Chicken Milk, Anyone?

Hey Rain, wanna play with this dirty old glove?

Who wouldn't! Right?  

The dogs and I have been enjoying the springy green lawn, and the blooms on the locust tree and the iris beds.  Puck's old creaky hips are glad for the warm weather.  He's too dignified to wrestle with Wendigo over a slobbery old glove, but he still shows enthusiasm for long rambles with the goats or brisk jaunts around the donkey fence.  He doesn't hear well anymore, so Brandon and I joke that Puck is the only one not tortured by the crazy guineas, who are noisily going about their nutty spring-time behaviors.  When I see Puck lounging in the sun with a satisfied grin on his face, I imagine he's thinking "Ah, the little farm is nice and quite these days. It's so relaxing."  

We've started running the pool filter and dosing the water with chlorine.  So much algea grew in the pool over the winter it looked black and we couldn't see to the bottom of the pool.  The guy at the pool store reassures us that the water can be made clear again.  We've been back flushing the filter everyday.  

When I described our pool excavation to my engineering friend, and told him how we left a nearly vertical wall of soil, he shook his head and tried to explain to me that correct way to stabilize the soil was to excavate it to a a nice stable slope.  But that would have been so much more dirt moving!  If you remember, it took us all weekend with a bobcat just to dig the hole.  If we had to slope the cut wall too, we wouldn't have been able to finish.  So, we left it vertical, and now the slope is forming on its own as the wall slumps and slides, piling dirt along the pool wall and creating the gentle grade that it needs.  Nice.    

The frying pan special gang are turning into some very pretty roosters.  They haven't started acting too manly yet, so I'm enjoying having a giant flock to feed and look after.  

They like to relax in the shade inside my barn, and pile up on the goat milk stand.  Chicken milk, anyone?  Just kidding.  I don't milk the chickens.

The smattering of lettuce plants that sprouted in the greenhouse have been generous with their leaves. 

I bring in a bundle every couple of days, and we pile it high on sandwiches and make fresh salads.  I have a list of garden tasks that I want to accomplish very soon, but so far, it's all I can do to keep up with my seed starting experiments and stay ahead of the weeds around the plants I have.  This morning I discovered little caterpillars eating the herb plants!  After all these weeks of keeping them alive, I couldn't believe something was trying to eat them before I even got them in the garden.  I squished those bad bugs with my fingers, and their green guts smelled like basil and sage.