Ten Days to Chicks!!

The chicks are due on March 13th!!  They will be Devi, Diana, Freya and Bob.

For their first few days they will live in a large Sterlite container in my daughter's bedroom, with lights, water and food.  She needs to bond with them, so that they will look to her as "Mom" and follow her about.  It makes them easier to catch, and more friendly to people.  When it starts to smell like a barn in her bedroom (2-3 days), they will move to the garage.

We are constructing an indoor enclosure for their first few weeks, so construction needs to be sped up a little. So far, we've taken an old pallet and covered it with vinyl flooring.  Now we are making a fence to nail to the pallet, that will hold up the poultry netting, to keep the little girls inside.  Within the fenced in pallet will be a kiddie pool filled with bedding, where they will live their lives for a few weeks.  The pool is key to making it easier to clean.  When it starts getting a little stinky, my daughter will take the pool and dump it on my garden, fill it with more clean bedding and place it back inside the fence.  Above all this there will be a light for heat, suspended on a crossbar, so that it can be raised as the girls' heat needs decline.

When the girls no longer need heat and they are a little too big to be snake food, they will go outside in the covered, enclosed and fenced run to scratch to their heart's content.  Because they do not have a mom chicken to defend them, they need the protection of the fence, adult chickens will often kill young that are not their own. Athena and Ursula, the big girls, will be within the big fenced area and we'll put up some tarps for shade.  They will be able to see the little girls, but not be able to touch them.  They need to get to know each other for a while and when the little ones start getting close to full sized chickens, we can let them out to scratch in the whole fenced area. We hope the transition will be smooth for them as they join the big girls.

Less than two weeks to baby pictures!!

Turtles, Crows and Deer, but not an Aesop's Fable

I've been rather busy, but it's the kind of busy that I have trouble defining what is actually taking all of my time.  Much of it is the garden, I head out there and whoop, two hours--gone!  Not so today.  It is starting to warm up significantly (just checked 86 degrees F, in the shade) and I'm not quite used to it yet.

I'm in the process of mulching the garden with straw, so that the weeding doesn't run my life any longer.  It also cuts down on the watering, which can also be a bit of a time suck.

Baby tomato and watermelon plants, with greens and sunflowers in background.

Three bales down, probably 2-3 to go.  Time to drive the XB over to the nursery to get three more bales.

I bought some blue potatoes at an international grocery a few weeks ago, they were amazing.  Some started to sprout pretty quickly, so I guessed that they hadn't been treated with any anti-sprouting agents that are often on potatoes in the supermarket.  I planted an 18 foot row in the back garden alongside the banana fingerlings and the Yukon golds.  The little blue guys have come up in the past 24 hours!!! 

Banana fingerling (left) and Yukon Gold potatoes

The greens are doing an amazing job in the front garden, we have been having kale and Swiss chard almost every evening, in many different forms.

Lacinato Kale

Swiss Chard

Tonight we start on the collards!  I'll do them up with a cider gastrique sauce that my husband found on the internet a few years back for one of the special meals he prepares for me.  It is brown sugar, half as much water made into a simple syrup (boil it for a couple of minutes) and then add the same amount of cider vinegar as the water, a pinch of hot pepper salt and some sort of allium (garlic, onions, chives, shallots, whatever).  The original recipe called for shallots, but I rarely have any and the markets here often don't carry that sort of stuff, so whatever I have goes in.   The original recipe also called for a bazillion steps, which I refuse to do, and have simplified it to the point where it takes about three minutes from when I pull the ingredients out of the pantry. Beyond this collard dish, I haven't a clue what else I am serving for dinner, last night we had whole wheat rotini pasta tossed with garlic, tuna, olive oil, red pepper, and red Russian kale, with beets on the side.

Red Russian Kale

The strawberries have been doing pretty well, but I've been finding a few with one bite out of them, which means my little friend the box turtle has walked his way back to my garden. I'm going to have to find him and walk him farther away into the woods this time, maybe to the other side of the stream.  Luckily, most of the strawberries are planted in another spot in the west side of the yard.

Tiny Alpine strawberries in the side yard.

The deer have pruned two of the trees that  did not have fences around them, time to get more fencing.  It (probably the doe we have seen a couple of times) ate four of the six medlars on the medlar tree, at least it had the courtesy to leave me a couple to try.

The wild raspberries are flowering, the mulberries should be ripe in about a week, one variety of blackberry (Apache) has developed a fair amount of berries that should be ripe in about a week and the other variety is just flowering. There are just a few blueberries this year, next year they should be mature enough to produce some more fruit.

My mother would be proud, I have been practicing my pie crust and have had two decent ones in a row.  I will have plenty of things to bake in pastry soon!

In another battle with wildlife, the crows have been stealing the chicken's eggs and eating them.  Luckily, the girls have finally started laying under a dome that has been out there for a while and the crows can't see into it.  We placed a plastic egg underneath to help encourage them to lay there.  It usually works.  We were able to retrieve three eggs yesterday, for the first time a in a couple of weeks.

So much to do still!

Protection and Growth

Front flower garden, just getting started.

My daughter ate fourths with dinner last night, it seems she has made a full recovery.  She went to track practice on Thursday when she returned to school and managed to make the team!  I get the feeling she'll be eating fourths more often.

Girls inside the fence, for the moment.

The chickens are fenced, we can't count on the neighbors to keep their dogs in their yards and as a consequence (since we'd rather not have our girls die) we get to foot the bill for a fence.  That took a nice little chunk out of this month's budget.  We spent part of this weekend erecting it.  Within three hours of completion Athena went AWOL, three times, once when the pit bulls were out, sigh.  She was determined to lay her egg somewhere else.  We've been referring to her as our "special" chickie, because she doesn't seem to have normal chicken sense.  The other chickens barely tolerate or bully her.  The others dive for the worms in the roots of the weeds I pull up, she will peck my hands, not seeming to figure out that they are not food, even after the tenth attempt.  We're going to have to clip a couple of feathers on one of that special girl's wings, so she won't be able to steer herself over the fence and do herself some harm.  The others seem pretty content.  

 

I'll be placing some of the shrubs we are removing from the front within the fenced area to give them a little cover, and a neat little spot to lay eggs.  They seem to understand the value of thorns, they ran for the quince bush when the pit bulls came into the yard, luckily we were able to turn them around before they got to investigating the chickens and their prickly surroundings. Maybe we'll get the girls something prickly and pretty later in the season.

 

The garden in going in bit by bit.  Leeks, red and yellow onion sets went in as well as all of the little greens seedlings that I have posted pictures of.   The greens are under a floating row cover, after the bugs ate six times as many greens as the family ate last year.  Right after I put the cover over them I saw a cabbage white moth flutter by and was very glad I spent the time setting it up.

  

I planted some peas, lettuce, beets, daikon and white radishes in the back garden.  My tomato seeds are planted inside and coming up.  My mom sent me a few of her seeds for some huge tomatoes and suggested that we have a growing contest, three of the six seeds for that variety are up, so far.  The germination for the eggplant and peppers has been horrible. I planted over 100 seeds, knowing that they are a bit persnickety, but only six have come up and I accidentally broke one of them.   I may be buying plants this year.

Copper trees, Stink Bugs, The Bay Bridge and The Holy Grail--Is that Random Enough?

The weather has been teasing us, it has been warm, even sunny.  I drove with my windows open a little yesterday, but winter will win again.  Maybe a bit of snow tonight and a some more on Tuesday into Wednesday.   Spring is peeking through the blinds, but hasn't come in yet.

Despite the glorious weather, I had an indoor activity planned for yesterday.  I took an art class with a local wire sculptor, Devin Mack. The first time I met him a year ago,  I watched him create part of a large, detailed sculpture of a female trapeze artist while hardly even glancing at his hands.  He stood staring at some place in his brain and bent each piece into place. The spine and ribcage emerged as I watched, completely recognizable as human.

I just took a moment to look to see what he has on-line, and I found a time lapse video of him making The Aerialist at AnnMarie Sculpture Garden. I wasn't aware he was being photographed, and lo and behold thirty seconds into the video I appear for two  seconds, wearing the same polar fleece I am wearing right now.  At Devin Mack's Website you can watch him create the trapeze artist without him having to consult any reference or drawing.

Winter Tree, 20 gauge copper wire sculpture

Anyway, my point in all this is that I took the class and somehow ended up seated between two others who also volunteer at the sculpture garden, whom I had seen, but never really met.  They both like to write, they are both into gardening  and art and when a classmate referred to her progress creating a wire tree she referred to it as a shrubbery and the three of us giggled and started talking about Roger the Shrubberer, and how we were "getting better" and "going for a walk" (Monty Python  and the Holy Grail references, for the uninitiated).  I thought I had been transported back to high school for a moment or two.

My tree sculpture from the class isn't quite finished, it needs a bit more crimping on the ends and balancing of the branches, but here it is.

Bug Hunters in Repose

Speaking of trees, later this week I will be taking a  class on growing fruit  in the Chesapeake Bay area. The class not going to be much like the art class, more of a series of lectures with me scribbling notes furiously.  There is one section on beach plums which will come in handy when my trees/bushes arrive in a few weeks. After listening to so many people moan about how hard it is to grow stone fruit here, the section on variety selection for the area will either tell us that we have selected well or rather badly. The segment on brown marmorated stinkbugs (Maryland's imported version of cockroaches and Japanese beetles combined, as far as I'm concerned) may also prove to be useful.  The nasty little things suck on fruit and mess it up and invade my kitchen as insectoid kamikazes sometimes diving at the lights, sometimes our heads. They do provide the a bit of entertainment as the cats bobble and hop about to chase and eat them. They don't seem to mind the taste. The big, tough, hunting dog barks at the  bugs then pounces and eats them, which is on par with the rest of her hunting skills.  

They are predicting snow the day of the class, which won't be fun since to get to there I will have to cross the Bay Bridge, which is on the list of the scariest bridges in the US.  It is like being on a road suspended  high in the air by nothing, you see nothing off the sides, just a jersey barrier and then nothing (for five miles), add wind, heavy traffic, and crazy, aggressive drivers trying to make the experience as short as possible by driving as fast as possible, and it makes for an all too memorable experience.  I'd rather drive the George Washington Bridge in NYC on a Friday night, in the rain/sleet (like I did last December) than take this one on a sunny day.

The chickens are blissfully ignorant of the coming snow, they are scratching in the flower bed, exposing the just beginning to sprout daffodils.  They have become much more productive now that the weather has improved. I was able to take a frittata to a potluck yesterday that contained fifteen eggs with  a few eggs left over and then found three more this morning, one still warm.  Time to to check behind the hedges to see if there are any that I have missed...

Snow Days and Chickens

10:30 AM, Tuesday, January 21, 2014

11:30 AM, Tuesday, January 21, 2014

3:30 PM, Tuesday, January 21, 2014

8:00 AM, Wednesday, January 22, 2014

I'd forgotten an old New England fact during my years in Florida, salting the roads when the temps are in single digits doesn't work.  Well, it usually doesn't get that cold around here, so the road crews only have salt to work with, as a result we are now on our third day of no school due to six inches of snow.  I also hear that there might be burst pipes at some school or other weather related calamity.  Our road is clear, most in my area are pretty clear, but as long as some areas in the county are not cleared there will be no school.  My daughter is not complaining, she is over a friend's house sledding and then playing Wii. Her friend called to ask her to sleep over minutes after the robo-call came through announcing that there would be no school.  If they miss any more days then they will start losing days from their upcoming summer vacation.

Not coming out, nooooooooo waaaay!

The chickens are not amused with the snow.  In fact, it appears that Athena is quite out of sorts over it.  With the single digit temps causing them to spend their nights in the garage which isn't nearly as chilly as their coop, they have spent several nights in pet carriers.  In the morning, once the temps are in the double digits I bring them outside, feed and water them and leave them to do whatever chickens choose to do. A few minutes after I put them out she was on the back steps staring me down, seeming to demand that I bring her back into the garage. I stepped  out later when I saw that the coop door had blown closed and found Athena hunkered down in the pet carrier by the back door.  She was not about to put her toes into that snow!

She has a worried look about her.

The other three are running about the yard together, but she won't join them.  I put the water within her reach, so that she doesn't dehydrate.












I'm still ready for winter to end (I think Athena is with me on that one), but I get the feeling that this winter is far from done with us.  There are whispers of another storm on the way...I guess I have my seed and tree catalogs to entertain me in the meantime.

Freedom!

The chickens are free again, after a couple of days of no eggs, it seemed unfair to imprison them.   They probably need more daylight, chickens don't lay well during the short days of the year, so they need to have a little supplementary light.  I'm a little leery of plugging anything in and putting it out there (see January 31st's post), so I'm looking into rechargeable or solar possibilities.  There is also the possibility that I just hold off until spring and they will pick up laying all by themselves.

The first thing they did when I freed them was to remove all of the mulch that I had over the front garden looking for the bugs that had been sheltering there.  Thanks girls.

 The book I read most recently has haunted me a bit.  No, it isn't horror or anything, well maybe it is...

American Nations, A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard, it continues the light bulb that lit  when I read Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer, a few years back.  It is an analysis of the different original cultures of the current regions of North America (mostly European, the Native Americans didn't get the option of having their cultures extend to the present in most of the regions--but that situation is partly analyzed in Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel). 

I could write pages and pages about what I took away from the book, but the most important point I took away was a bit scary.   I boils down to the objectives and viewpoints of the Yankeedom  and the Left Coast regions  are irreconcilable with the objectives of the regions of the Deep South (political power to few, no emphasis on education except for the ruling families) and Greater Appalachia (folks from the war torn north of England and Ireland settled here, shoot to protect your family, a few families control the political scene and money, distaste for whomever is in power) and the Far West. There will never be peace or an easy political process, to satisfy one group, the other has to give up everything.  If he is right, then the implications for our nation are chilling.

Anyway, the premise is that the original culture of an area persists in various forms in the current society of that area.  Meaning that the New England, Upstate New York and most northern parts of the Great Lakes region are extensions of the Puritan's beliefs, with the religion watered down as scientific discoveries gave other explanations.  The part that survived is the ethic of strong education, community participation in the government and the need to work toward a stronger society through social experimentation, he calls it Yankeedom.  Being a product of Yankeedom I wouldn't have agreed with him until I moved out of the area and lived among several of the other regions and felt as if I had landed on another planet (with the exception that all the shopping centers were identical, all that differed was the roofing detail).  The book clearly had a Yankeedom bias, the author hails from Maine.

Right now I'm living on the border of Midlands and Tidewater with a tiny hint of Yankeedom from time to time, since the original settlers of this part of Maryland were Puritans.  My mom at one point in her first visit made a comment about a gentleman we met saying, "I didn't know they had Old Yankees down here!" and she was right.  I've bumped into a few of them now and then, one of them runs the saddlery shop where my husband and daughter get some of their horse gear.

The Puritans were overrun pretty early on by Tidewater, who are now being overrun by Midlanders (eastern Pennsylvania-live and let live types, work hard, keep to themselves).   I see more Midlanders as I head toward DC and as I drive away from DC I cross into Tidewater-land. The local Facebook page for information and events sometimes has inquiries about strange booming noises (probably military) or sounds of shotguns, etc.  The Midlanders don't like folks shooting near their suburbs.  The Tidewater folks are still doing what they have always done, even though all their neighbors have sold their farms to Midlanders who developed giant suburbs for other Midlanders, who generally don't shoot near houses  One person posted that these folks had moved to the country and that they need to just accept that they are in the country now. He hasn't noticed that his "country" is being paved and built up. The Midlander's freedom to feel safe in their house is conflicting with the Tidewater's freedom to shoot their gun where ever they choose.

It is really weird that some folks here draw out their vowels in a southern type accent and others have a more clipped vowel northern accent and they can be from neighboring towns and their families have been here for generations.  I heard both the "y'all" and "you guys" shouted from the sidelines of the soccer field, one coach "y'all=ed" the other "you guys-ed".  The blend worked, they won the county tournament.

One Brown Egg

Finally, one day before the chickens turn 26 weeks old, we have our first egg.

It's probably not the first that they have laid, but it is the first we have.  I locked them in the chicken run yesterday, instead of letting them run about the yard.  In one corner, I placed a recycle bin filled with wood shavings and a white supermarket egg to give them a hint of what I wanted them to do (with no risk of mixing up which egg is fresh since all the girls are brown egg laying breeds).  One of them obliged, but I have no idea which one.  They are locked in again today.   Leftover rice really helped encourage them.  While I stepped outside to photograph the egg, they all lined up and stared at me from inside the run, seemingly indignant that I would lock them in for a second day.  Sorry girls, it will probably be a week or so.  They need to get used to laying their eggs in the recycle bin instead of some hidden spot in the yard, leaving the eggs to feed the big possum.

I've spent some time reading Sandor Katz's Art of Fermentation.  It makes me wish it was the beginning of the growing season instead of heading into the winter.  I've been wanting to try some vegetable ferments beyond the kimchi experiments, but couldn't figure out exactly where I would do put some of this stuff.  Our not quite 1300 square foot home is not equipped with what my grandparents referred to as "cold cupboards", closets on the north side of the house that were unheated and used to store food.  We do not have a basement, but as the weekend projects have reminded me, we do have a crawl space.  We have been removing insulation that was installed with the paper outward-trapping moisture-and either flipping it or replacing it, depending on its condition--a horrible, nasty job requiring tyvek suits, goggles, face masks, gloves,lots and lots of crawling on the ground and lots and lots of time.  The area of the crawl space nearest the hatch opening is high enough to sit up in (for me, but not my husband) and could be a reasonable storage spot for some kimchi, sauerkraut, kosher dills or who knows!  I could always dig a bit of a pit to help insulate against temperature changes--but first the fiberglass insulation under the floor boards.

I have to be more careful with the bread ferments, the sour dough bread, pancakes, appams, etc., because of the 1500 calorie issue.  The breads (sigh) add up quickly.  I did try sour dough pancakes this weekend, they weren't sour tasting because I added baking soda shortly before cooking them.  I fancied them up with apples and cinnamon inside, and a bit of my apple butter on top.  They came out pretty well, but I'm going to tweak the recipe a little.

The Wildlife Refuge

We had our first frost last night, so we fired up the pellet stove. It was nice to wake up in a house that wasn't chilly.  Those in-between days when it is pretty cold at night but hit mid-sixties in the day are challenging, too warm for the pellet stove and too cold to be comfortable.

I did my final harvest of warm season veggies last night in anticipation of the frost.

There are enough peppers to make a new batch of (mostly) jalapeno pepper jelly. With my canning frenzy, I have come to the realization that I need more shelves in my pantry, yet another project to conquer.  The chill has also reminded me that I haven't found the right fabric for curtains in the kitchen/dining area.  I've been carrying around my yardage calculations for a few weeks  since I'm trying to pair it with another errand into the areas. The fabric shops seem to claim a certain radius around themselves, I can drive west 45 minutes to one (Hancock), northeast about 55 minutes to another (Hobby Lobby) and due south for 55 minutes to another (Jo Ann).  Many of the fabric sellers on-line do not seem the have the yardage required to cover four 62 inch long windows, which comes to 10-12 yards.  Gotta drive!


I'm looking out those exposed windows to the bird feeder, which I just filled for the first time this season about two days ago.  The chickens love whatever the squirrels spill, but the wild birds have not yet discovered it. I hope we have the variety that we had in the past year the usual chickadees, robins, sparrows, blue jays, titmice, nuthatches, cardinals, juncos, wrens, then there are (spring and summer) bluebirds (they like the posts we put in for the blackberries), blue gray gnat catchers (had to look them up, again spring/summer), Baltimore orioles, flickers, red bellied woodpeckers, pileated  woodpeckers, mockingbirds, catbirds, brown thrashers, and when a deer gets hit on the road (they have a crossing nearby) the black and turkey vultures (nasty, stinky things), oh yeah, wild turkeys (mom and five babies).  Then, of course, we have mammals deer, bunnies, a big possum, saw a fox once, a bazillion moles that make the lawn squishy. The moles are the reason some of the hawks (red tailed and red shouldered) come--they sit on the "lawn" and wait--then pounce on a mole when it comes up).  Nasty little moles ate the roots of my parsley!  Go Hawks!

The other day in the back yard we had two deer, a  crow and a bunny all just sitting on the lawn near each other, my husband said that it looked like it was an idyllic scene straight out of an old Disney movie and that we should hear perky music in the background.  Much of the land around us platted for development and now the recession is easing the 500K houses are going in, so our wildlife refuge of a backyard will probably be short lived.

Time to fill the feeder, I hope the squirrels will save a little for the birds today.

DIY -- Doing a Great Deal for a "Great Deal"

Where has the summer gone??
I've had blog ideas accumulating, but I just haven't had the moment to write.  I have a few minutes, let's see what I can get on the screen.

I haven't talked about the garden lately, but it is doing quite well.  Tomorrow, I will put my pumpkins out to cure in the sun, I haven't counted them, but there seem to be quite a few.  The tomatoes have been making up for last year's poor showing.  This year's favorite is green zebra, nice and tangy. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words, that is a nickel under the tomato(es).  These are two tomatoes that merged to form one massive tomato, (fraternal conjoined twins??) it was 5.5 inches across:

It was yummy, we ate it within 20 minutes of it being picked, most of the 20 minutes was spent trying to get a good shot of it.

The goat lease is moving forward, here is the goat who will be providing out milk. I should have taken a bird's eye view of her, she is is probably carrying triplets and from that view it really shows.

One of the reasons that I haven't had time to write is that after getting a "great deal" on a dining table and chairs, I had a great deal of work to do.  The chairs needed new foam and upholstery, the whole set needed a good scrub and a coat of paint.  The couple I bought it from referred to the set as "Nana's table".  Well, it appears that Nana was a two pack a day smoker, the chairs had a thick coating of tar and nicotine.  Some of it came off and some of it didn't.  The mustardy colored set appeared to have originally have been off white, with off white seat covers.

After washing

The deconstruction, the beginning

Hadn't seen a chair put together like this before.

STAPLES!!!

 After spending an hour or so washing the pieces, I spent about 10 hours pulling all of the staples out of the seats (not kidding, there were thousands of them). 

Making progress with a little company.

Nasty Chair Cover

Cup-O-Staples

Then I had to order foam on the internet for the cushions, find fabric, find the right color paint and...a month after I started I have now finished, this is how I spent my summer.  This is why I haven't had time to write.

Next  the window treatments, eventually.

For the vicarious poultry keepers:

11 weeks old

Chickens, Spicy Peppers, Berries and Other Random Thoughts

Athena

Ursilla with Paisley hiding behind her.

The chicks have been in their outside coop for four days, they love it!  They had their first taste of pizza crust yesterday, they love that too!  They seem very happy to be outdoors, scratching and eating bugs.  The buffs still pose for the camera and the other two still seem camera shy.

Athena again

Paisley with Ursilla hiding this time.

At almost four weeks old the Buff Orpingtons are becoming fully feathered, Ursilla is improving, and poor Paisley, I guess she is a late bloomer.

They are hanging around inside the run, once they get a good feel for where home is they will get a chance to free range a bit.

Scroll through the pictures, I'll move on to gardening below.

Back yard garden

The back yard garden has its issues.  The placement of the garden was chosen by the previous owners of the house and like most of the trees they planted, it's in the wrong place.  It is too close to the trees and it is shaded too much of the day in the summer,  the sun doesn't hit it until after noon.  On top of that, the trees that it is too close to are black walnut, which are known to send out a nasty chemical, juglone, to kill plants living near them. I'm doing battle with the caterpillars in the collards and the cabbage, the cilantro and dill decided that it is too hot and bolted, the tomatoes are struggling with the limited sun as are the peppers and eggplants. Sigh.

Front yard garden

All this is why I started the front yard garden, which I created by layering organic materials on top of cardboard, as you can see the squash and the pumpkins like it, the watermelons were planted later and are a bit slow to get moving.
The two pepper plants placed in the flower bed are doing great, they get full sun and my husband squirts them with the hose every time he waters his carnivorous plants.  They were supposed to be the two jalapenos, but I somehow got the plants mixed and it appears that one is cubanelle.  This means that one of the ones in the back yard is jalapeno and I may have a bunch of peppers that appear to be sweet frying peppers that may be "Muy Pica!" due to cross pollination.  Oops!







This Italian squash is almost 10 inches long. I swear it wasn't there yesterday!

The blackberries we planted this spring have just a few berries on them, we weren't expecting any this year, so they are a little bonus.

This doesn't look like much but they are oooooooooooooh so cool!  A cultivated variety of raspberry that has gone wild  and provides a border to much of the property, we do nothing but mow to keep them under control. They produce enough berries to send kids out there on a mission to get enough for a recipe, they can sample as many as they want, as they fill my measuring cups and then repeat it every afternoon for about three weeks.

Love Summer, Dread Summer

Summer is coming.  I'm looking forward to it and I'm somewhat dreading it.

The pluses:

My alarm won't go off every morning to make sure that all household members (furry, feathered, and otherwise) have breakfast and are properly equipped for the day and that certain members of the household are out the door on time. Mornings have a slower pace, nice, because I've never been much of a morning person.

Organized activities are minimal, no soccer or basketball practice messing up dinner or chopping every Saturday and  Sunday neatly in half, so that we get nothing done.

I am able to spend more time with my daughter, who is good company.

The farmer's market is open, and it is warm enough to enjoy it.

My garden is in full swing, collards, kale, scallions, cilantro and strawberries are ready now with other cool things to come.

Camping, got to have at least one venture to primitive living and escape the house. When I'm away from home I don't think about the trim painting that needs to happen, or have to look at the nasty white floor in the kitchen that looks like it needs to be washed despite the fact it was just washed. (Personal rant: Who are the sick people who install white floors in homes??? We garden, some of us ride horses and we have a large dog, the floor is never clean for more than fifteen minutes.)  Cooking with wood for a week is fun and it sure makes me appreciate the microwave and the oven when I return.

The dreads:

The cats become my alarm, usually they come and sit either on my pillow, so that I breathe fur while they yowl at me or the sit on my chest and rub their noses and whiskers across my face.  They know I don't "do" cats in my face.

Organized activities are minimal, so every day my daughter tries to see what she can come up with to entertain herself, usually involving friends who live several miles away or activities that are expensive and a minimum of a half hour's drive away.  She isn't old enough to drive, so I become "chauffeur extraordinaire."  and "the mom who says, "No!."" (sometimes I get the urge to say "nee." but she wouldn't get it--she is finally of the age when she can be introduced to Monty Python, she'll get it).

Though my daughter is good company, sometimes I just want to talk to adults or just plain old don't want to talk.  That introvert thing gets in the way of parenting, that's why I have only one.

Camping, I hate the packing.  Last year, I forgot the dog food (I remembered everything else!),  but she didn't mind eating leftovers.

Sweat.  Living in humid-land, life is hot and moist and a bit smelly.

______

Chick update:  The girls are doing well, they are more active now and have little feathers growing in on the tips of their wings.  Since it has been hot, they have been able to go outside briefly (they are supposed to be kept between 85-90 degrees at this point), they seem to enjoy it.  They are perching on my daughter's hands, much to her delight.

New Peeps

I have been missing having chickens.  I miss their crazy antics, the silly way they walk, their ninja kicks at each other over the grubs I toss from the garden and just looking up from yard work to find a tilted head with curious eyes pondering my every move.  I also miss the eggs, though Fluffy and Zebra our long-time companions gave the bittiest eggs, they were by far the tastiest I've ever had.

With a bit of trepidation, I jump back into the poultry raising pool.  I quickly became attached to the last crew only to have all of them gone in a moment, but that is life, isn't it? Changes in a moment never to be the same again.  I still feel a bit of guilt over the last bunch, but it is time to move on and try again.

So, meet the new peeps with names chosen by my bibliophile daughter:

Athena, (Buff Orpington) the goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law and justice, just warfare, mathematics, strength, strategy, the arts, crafts, and skill. Thus far, I can tell she naps well.

Athena

Lucy (Buff Orpington)  named after the youngest child in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.

Lucy

Ursula, (Australorp), not sure where she came up with this one, I don't think it was The Little Mermaid and she hadn't remembered that it is her Nonna's middle name.

Ursula

and Paisley, I named a piggy bank (only because she said it required a name) that my daughter gave me as a gift, Paisley, because of the pattern on its back. I seem to remember a character in a movie somewhere with that name.  Anyway, she seems to like the name and has bestowed it on a bitty barred rock chick.

Paisleu

The yellow chicks seem to already understand how to pose, I just plopped them down, they looked cute and I snapped the pictures.  The black ones turned their backs and had to be re-oriented repeatedly to get a sort-of-okay shot.

These girls already have the beginnings of pin feathers on the tips of their wings, their cute as a button fluffy look won't be around next week.

The Golden Eggs

Back to the chickens and ducks...Here is the question--How much does it cost to protect $38 worth of ducks and chickens from raccoons, hawks, and opossums?  

The plans for the coop were free, published with step by step instructions in a library book. 
The first trip to the home improvement big box store cost about $170, and we thought we had pretty much everything for the coop and the run would be inconsequential in comparison, ha!  The lumber we purchased did build the coop, but it seemed that we needed more hardware.  Off to the local hardware store for screws of a different diameter or length, latches for the doors, hardware cloth, chicken wire, poultry staples for attaching chicken wire (really if you go into the hardware section they have a box labelled poultry staples), corner braces, you name it.  Oh, and then exterior paint had to be chosen (by my daughter) and purchased.  The woman mixing the paint exclaimed that the chicks and ducks will think they have been transported to the Caribbean, so be warned.   Next more hardware and then even more hardware.  For the last thirty dollars of hardware they gave us an itty bitty bag and as if to make up for the size of the bag, they threw in a bumper sticker that said "United We Stand".  Sigh.

Poultry Penthouse

The benefits for our several hundred dollar investment we will get some of the yummiest eggs available, I don't want to calculate the value of each eggs the girls produce, it would be laughable (or cry-able).  The girls (and Sebastian) are really pets, so they have their little penthouse, where they slept for the first time last night,  Our garage seems lonely.  No nameless boy chicks scurrying about, no Kiwi and Sunny running up to me to seeking some attention, no ducks soaking up rays from the heat lamp with the, "Hey, what's up!" look as I come down the steps.  It smells better in there already. 

There was a throng of excitement as I opened the coop door to put in breakfast this morning, it was intense.  Today their ramp to the outside will be built and they will be able to enter and leave as they wish.  What is now their prison will really be their penthouse.

So to answer my initial question--I don't want to know and I will not add it up.  I will enjoy the antics of the girls and Sebastian,  and savor the eggs produced.  It will be worth it in the end.