Starting the Garden

Erica and Aidan helped get some of our seeds started. We've got tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, brussel sprouts, cabbage, basil, stevia, cilantro, marigolds, ayssum to name a few. I haven't had the greatest luck starting seeds inside in the past, but I always look forward to trying again. Glutton for punishment. Anyhoo, it makes a nice homeschooling lesson for my children:-)

A Day on the Couch

I spent yesterday on the couch with a very sudden spring cold--a slight fever, headache, sinus pressure, all that jazz! Not what I had intended to do with the day, but that's life. Aidan was a restless sleeper Friday with a very deep (and disturbing, not as in "oh I can't sleep with this noise", more like, "should we take him to the ER") cough. Needless to say I got very poor sleep. Erica woke up with a sore throat. We (the kids, Jim and I) spent Saturday watching movies, drinking tea and eating chicken soup. Of course Jim isn't sick, I think he was just feeling pressure to conform from the rest of us coughing, sneezing, nose-blowing folks. So he took care of us and enjoyed a well-earned day of rest as well.

HE (husband extraordinaire) had spent the day on Friday raking mulch while I ran errands and had an acupuncture appointment in Madison. I was amazed to see that by late afternoon Jim had the whole garden de-mulched! I think he overdid it, as his back was hurting yesterday. I keep reminding him that we are not so young anymore--time to be more like the tortoise than the hare. Slow and steady wins the race.

The chickies are all doing great. In preparation for their arrival I had done quite a bit of reading and had learned that we could expect to lose 10% of them in the delivery. We only lost one, so we have 29 or 30--I can't get a reliable count they are so fast! We ordered 30, so a good guess is 29, but maybe our hatchery stuck an extra guy in there just in case. Who knows. They are still very skittish when we go to change their bedding and water, but now they stop and tilt their heads to watch me when I go in the spare room, which is their temporary home.  I don't quite know how to break it to my father that he will be sleeping with chicks when everyone comes out to visit in a week and half..... :-)

Spotters continues to settle in and get acquainted with our routine. He seems totally at ease with us and has stopped barking at noises coming from upstairs and at Jim when he comes home from work. This is nice, because it would always set Tippy off. When we get the mail we take the dogs down to the mailbox--it's a good 1/8 of a mile to our mailbox and then (another 1/8) to our neighbor, Mary's house to deliver her mail. Mary lives in the original farmhouse. The property we built our home on is 35 acres of the original 160. Our driveway veers off the main driveway to the north. On our way back from delivering Mary's mail Spotters ran ahead of us. It was only his second or third time on this walk so I wasn't sure if he would continue straight on down the driveway to the road and I became a bit nervous as he doesn't consistently respond to his name. I was surprised to see him gracefully turn up the drive to our house without even breaking his stride or looking back to see if we were following. Amazing.

Spotters is home.

Moonset

The moon was quite lovely this morning at 4:30, Spotters new favorite time to use the bathroom. It was close to setting--about 3/4 full and a stunning yellow/orange color. I am always enchanted with the moon's beauty.  There is some magic in the moon.

And it is important to note--I would not have seen that if it hadn't been for our new puppy. He is a sweetie and seems to be settling in. Tippy has always been a submissive dog and I think for the first few days she didn't know what to make of this new situation. Now she is asserting herself more--letting Spotters know that she was here first. Spotters is fine with that--he just wants to play.

Our chicks are already feathering out on their wing tips! I was quite surprised to see this yesterday, so I sent an email to our friends inviting them to come this weekend and check out the cute little fuzzballs before they are not so cute anymore. Chickens are not so attractive during adolesence.

But that's ok--some of the rest of us were not so cute during adolesence either....
Happy Friday!

Babies!

Just a quick note--our chicks are all doing great. We did lose one, apparently during the transport.

Jim had decided to drive in to work yesterday (usually he takes the van-pool) and stayed home later than his usual 5:45 departure time. When we got the call at 6:50 am, he woke up the kids to see if they wanted to accompany him to town to pick up the chicks and they were all over it!

If you've never heard a box of chicks peeping, you are missing something!!

And here's a better photo of Tippy in her pose:

Hot Off The Press

Just got a phone call from the post office--our chicks are in!! More later....

Canine Friends

Puppies wake up. In the middle of the night. To pee. This means that unless your dear sweet wonderful 7 or 10-year-old children wake up to escort the puppy outside, that job will fall to you. Just in case you were wondering.

Spotters became a member of our family on Sunday when we adopted him from an organization called “Friends of Noah” (http://www.friendsofnoah-wi.org/ ). Lois and her husband, Mert (short for Merton I later discovered) had only moved to the area 7 months prior. Lois started Friends of Noah in November and has 30 volunteers and 6 foster homes already. She mostly deals with mixed breed dogs (Spotters, at best guess is Border Collie/Australian Shepherd mix). And she is very passionate about what she does. Spotters was one of a large litter of puppies dumped on a veterinarian’s doorstep with their umbilical cords tied together—hours old? She and her husband hand fed all the puppies. Spotters was less than a pound and the runt of the litter. While it took Lois an hour and a half to feed Spotters’ litter-mates, it took her husband the same amount of time to feed Spotters. All of the other pups had been adopted out prior to our seeing Spotters on Petfinder.com. They had kept him a bit longer to work on training and to bulk him up.

Tippy, our 2-year-old Australian Shepherd/Lab mix had gotten into the habit of sitting on a piece of furniture with her head resting on the arm of said furniture, looking forlornly, out into the distance. I believed she was bored or depressed. She gets to go running with Jim, and the kids and I take her on walks. But perhaps this amount of activity is not enough for a breed designed to herd sheep every day. So, I thought getting her a playmate would be a good idea. It was either that or a herd of sheep (that may come, but not just yet).

She still sits on the furniture the same way....

First Day of Spring

This seems an especially auspicious day to begin this blog--at least by looking at the calendar. If you look out my window, not so much. We won't be doing anything that remotely resembles gardening today as the ground is covered in a beautiful (not so deep) blanket of snow. That is Wisconsin. We were actually graced with several days of 60+ degree weather this week--just a tease, but I did spend a few hours in gardening activity.

Our garden is only a year old. Well, not even a year old. We finished building the raised beds last May. All around the raised beds we laid mulch to cover the paths. Big paths. Wide paths. Paths an elephant could lumber through. We erroneously believed we would need to wheel a gargantuan cart throughout our garden and therefore, created the paths to accomodate this beast. I never used it. Jim (hubby extraordinaire) used it at the very end of the season during the clean up phase.

Anyhoo (this was one of my mom's cute words) we are making the paths smaller this year. This entails more work than you might imagine. First, we have to rake the mulch off all the paths. Then we are going to remove all of the fieldstones that were laid last spring to create the raised beds. Jim is then going to till in some compost all over. We will then lay landscaping cloth in all of the new path areas (I am hoping to drastically minimize weed growth) and cover it with the previously raked mulch. Finally we will build up all of the new garden beds, fill them with additional earth and cover with straw.

"Not so bad", you say.
"The garden is 40 feet by 60 feet", I say.

Not so bad. And then the fun begins. I am always humbled by the whole process of seed to fruit. This itty bitty speck of a thing that you place into the ground grows into an entire plant with multiple hunks of food to eat. It's mind-boggling and beautiful. Can't wait to get started. The first day of spring may officially be today, but our real spring is just around the corner.