows the slightest interest, or anyone who happens to make eye contact.

FoShizzle still steals the daily show…this little chick has so much quirky it’s like she’s an extraterrestrial being:

So I guess my new purpose in life is raising baby aliens. And I can only post so many photos of Fo without risking becoming the Fo Show. (there are more here if you want to see them.) And there are other baby chicks so I should give them some equal air time so they don’t feel left out…

Our two buff brahma chicks are named Miss Plump and Sunny. They are just gorgeous, but they are also so startlingly skittish. Whenever I pick one up they just squawk and squawk. It’s very dramatic. I hope they warm up to us eventually. If they don’t I might need counseling.

Our two Barred Rocks are M-LO and Henrietta. They are cute in their own little awkward Velociraptor-ish way. M-Lo is half the size of all our other chicks…but she’s spunky. Not sure why she’s so small but that’s how she got the name M-LO…Boo named her “my little one.” Whenever I feed the chicks from my hand M-LO grabs food and runs around peeping like a maniac, as if the sky is falling.

I love the Barred Rocks feathers coming in….they add a new row of black and white every few days. Aren’t they so sweet sleeping? I so want to just crawl in and snuggle with them…but they are chickens.

And then there’s Rey. She’s our lone Welsummer chick since we lost Whittle. And she’s very much a loner, but very smart and very tame. She’s the only one that will eat out of my hand if I’m holding her.

Rey is also like twice the size of everyone else, but doesn’t use her size to her advantage. She’s a gentle giant…my Martha Dumptruck. And I would have named her Martha Dumptruck, but Boo insisted on Rey because “she’s just like Rey in Star Wars, a scavenger, a loner, a survivor.” I couldn’t argue with that.

(You can still be Martha Dumptruck when no one’s around.)

And I can’t forget Ditto…our other Polish Frizzle. Ditto is probably more of a diva than FoShizzle:

Ditto is also the most daring of all the chicks. When I sit in front of the box she jumps onto the water jug and stares out at me. I can see her little chicken mind spinning as she looks me in the eyes. She knows there’s another world beyond the edge of her cardboard box. She has tried to make the jump to me, but it startled me and I moved backwards and she missed. Ditto can definitely be trained…maybe she’ll be my agility chicken champion. Do they have chicken trials?

*****

They’ve been living in a big refrigerator box. One side folds down halfway when we want to kneel down and play with them. I’ve found that the easiest way to keep it clean (so that they aren’t sleeping in poop) is to spread a layer of newspaper and then cover that with a layer of paper towels. I add a few more paper towels here and there throughout the day so that they have new clean areas. The next day I lay down newspaper again and start the process over with the paper towels. At the end of the week it all rolls up easily into one large wad and I toss it and start again. There’s no smell or dust to worry about.

We also added a piece of lucite to the side so that the chickens could look out at us, and so that we could look in without coming in as big scary monster from overhead. It’s like reality TV, and it’s the favorite channel in our house:

Or maybe we are the favorite channel?

I made the chicks a little roost recently out of an old ruler and some wood scraps. They must be little genius prodigy chickies…they figured out roosting on their own.

This morning Boo and I decided to make a little chicken tractor for them (or maybe it’s a chunnel…a chicken tunnel). It was such a nice day and we thought they’d love the warm sun. They stood in shock for about 20 minutes but then pecked happily at the grass for the rest of their outing.

“There must be some mistake. We are not outdoor chickens.”

Catching them to bring them back in was another story. They definitely did not want to come back in and they are fast little stinkers.