So what have we been working on - well Joe has stumbled upon a construction job for a guy nearby, so I had Friday to myself. I had a long list of things to do, but it ended up being a leisure day - watched a movie, napped, and spent a nice long time at Barnes & Noble, where I went buck wild with a birthday gift card (thanks Mom Z!). I could literally live in a Barnes & Noble. I decided on one book from each of my three main interests - a book on composting, a book on green building, and a vegetarian cookbook by Deborah Madison (who is coming out with the new edition of Local Flavors on May 13th - a book about cooking with local foods from farmers' markets - I can't wait!). While I thoroughly enjoyed the day, not much work got done around here, which I suppose has to be okay every once in a while.
Today, however, was quite productive. We spent some time at the new house today, but I didn't take any pics there, so I'll update you on that tomorrow. But back at my mom's we got a lot done. Here's Joe doing a little weeding around the arugala patches. He looks so happy to be doing it doesn't he? :) This arugala is quite honestly the best we've ever had and we are thoroughly enjoying picking it and other greens from our garden for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
On the left here is the broccoli patch, planted a little over a week ago, which is doing really well. To the right of that is red cabbage which I just transplanted from cell packs today. As I pitchforked the bed the chickens were following close behind picking out the worms. It was cute right up until the plants went in, after which I had to chase one chicken in particular out of the bed about 18 times so that it wouldn't dig up the tiny cabbages. Hence all the fencing around all the gardens.
Here's one of our pea plants! We had a bit of a battle with the pea plants for some reason this spring. First we planted two rows which never came up - we think squirrels or birds were digging them up. Then Joe eliminated the squirrels (don't ask), we planted two more rows, and a few of them came up. Still not happy with the number of pea plants, I started a few inside which I transplanted into the garden today. So with all that we ended up with about 5 plant. That was at 4:00 pm. Then we had an incident.
This looks like an innocent bird right? Not so -she's pushy and shovey, she always has to get the first worm and she's always the first to escape from a new coop. I keep thinking she's gotta be a he - but only time will tell on that. After dinner tonight, Joe went to check on the birds, only to find that THIS bird had not only escaped, but chowed down on some pea plants. So what do you do when you have a rabble rousing bird who eats your vegetables? There's really only one solution.
SHE GETS EATEN!
Okay, not really. We'll at least let her get through puberty before we make any rash decisions about her character. But we have got our eye on this bird, that's for sure.
The laying hens are still doing well. We got four eggs this morning and we finally got to a point where we have accumulated enough that we could sell some. But since our birds spend half their time in our kind neighbors yard (she has lush tall grass that is far superior to ours, so we can't really blame them), we decided to give her some eggs for free. She was very happy and said not to worry about the trespassing. Here's them in her yard as well as one of them on a fence, which we just think is the cutest thing ever.
After our outside chores, I did some seeding indoors - two kinds of basil, chives (my third attempt at chives, kind of embarassing), and cantaloupes. Here's me in my little seeding room in the basement -
We ended the day with a fantastic dinner. I realized that I haven't been sharing any of our meals and it's sort of the whole reason why we're doing this - we love to eat! Tonight we had a Middle Eastern feast - I made tabbouleh and served it with hummus, pita bread, arugala from the garden, and red wine. It was delicious.
And now we're both sitting here at the dining room table, me updating the blog and Joe looking at house plans online. We're getting closer to having a great design - it has to be small (under 900 square feet to qualify as an accessory building so that we can build another bigger house later on the same property), it has to use passive solar (so lots of windows on the south side and probably concrete floors), and it has to fit mostly within the footprint of the existing house. We're almost there.
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