Cliff and I spent a lot of time outside with the baby yesterday. Here you can see her enjoying the chickens as the chickens enjoy their pen. It got pretty warm in the afternoon, and the hens spent a lot of time under their house where it was cooler. If they start laying eggs under there, they are going to be confined inside the house until mid-afternoons. So far, so good. I average about five eggs a day from the six hens, now that the days are longer.
We are not getting enough rain. I sure hope that changes, because if it doesn't, this will be the third dry year in a row. I really get tired of dragging soaker hoses from row to row.
I set out my last two tomato plants yesterday; Burpee had a special three-plant price with no shipping charge, so I got two tomato plants and one sweet pepper plant. Every year I tell myself I will only have eight plants, but I always end up with more. This year it's a total of fourteen. One of the tomatoes is a variety I had never heard of: Steakhouse Hybrid. It's supposed to bear the largest tomatoes of any plant.
Now, I don't expect a tomato this huge. In fact, I have learned not to expect anything when trying new varieties. Last year I had a couple of "Mortgage-lifter" tomatoes, an old heirloom type that were supposed to be huge. I only got puny little tomatoes from it, and not many, either.
Finally I saw a couple of green beans breaking through the crusty soil this morning. Radishes are doing the same thing they always do for me... most of them are making tops, not roots, and then going to seed. I'm having a problem with horses running through my garden again, which I thought was a thing of the past. I'm not sure what the deal is, but at least once a month the new neighbors have horses get out. Cliff thinks it's due to a faulty closure on one of their fancy gates. In the winter it didn't matter much, but yesterday one of their horses got out and left great big craters in the garden everywhere he stepped. Looks like we are going to have to electric fence the garden like we used to.
I just can't seem to get back into regular blogging lately. I know part of it is that I'm baby-sitting four days a week. I take pictures of the baby and put entries in her private blog, and then neglect this one. When she is here, she has top priority. We take her shopping with us sometimes, but I forget half the stuff I was supposed to buy. Young mothers don't realize how much of their attention a small child demands, not by misbehaving, but just by being a defenseless child. When Cliff and I talked about babysitting this baby, I told him, "This might be our last shot at spending this much time with a baby, and I intend to do it right. When she is here, she will be my number one priority. If I need to get rid of the cows or chickens, I will. If I need to stop gardening, I will do it."
So far, I haven't given up anything intentionally, although the truth is that I lost a beautiful heifer last fall due to bloat, and a newborn calf that was dead when I found it. I'm sure at least one of these deaths would have been prevented had my attention not been on a tiny baby, because had either of them been found in time I imagine they would have survived. That is my fault, not the baby's. I'm the one who keeps track of the cows. I should have asked Cliff to check them periodically. He isn't the one who is used to bothering with the cows, so he wouldn't have thought of it, but would have gladly looked at them a couple of times a day. Another factor in those deaths is that we had moved to the old house; both animals would have been in plain view from our living room window back at the trailer house.
It's water under the bridge, and the child has been such a blessing to us. We smile all the time she's here.
We should be back at the trailer house by the end of this month.
In the garden, my potatoes are up, onions are doing well, and I'm just waiting for the corn and beans to break through the ground. I've planted all the tomatoes I intend to except for two that are supposed to arrive via UPS tomorrow.
Cliff has put off building me a pen for the chickens for a long time. He says he kept hoping I would get tired of them. No such luck! So one day last week his brother, Phil, came and helped him build the pen.
As you can see, it was a cool, dreary day.
I let the chickens out to roam the place around 3:30 every afternoon, if I'm home. They enjoy it so much! I'm afraid to let them go free all the time because of foxes and hawks, but my grandma always let hers out in the evenings and didn't seem to have problems.
The strawberries are the reason I needed a pen: they are in full bloom. Chickens like strawberries, and I needed a way to turn them out without their getting into my garden and eating my produce. So during strawberry time, they will be confined to their yard. It's nice to let them out in their yard each morning, too, so they aren't just confined to four walls. Happy chickens are fun to watch.
Warm weather is with us at last, and I caught myself thinking a while ago, "It's almost too hot!"
Then I thought about the long, bitter-cold winter we've had and decided anything below 100 degrees is just right.
