Living California! Especially life in Crescent City, California...

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful Holiday. I along with all my family here in the "CCC" (Crescent City, California) had a wonderful Christmas but so glad it is over too.

Snowman Christmas Tree

On Christmas morning, we had a beautiful sunrise. I took some great pics. I also did a panoramic shot but I turned the camera before it finished and got this weird panoramic picture. We have a lot of beautiful sunsets and sunrises here in the CCC.

Christmas sunrise 2016

Christmas sunrise 2016

Christmas sunrise 2016 weird panoramic picture 

Crescent City is a fishing tourist town. One of the things we most known for is the Pelican Bay Maximum Security Prison. Otherwise, when you are traveling 101, you pass through CCC. We have lots of motels, hotels, real estate agencies, and driftwood for days. Oh, and elk, you have to be careful for the elk.

Driftwood Crocodile

Fish driftwood in front of the Restuarant, The Chartroom

Driftwood everywhere on the beach

Driftwood everywhere on the beach

Driftwood everywhere on the beach

Elk everywhere. Definitely have to be careful on foggy mornings.

During the summer, people flock to this area to see the redwood trees, the National Parks, for camping, hiking, fishing and most of all to catch a glimpse of BIGFOOT! There is also Paul Bunyan and Babe in Klamath. Population is small. The biggest stores we have going for us is Wal-Mart and Home Depot. We do not even have a KFC or Wendy’s, not that I really care for fried chicken anymore but miss eating at Wendy’s.

Paul Bunyan and Babe in the Klamath

Babe

Paul Bunyan

Definitely Bigfoot country

 We live close to Oregon and most weekends we go to Brookings to the Goodwill Store and that is where they have a KFC but no Wendy’s. It is a small town too but traveling in Oregon has a different atmosphere. It just feels different. It is like traveling from North Carolina to Virginia. It is just different. I do not know how to explain it. It is cleaner and cheaper. In addition, Oregon has no sales tax. Gotta love that!

Captured a shelf cloud on the ridge on our way to Oregon

The weather is great here, not too hot and not too cold. We do get a lot of rain. It can get you down if you let it. Have to keep busy. I guess those majestic redwood trees need a lot of water. I believe one of the reasons it rains a lot in the Northwest is because of all the forest we have. We have many mushrooms growing everywhere. In addition, moss grows alongside the roads and on the trees because of all the moisture. The downside to all the rain is mold. Have to do monthly maintenance on the windows to keep the mold from building up on the windowsills.

Driving through the redwoods

Redwoods are right on the road. Have to be really careful.

 It is hard to grow a garden here without a greenhouse. I tried my hand at gardening this summer and it took a long time for my crops to start growing and producing. Some things did not even sprout. Yellow squash grows good. Pepper plants finally took off and started producing. The cherry tomato plants did well only during the hot spell we had; otherwise, it takes days for them to change colors. Cucumbers did not do so well. I had something underground eating the whole plant little by little until they were all gone. Such a bummer, I only got one off the whole plant. The Black-eyed Susan pant and sunflowers did fantastic.

Made the garden fence all by myself with lots of ingenuity.

Tomato plant

Pepper plant

Tray posing with grandma's flamingos

Tray loves helping grandma in the garden

Black-eyed Susan

My homemade scarecrow. Don't work though. Crows send out a scout and
before you know it, crows everywhere.

Garden planted. I know it doesn't look like much but eventually
some of it grows and maybe next year it will be better.

Lettuce didn't grow right. Slow start and tasted bitter.

Lettuce bed

Lovin' the sunflowers

 Overall, I do enjoy living here but would love to move to a warmer and less rainy part of California, but not the Bay Area, been there, done that, and tired of the rat race. Also, the wind, forgot to mention how the wind blows hard when a storm comes. Let me tell you, it's an attention getter for sure. Here's some random pics of Crescent City and the surrounding areas, along with papa and Tray walking on the beach.

Thanks for dropping by and hope you have a prosperous, healthy, 2017.

Happy New Year! XOXOXO Dawn

Oh My, Farming Is Harder Than I Thought!

So if you read my last blog post you know we moved to Crescent City, California last June and now have chickens and how I said once the kinks are worked out anyone can raise chickens. Well I'm going to let you in on our little adventure and elaborate on the kinks. When we moved on this property there was a mother load of blackberry bush. I guess they're native to this area because you see them everywhere. At first, I conjured up childhood memories of how my brother and I used to pick them and sell them for $3 a gallon in North Carolina. Now that was approximately 38 years ago. I got all excited thinking about all the blackberry cobblers and blackberry and dumplings I was going to make. Well, that didn't pan out. There was just too much and I was so overwhelmed that I decided I rather get rid of them being they were pushing against the fence and too much work.

We noticed a lot of goats in peoples yards when we would go out riding around. After talking to the locals and looking around on Craigslist we decided to get some goats ourselves. We came upon an ad with 2 goats which we picked up in Brookings, Oregon. They already had names, Nanny Goat and Peanut. We soon came to realize that it was going to take a long time for 2 goats to clean out the blackberry bush. We decided to get 2 more goats. They came from Arcata, California. I named them Huck and Finn.

After getting the goats, that's when we decided to go ahead with chickens. We purchased 12 hens for a $100 from a local here in Crescent City. As I said in my last blog post, the breeds consist of Americana, Plymouth Rocks, Jersey Giants, and Rhode Island Reds.

We attached the chicken coup to the existing building and fenced in an area for the chickens to come out and scratch. While on the other side of the fence the goats ate the blackberry bush.

Everything was going good so we decided to get a few peeps from the local feed store. We got 1 rooster and 2 hens.

They were so cute. I was so excited. Now realize we're new at this chicken thing. That being said they didn't make it. I was devastated. I decided after that I rather get hens that are older. So we purchased 12 one month old hens of different breeds from Brookings, Oregon. Everything was going great we thought. We let our guard down and our rat terrier, Crystal dug a hole beside the chicken coup where the babies were. Low and behold as they came out one by one our labrador, Spirit, killed about 5-6 of them.  I was so traumatized. The others escaped through the fence and never came back all except one. We looked for them but couldn't find them. The one that came back she died too and one of our big chickens died too. So we're left with 11 hens and 1 rooster.  Now when they're out we fence the dogs up. Lessons learned don't ever assume you know it all because I guarantee you something will happen when you least expect it. Read and educate yourself and also don't be afraid to ask questions even if they seem stupid. I'm happy to say everything is going good right now. Always be ready for the unexpected. (Oh and we got the rooster by trading all 4 goats for it. The goats did what we wanted so it was time to let them go. I was just concerned about them getting ate and was leery about letting them go.) Until next time have a great weekend.