Unfading Blossom Farm + Market

08/23/2026

Signs of cooling temps and happy hens!

08/16/2026

Our oldest parishioner, Marina, celebrated her 97th birthday this past weekend! We surprised her with naming this little Salmon Faverolles pullet Tsipka after the Faverolles hen she kept when she lived among the Russian emigrées in Paris and near Geneva. She has the best story about her little hen faking an egg song until one day little 7-year-old Marina taught her a lesson about not telling the the truth with a dip in the cellar washtub of cold water! 🤣 Hearing the memories of a 97 year old woman is such an honor. So much happens in one long lifetime!

08/15/2026

All that work tightening the coop last week paid off handsomely. ALL chickens and guineas are alive, we’re getting daily eggs, and Elvis, our bantam cochin rooster, is feeling comfortable and relaxed enough to put on some pretty fancy courtship moves. Enjoy a look at this beautiful flock!

When it is no longer a MILLION degrees outside, we will build smaller pens to separate the different breeds, an outdoor run, install a time-controlled door, some continuously renewing garden beds for fresh greens, and power wash and trim and paint the exterior in a subtle olive green to make it beautiful! Volunteers are welcome! For now, we are just grateful they seem to be thriving through the heat and enjoying the environment. The guineas are eager to hunt but they have a couple more weeks to solidify their homing ability in this new location!

Birds available for sale:

Salmon Faverolles rooster
Cochin/Cream Brabanter rooster and hen

08/12/2026

I definitely know where the Seeker of the Lost Orthodox Christian Church watch party will be.

TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE - Arkansas special!

The greatest space event of our lifetime will occur on this day, 19 years from now.

Am I actually posting about a space event 19 years from now?

You better believe it.

On August 12th, 2045, we will observe a total solar eclipse with a large totality path centered over the state of Arkansas (red highlighted area).

Some of our state will observe near 6 minutes of totality in the middle of the day.

Combining the totality length, path and time of year; it is fair to say we will never observe something like this again.

This will be an extremely rare and unique opportunity for our generation.

Coast to coast totality events like 2017 (and this one in 2045) are very rare.

We are incredibly luckily to live in a time period where these celestial events are occurring.

Do you live in the path now? 👀

08/09/2026

Okay, who’s coming stargazing at the new property!?

08/08/2026

No losses and happy hens! Yay! We stayed late into the night tightening up every last gap and hole we could reach and it seems to have paid off for today. Now, we are constructing brooding and breeding pens for raising particular breeds of hatching eggs and chicks. We are utilizing pallets donated by the Little Rock Air Force Base and delivered by Major Kenneth Baird of the 62nd Airlift Squadron, as well as found materials on the property,including a lot of corrugated sheet metal and leftover fasteners and hardware from Father Ryan David Carder’s handyman work. All we have had to purchase (using personal funds, not church funds) is 1/4 inch hardware cloth and some framing lumber. It’s one way to motivate us to keep cleaning ALL the metal and wood strewn all over these ten acres!

Using found materials makes it hard for things to be completely square and adds some challenges but it also utilizes a lot of creativity and gives a certain rustic charm. When we finally paint the exterior uniform using “blemish” exterior paint from Farrell-Calhoun (for $6!) it will all come together into something cohesive. Here’s hoping for cooler days ahead and our amazing bug-killing, income stream producing birds!

08/08/2026

First egg in the coop! A bright ray of hope in a tough week!

08/06/2026

Yesterday was rough. We realized we have lost seven birds to predators in our new coop but building a new coop is like that. You really don’t know the weak spots until it is tested and that is a lot like the spiritual life! In becoming an Orthodox Christian, you do typically begin to build a sort of a new self and take on new habits and construct a new way of life with the guidance of the Church, but you really don’t actually know if what you have built is secure until the predators come in to test it and find the holes and pull out the life inside to destroy it. That can be really disheartening and many of us sit there and mope for a while, but you just have to accept the challenge and be grateful that the holes were identified for you - because there really is no way to know the weak spots at first glance, when something can slip in through a hole as small as a pencil eraser! You repair and rebuild stronger and you guard yourself and the life in you more carefully and realize that you cannot be too careful about not allowing in that which seeks to destroy. Predators have all the time in the world and they will not give up. They’re not busy like us nor distracted and they are persistent and have an insatiable appetite.

A sound coop also requires regular checks and sanitization, maintenance and upkeep, periodic repairs and no, we are not just a building that houses life, but, in truth, we are not far from that. ”Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” Thanks be to God for life of sacraments that sustain and repair and rebuild us day by day, Pascha to Pascha.

We must be always on guard. Small are the entry points which allow predatory evil to come in and dismantle that which God has protected and sanctified and the old saying remains true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! How often in life has hindsight filled us with regret! Glory to God for a new day to try again. May He Who is always so patient and kind help us to learn this needed watchfulness.

*Rather than photos of headless guineas and empty places where pullets were, I thought I’d share photos of the consolation poultry we got from a local breeder today. We added another layer of sheet metal screws and more fascia. Say a little prayer for the critters tonight. It’s hard to work long outside on the coop in these temps! 🫶

07/30/2026

Just a brief update, because it has been all hands on deck all the time around here! With much blood (not even joking😅), sweat (110?!), and tears (hey, we’re kind of tender around here!) the guinea/chickens have been established in a coop built mostly out of found materials on the property! We will work to make it beautiful when these temperatures go down. In the meantime, they’re learning what their new home base is and enjoying the spacious coop. After about a month enclosed, we will begin putting 1-3 out each day while we are there so they can begin to free range and practice coming home at sunset. Guineas are notoriously bad at this so they require careful, slow training and a little encouragement in the form of cracked corn and light at the end of the day. For now, it’s a lot of work but when they can free range fully, their diet is 90% foraged, each one of these lavender beauties can and will eat 1,000!!!! ticks per day and they will hunt and kill snakes on the property as a flock. Soon we will install rain barrels to pipe in an endless fresh water supply.

Grateful that God created a very organic and sustainable solution for the overgrowth issues that happen so quickly in our warm and humid climate! Freedom is a God-given right of all creatures, but it takes a little training to learn to use it wisely. 😊 God help us to be good stewards of these wonderful birds. Look forward to fertilized eggs from Salmon Faverolles, Easter Eggers, Pavlovskaya, and Ermine Easter Egger chickens this fall for purchase for eating or hatching your own babies!

06/27/2026

Working hard? Or hardly working?