Not Very Good At Keeping Up With This

So….I knew it had been awhile since I posted anything but I didn’t realize it had been a whole MONTH! It’s not that I haven’t had things on my mind to write about- there’s been plenty. I just don’t get the chance to sit down and type when whatever-it-is is going on. And then it just kind of loses some of the excitement before I get to share it. Which sucks.

So what’s been going on around here in the last month…hmmm…

Chicks

Well, we have new baby chicks. We picked up two little Columbian Wyandotte pullets from the local farm store this past Monday. The other seven are a barnyard mix (aka chicken mutts) that came from a coworker who picked them up at one of the farmers’ markets. They were younger and smaller than all the others he picked up so they needed separate housing arrangements. Logic would tell you that it’s easier to give them to a ten-year old whose mother wants more chickens than to build something special to house them in yourself. And as luck would have it “we” (meaning Ed and Lando) had just the day before moved the stinky ducks out of the garage and into an outside pen. But I guess I haven’t told you about that yet either.

We always start our chicks off in a homemade “brooder box” of sorts. It’s actually a large storage tote that Ed and Lando modified (one of Lando’s first farm projects when we moved here in 2017). They cut out the center of the lid and replaced it with a piece of rabbit cage-looking wire that they found lying around left by the previous owners. It’s held in place by thin slats of wood on top and underneath the lid. I’ll post a picture because that probably doesn’t make sense. Anyways, all of our chicks have started off in this so that’s where the new little guys (hopefully mostly gals) are hanging out in the garage.

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Ducks

It didn’t take the ducks long before they grew out the brooder box. They soon got moved into our “big chick” setup which is a metal water tank with a special made lid that covers half of the tank. The lid has a brace across the top to hold a heat lamp and also drops down into the tank from the top to provide some “shade” to the other half of the tank and provide a cooler area for chicks/ducks to get away from the warmth of the heat lamp. Coincidentally, the ducks were ready for a bigger space just a couple days after we took the last fat steer to butcher and he no longer needed a water trough.

You know how some animals like turtles will grow as big as their cage or tank will let them? I think ducks are the same way. They definitely did some growing in those first two weeks or so, but good grief have they grown since we turned them outside! Right now they are in the pen behind the chicken coop that we had completely closed in with chicken wire for when we need to keep the chickens contained when we go camping. They have a little covered area which I think they only use when they need to eat. They prefer to sit outside or walk/run around in a little cluster like toddlers playing soccer. They must poop as soon as their little butts touch the water in their tub because that water doesn’t stay clean for long! They are growing up fast and are filling out with regular feathers that no longer show any trace of cute yellow duckiness 🙁

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Summer Bucket List Item

One of the things on my bucket list for summer was to learn how to pull the camper. We/I have been putting it off, but it finally came down to necessity. We had planned a multi-family weekend trip for Ed’s birthday. Guess who wasn’t able to get off work… I knew I would have to work a full day on Friday so one of our bestest friends in the whole wide world towed our camper up to the campground (which luckily wasn’t far away) and then made the trip back to get his own camper. While I was a little bit of a blubbering mess Saturday evening thinking about Ed having to work a 12-hour shift on his birthday while we chilled and relaxed with friends, we still had a good time. And that same bestest friend took the longer way home so that he could follow me while I pulled the camper home just in case I had problems. But, guess what… I didn’t! I let him pull it out of the camping spot but the rest of it I did ALL BY MYSELF! At least until we got to the house and then I let Ed pull it up into the yard and back it into it’s parking spot on his lunch break. Small steps, folks, small steps.

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Garden

Onions are growing great. Something ate off a couple of my bean sprouts so I’ll plant a few more seeds in those spots. Peppers are a little slow to take off. Squash is doing almost as well as my onions, and the cucumbers aren’t far behind. Tomatoes got a little lanky in their plastic seed cups, but they are in the ground and will hopefully get to enjoy some consistent warm weather soon.

The raised beds that Ed built me are making it a lot easier to keep up with weeding. It helps that just the idea of beds makes it possible to break the task of weeding down into doable amounts each day. I’m sure things will change once weeds start coming up quicker around the tomato plants since they aren’t in the beds. Maybe I’ll get some landscape fabric and straw put around them before that happens. One can hope, right?