Flower Friday: May 24, 2013

The bulbs are in a fairly shady spot of the cutting garden, so they are late bloomers. Not sure if they will get enough sunlight to return next year or not, so I am enjoying them while they are here!

Tulips. Keeping the leaves on make a pretty decent frog for holding them upright and in place.

Tulips, daffodils, Jacob's ladder, and allium. The Jacob's ladder ("Bressingham purple") smells wonderful!

A small vase for Tiegan: tulips and daffodils.

More tulips.

Even more tulips. This shows the evolution of the plain tulip bouquet in the previous photo. As some older blooms faded over the course of the week, I removed them, cut the remaining stems a bit shorter, and added some hosta leaves around the edges to fill in the gaps and push them closer together so the whole thing looks like it's still full of flowers.

And...tulips. We are having a week of heavy downpours each night, and I wanted to bring these inside before they got beaten down by the rain. They should last a while since they haven't opened yet. I'm not usually a huge fan of pink (unless it's warmed up to a salmon-y hue), but these are nice and cheerful.

Quick Chicken Coop Upgrade

Before we left for our trip last weekend, Kirk spent a little time in the workshop to fix a major weakness of the water fount. 

Unlike the handle of the feeder shown above, the handle of the fount lacks the clever notch to keep it balanced as at hangs from its chain, EVEN THOUGH it is specifically designed to hang. Stupid. Without that notch, the chickens are completely capable of knocking the fount off center in their greedy guzzling, and then all the water spills on the ground. 

And that would be a problem, since we didn't bother to ask our neighbors to check on the birdies while we were away, since it was just for a couple days.

So Kirk came up with this solution from some scrap blocks of wood:

Two pieces of wood just slightly narrower than the width of the metal handle were notched to fit around the handle, then glued together around it.

The top of the block has a hole drilled in it for the chain to go through. When it's hanging, it looks like this: 

This is the short end of the block, but the wide end is wide enough to keep the handle level and stable, so Martha can no longer tip the fount and spill it. Everyone was alive and still had plenty of water to drink when we got back, so it passes the test: a quick but effective fix.

Sheep!

This past weekend we traveled to Pennsylvania to visit family (and so Kirk could run another triathlon). Kirk's sister's family lives in Lancaster County (which you should really learn to pronounce correctly if you are not a PA native) on an old Mennonite farm. It's hard not to be jealous of something like 30 acres of farmland and woods that even has a small creek. They have a vegetable garden, a flock of chickens, and have also started keeping bees. And sheep.

And the kids sure loved the sheep. Above, Jonas is feeding grain to Apple, a Dorset ewe. You can see that he is kind of crouched, bracing himself against her head. This was so he could keep his feet--the sheep are all over their new best friends with food!

Here Jonas is (literally) taking a sheep by the horn to keep from getting knocked over. If you are familiar with Jonas at all, you know that this is an absolutely enormous step into being confident around animals. He jumped right into feeding the sheep, and was determined to help catch a lamb (not at all easily done, as the babies are pretty skittish still). He came this close, cornering one by the fence and getting both hands on it before it leapt away. The lamb in question probably weighs more than he does, and he would have had to get it in a bear hug pretty quickly to have caught it. Still, a proud moment for him!

This black and white ewe above is a Jacob, which is an heirloom breed. They chose Jacobs because they are good for both meat and fiber, and because they can take pretty good care of themselves without too terribly much human intervention, especially during lambing. They had three lambs born this spring, all without any late night vigils or assistance.

Here you can see that Jacobs (even the ladies!) have horns. Some have two; some have four.

You can also see here that Apple (like all the sheep) has been recently shorn. They have literally bags of wool to card and spin into yarn, something that I'm sure Tiegan would love to do if we had enough room to keep sheep here in Massachusetts. Kirk was more impressed with their grass mowing capabilities.

Finally, here is Kirk with Binky, who is Apple's lamb. Binky is a mutt--a cross between a Dorset and a Jacob. Because of this, and because he is a boy, he is likely to be dinner by the fall. Kirk is holding him to prep him for castration, which is a (thankfully) bloodless operation. It is actually done with a very tough version of a rubber band, which stops blood flow to the area, causing his testicles to eventually just fall off. Binky didn't seem any worse for wear after getting the band, and was running around a minute after it was done.

Too bad we're not zoned for sheep!

Flower Friday: May 17, 2013

Here are the bouquets of the past week. We still have lots of bulbs and lilacs here, but I think peonies are on the way for next week!

Orange tulip, Fortissimo daffodil, and a white tulip (barely visible).

Red ranunculus, red-striped tulips, and double white daffodil.

The opposite side of the same arrangement.

Yellow tulip.

Lilac.