Roger's parting gift

It takes me 8-10 hours a week to mow.

For more than 2 years I've been mowing this yard while Roger is away.  I kept tellin him "I need a zero turn mower" and he kept saying "No you don't, you aren't doing it right - stop complaining".

Guess what happens when Roger had to mow a few months this spring ... he bought a zero turn mower!

It' a bit challenging for me. It's like backing up a trailer, it's different than what my mind thinks should be happening.

It only took me all of about 7 and 1/2 minutes to get it stuck and have to call for help.

Harley Bling

Well.... it IS a girls bike.

Roger's question was ... why are you putting jewelry on a motocycle?

The chicks hatched!

This is a story of life.

2 weeks ago we lost many chickens; they were attacked and eaten during the night (probably by a fox).

However during this time we had our first mother that decided it was time to hatch a clutch of eggs. She's been diligently sitting on these eggs for 3 weeks, and she hatched most of them yesterday.

We have no real idea what these mongrel babies will look like. We had (and lost) many different breeds and she was sitting on more than her own eggs. It’s not obvious to us novice chicken breeders what these chickens will turn into. Color of down does not seem to correlate well to color of chicken. We do know that we have one with “head gear” because he/she already has a pompom on it’s head. It’s also orange, and we lost all our orange “head gear” chickens.

So maybe, just maybe we have a small piece of our favorite chickens that we lost. It makes for a good story about life.

We also have 39 new chicks coming on July 11th … stay tuned.

Audrey's trip to Harpers Ferry

Audrey came to visit for a few days.  She spent 2 days in DC wondering around, then we went to Harpers Ferry.

It was Roger's first time too!  I've been there so much (I take everyone here) that I didn't realize he hadn't been there.

Eggs of all sizes and colors

We are getting a variety of eggs. We just happened upon these two extremes. One is a green egg that looks like it came from an ostrich (it ended up being double yoked) and there other appears to be a first egg from a Bantam chicken. Notice another smaller yellow one in her hand.

We get mostly normal size white, tinted (green) and shades of brown.

We recently lost about 1/2 our chickens to a fox. We will be getting new babies in July. These eggs are wonderful.

My sister will be here next month .... Oh I can't wait to have her slaving away on deviled eggs.

A Tree for Ripley

I want to plant a tree for Ripley.

I wanted to plant a tree in our yard with some of Ripley's things and maybe Ripley's ashes. This would be a tree that would grow and be nourished by Ripley and/or his things. It would also be the tree where we place his rock.
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I've been searching high and low for the right tree. I thought I wanted a big, strong (and expensive) tree, but it turns out that I think I found "the right" tree right  it in our back yard.

Last year I planted a bunch of saplings - I even posted them.

http://snell-bennett.blogspot.com/2009/04/its-sapling-garden.html
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This year one of these trees is standing much taller than the rest. As I was standing there watering them I realized that this should be Ripley's tree. Ripley was there while I planted it, and it survived him peeing on it. It seemed like Ripley was already a part of it.

Once I find a place for it - I'll be moving it, making a spot for it and burying Ripley's things under it.

Anyone know what kind of tree this is?

Ollie ... drunk happy.

Ollie isn't often happy - but I snapped this picture of him today while I was planting.  He'd eaten so much chicken poop from the garden that he was slap happy.

His shirt is for a medical issue - not becuase we like to dress our dog.

Spring planting

I've been wanting to put in a garden, but with Roger gone over the last couple of years - it was just more than I thought I could handle.

I love these boots!

Since he is home this spring, I decided that maybe this year I could manage it. We have mostly clay so I wanted a raised bed. Roger (the practical one) wanted to just nail some board together, but I really liked these cool brackets and after some hounding ... he finally gave in.

For the last couple of weeks I've been working the soil. It's a mixture of clay, leaf mulch, peat and the stuff I pulled out of the chicken coop yesterday. The idea was to use top soil, but instead of 3 yards of leaf mulch and 2 yards of top soil, they delivered all leaf mulch and I decided to improvise.

As I was planting this evening (in humid 90 degree weather) I realized that I have not had a garden since I was a child. Actually probably since I was about 8 years old. Now, I've grown tomatoes, and I once did potatoes in a tire. It’s hard to get things to grow in Seattle with all the shade and such a short growing season.

I’d already planted my onions and potatoes a few weeks back, and I decided to do these in these new grow bags.

Look I already have potato greens coming up!

And for the 3rd year in a row I’m doing my upside down tomatoes in buckets

It's kinda cool to think that these seeds will become food.In the garden I planted Carrots, Beets, Watermelon, Cucumbers, Squash, and Gords                                                                 

They don't just make eggs...

We have been enjoying loads of fresh wonderful eggs. We are having to give them away.

They don't lay in those boxes very often.  They prefer to lay in the bench or in the corners under the perch.  They want us to have to hunt for the eggs.

However, eggs are not the only thing that chickens produce. It was time to clean out the chicken coop.

I'm preparing the garden and planting my tomato upside down plants - so I thought it was a good time to put the manure to use.

I can't get a tractor in there, so I had to shovel into 5 gallon buckets and then dump it over the fence.  It's only 85 degrees out.  It actually wasn't so bad, just hard on the lungs and eyes with all the ammonia.

Here you can see some of the chickens out the door.  They weren't happy I made them all leave.