Update on Spring Projects

Well, things have been really busy around here lately. The goat pasture is in and happily contains 5 goats and 1 horse. The 3 babies however, spend their days mowing the yard. Why just the babies? Well, because they come when called and stick close to the house. They have become my gardners and lawn mowers. They are fun and adorable and frequently come to see what we are doing when we are outside. The garden is about finished with planting. We planted corn yesterday, pencil cob corn and yellow trucker's corn. We still have the potatoes and the sunflowers, so we are doing pretty good. It is a large garden and everybit of it has been worked by hand. We will be working on the summer beds once the potatoes and sunflowers are in. Our chickens are quite happy and producing eggs like crazy, we fixed the flooding problem with the chicken house and now no more problems when it rains. We have 12 chickens and would like to have a few more, but that is for the future. Our two remaining guineas have developed a happy little routine and our guinea hen is laying. She will not sit on her nest so the eggs are fed to the chickens. They refuse to return to the chicken house, but roost in the tree at night above the chicken house. They greet me at the feed room door morning and evening for their feed and spend the day eating bugs and grass. I know many people talk about how guineas are wonderful for pest control in the garden, but I am not sure I would recommend that now that I have a pair. Mine have destroyed uite a few seedlings because they like to take a dust bath in my nice dirt in the beds. We have had to replant several tomatoes this week because of them. The tilapia are not in the pond yet because the weather and water are still quite cold. Our pond is an old swimming pool, so the concrete keeps the water cooler than a typical pond. We have designed a system for irrigating our garden this year which will reduce water waste and allow us to more purposely use our water with minimum effort than a sprinkler or a hose. We will be installing that soon. I will explain in another post about that. The rabbit house is fixed with the exception of a small hole in the roof that we have not repaired yet. We have not repaired it because it is housing a small bird and her nest. When she and her babies, that hatched this week, leave then that hole will be fixed. She uses the hole in the roof to enter and leave the building so we didn't want to disturb her too much. Our rabbit is on the dry end of the building and doesn't seem to mind the extra ventilation. I suppose the worms are happy, they haven't tried to excape their bins and the bits of produce seem to disappear. I cant wait to be able to use some of my worm compost. The horses are happy. We do worry about our old stallion though. We wonder how many more winters he will make it through. He is 23 years old and the winter is hard on him. He is happier now that he has a good amount of fresh spring grass. His son is starting to challenge him for dominance in the pasture so we know that age is getting to him. He moves a lot slower, but still manages the furious mad dash from the far side of the pasture at feed time. The mad dash is a little slower. He has done a wonderful job of training us and we will miss him terribly when he is gone. However, that is a story for another time. We seem to be on schedule with our spring projects and sometimes even though it seems as if we have accomplished nothing because there is still so much we wish to do, we look around and have accomplished quite a bit. The days have been long and the work has been hard. We love every minute of it and know that each project is one more step toward self-sufficiency and independance. We pray that God blesses our journey each and every day.