As it usually goes, life is busy these days. I feel like it is always busy, but the tasks change with the seasons. During winter, we don’t have many outside tasks so I get to put a lot of effort into my side businesses. Lots of art and writing, and slow cooking hearty stews. Then spring arrives and all Hell breaks loose. Planting is serious business. Adding structural framing, animal rearing, and a gaggle of kids makes it a full time gig.
The gravel bed is complete for saplings. We have about 500 trees to get in the ground. The berry bushes are in. We assessed the deer damage on the fruit tree groves.
The ducks are growing quickly and we moved them outside into the fowl run expansion. I have nine more young chickens to move from brooder to coop in the next couple weeks. I moved the younger ducks out early after an incident with the chicks attacking one of my female Pekins. My husband calls the chickens soulless dinosaurs.
We lost a laying hen. She had no outwards signs of poor health. After some exploration of her body, I concluded she was egg-bound.
A four day old Olive Egger Chick!
We have had some soft shell and thin shell eggs lately, but it is also molting season. We offered up some oyster shell and mealworms just in case though.
I planted a native climbing honeysuckle to create a shade canopy over the chicken run. I’m hoping to also use some goat-wire to fence in a yard for them. We can’t afford to have the chickens trash the designated growing areas this year. Luckily, their free-ranging area will still be larger than most people’s entire property.
We put in our vegetables, only to have one last frost at the end of May that killed most of them. Such is life.
My grandmother recently passed. It was definitely her time and with her pain, it was a blessing. She was an anchor in my life, and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about it. For now, I simply enjoy the nostalgia of certain activities that were a big part of our relationship.
School wraps up this week and it’s summer vacation!! Since I’m not pregnant this summer, I’m looking forward to being more active with the kids. We’ve already planted so many perennials and flowers. We have lots of plans and the calendar is filling quickly. Between work, farming, child wrangling, gym time, and sports, we don’t really have enough spare time to keep up on shows or politics these days. I’m going to assume this is a good thing, from what I hear.
I feel time is flying by too quickly and I don’t know how to appreciate each day more. I am with my children each day and yet I feel like I’m missing out on their lives somehow. It will only get more chaotic as they grow and develop and I am already trying to find ways to slow it down.