We had a taste of spring last week and it was delicious. Typical of March, the nights were cold – near or just below freezing, but the days were warm enough to actually feel warm – in the 50s and even the 60s. It was perfect maple weather. It was also the perfect sort of weather to begin some spring projects. At the start of the week, there was still quite a bit of snow on parts of the garden. It always piles up deepest and lingers longest on the long border. I kept my eye on it as it slowly melted away, hoping to see crocuses and iris reticulata revealed as it retreated. By Wednesday they were there.
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| More snowdrops appear every day. |
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| Crocuses emerging at last. |
In the mornings, while waiting for the sun to warm things up a little outdoors, I fed my brain with music. I get odd musical whims sometimes that I have to indulge. Usually they are the result of my Morning Music Syndrome, where I wake up with a song playing in my head that gets stuck there. I never know what the songs will be. Sometimes they are hymns, but often they are random songs dredged up from my brain's cavernous archives. Last Monday it was Peter, Paul, and Mary singing 500 Miles in my internal jukebox, and that sent me on my first mental adventure of the week.
I don't remember hearing Peter, Paul, and Mary's music played in our home during their initial rise to fame, 1961-1969. That is, except for Puff the Magic Dragon. I knew that song because it was featured on The Magic Drawing Board on the Captain Kangaroo Show. I think my first exposure to their other songs came later when my sister Hollie was in high school chorus. It was the early '70s, the Vietnam War was raging, counterculture was in full swing, and it was cool to have school choirs sing the popular songs of rebellion like Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Blowin' In the Wind, and If I Had a Hammer. Hollie learned those songs and taught them to us, her younger siblings, and they became part of our Singing in the Car Repertoire. We sang them because they were great songs, not really connecting them to their wider rebellious implications. A little later, we acquired some records from my cousin Micki, who was older and had wider ranging musical taste. Among the records were several Peter, Paul, and Mary albums and many of those songs were added to our repertoire.
I never saw Peter, Paul, and Mary perform, but in July of 1999, Aunt Roxann took Sarah to see them at the Hollywood Bowl. I would have liked that concert. I love good harmony and Peter, Paul, and Mary are great at singing in harmony. I also love their simpler folk style of singing. Looking at the list of their biggest hits, Blowin' in the Wind, Lemon Tree, 500 Miles, Leaving on a Jet Plane, Puff the Magic Dragon, If I Had a Hammer, Cruel War, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, There is Love, and others, are all great songs. So that musical adventure took me through Monday morning.
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Peter, Paul, and Mary. The first project I undertook on Monday was to clean the workbench in the woodshed and get it ready for starting seeds. Over the winter a lot of things that we don't want to deal with get dumped in the woodshed. My workbench was piled high with tangled wads of Christmas lights and other messes that I cleared away. Once the bench was free of debris, I cleaned off my seed tray heating pads and tested them. Then I set up the grow lights and tested them. All was in working order.
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| Workbench after. |
Monday afternoon, I worked on repairing my little greenhouse. If you'll recall, an open vent and a strong wind had blown one of the roof panels off. I didn't completely succeed in putting it on again, but I got it to the point where the roof is intact enough to keep the elements out. With that done, I went inside the greenhouse and sat in my chair and soaked up some sun. The temperature outside was a pleasant 55°, but inside the greenhouse it was a lovely 82°. The sunshine and warmth, combined with the hour of sleep I lost from switching to daylight saving time, sent me right to sleep. I had a nice warm hour long nap.
The warm day on Monday gave the peacock a case of premature spring fever. He has regrown his tail and two weeks ago he began calling, so it looks like he thinks mating season has begun. Until Monday he was still sleeping inside the coop with the chickens, but that evening he decided it was time to begin sleeping in his favorite roost in the top of the maple tree by the front of the house. He flew up there just before sundown and then spent a half hour calling out. I think he's advertising for a mate, but there are no peahens anywhere near here. I worry about him roosting in the tree before it has leafed out, which won't be for another month or more. He's too easy to see up there and a horned owl could very easily get him. Silly bird.
Tuesday morning we had a very pretty sunrise. I went out to see it and was greeted by a chorus of birdsong. I heard red-winged blackbirds and robins in the trees around me, and geese calling from high above. A hymn, and one of my favorites, came to my mind. All Creatures of Our God and King (#62 in our hymnal) has an interesting history. The words are based on the Canticle of the Sun written by St. Francis of Assisi in 1225. It was adapted into English by William Draper sometime around 1900. The tune it is set to is the German Easter hymn Lasst uns erfreuen written in 1623 and arranged by Ralph Vaughn Williams in 1906. That's a pretty complicated and impressive set of circumstances. It is a glorious hymn and perfectly suited to a radiant March morning.
All creatures of our God and King,
Lift up your voice and with us sing,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Thou burning sun with golden beam,
Thou silver moon with softer gleam,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Alleluia! Oh, praise Him! Alleluia!
Thou rushing wind that art so strong,
Ye clouds that sail in heav'n along,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Thou rising morn, in praise rejoice;
Ye light of evening, find a voice,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Alleluia! Oh, praise Him! Alleluia!
Thou Flowing water, pure and clear,
Make music for thy Lord to hear,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Thou fire so masterful and bright,
That gives to man both warmth and light,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Alleluia! Oh, praise Him! Alleluia!
Dear Mother Earth, who day by day
Unfoldest blessings on our way,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
The flow'rs and fruits that in thee grow,
Let them his glory also show,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Alleluia! Oh, praise Him! Alleluia!
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| Tuesday morning. |
On Tuesday morning, I continued my seed starting preparations. I brought seed trays into the house and washed and sanitized them. Next week I will fill them with soil and then start planting some of them with seeds.
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| The first of many seed trays ready to be filled. |
By 10:00 that morning it had warmed to almost 60° and I went outside for the rest of the day. First I tidied up the parts of the flowerbeds where there was no snow. There are hundreds of little shoots coming up – crocus, hyacinths, tulips, squill, muscari, and daffodils. There are plants that have overwintered – poppies, wallflowers, hollyhocks and others. And there are weeds and winter debris mucking it all up. I spent an hour carefully clearing away the undesirable stuff to give the desirable stuff a chance. It felt good to get my hands in the soil, even though it was cold soil.
After an hour of doing that, I pruned the orchard. This is a light pruning year, just taking off water sprouts and dead wood. It took me two hours to prune thirty trees. I was relieved to get it done. I might have to make a second pass this week to see if I missed anything.
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| The orchard after pruning. |
Early Wednesday morning the moon woke me up. It wasn't full yet, but it was bright and shining through my bedroom window directly in my face. I love bright moonlight. It bathes the world in magical light. Although I still had an hour more of sleep I could have taken, I had to get out of bed and walk through the house to look out the windows. I would have dressed and gone out, but it was 28°, so no.
While waiting for the day to warm so I could go outside, I spent the morning rendering lard. We had all the fat from our pigs in the freezer and I wanted to get it processed and put away. It was a messy job. At first I tried grinding strips of fat with our trusty old grinder, but it just got clogged up, so I resorted to chopping the fat into cubes. We had two kinds of fat, leaf fat, which is the soft fat from around the kidneys, and the fat from the other parts of the pig. Leaf lard is the finer lard. It makes great pie crust and pastries. I rendered it first and got a quart of lard. The other lard, of which there was much more, took longer. Rendering lard is one of those processes that starts out great and then gets old fast. At first the smell of the cooking fat was delicious, but after a while I got tired of it. By the time I was nearing the end, the house smelled like a sort of county fair food fairway from hell. When the liquid lard was ready, I strained out the cracklings and poured it into jars. I got five quarts. When the cracklings were cool, I fed them to the chickens. I was finally finished by 11:30 and I immediately went outside to work and breathe some fresh air.
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| Packs of pork fat. |
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| Grinding didn't work. |
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| Rendering lard. |
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| Jars of hot lard waiting to cool. |
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| Cooled lard. |
I wanted to spend a few hours working in the garden, but it didn't warm up much and it was overcast. Two days in the 60s spoiled me. Working in the garden at 40° with no sunshine didn't appeal to me at all. Instead, I took a walk around the property to look things over. Even after those warm days, there was still a lot of snow in places. My raised bed garden is still almost completely covered along with part of the long border and two other flowerbeds. I came back to the house and spent an hour tidying the back porch. That's as outdoors as I got.
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| The raised bed garden. There are seven beds there, most of them still under snow. |
I spent a lot of time in the car on Thursday. We only had one car, the other was in the shop, so I had to shuttle people back and forth to school and work. I also had to run up to Wellsville, to the chapel. When I wasn't in the car, I was out in the garden. It was a nice spring day, 58° and sunny. I continued working at cleaning out the long border. I cut down all the tall dead stalks of phlox, coneflowers, and ornamental grass from last year. They gave some verticality to the garden during the winter, but it was time to clear them away to make way for this year's growth. As I worked, I took note of all the new plant life emerging from the slowly warming soil. Every warm day brings out more and more of them.
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| Cleaning out the long border. |
Thursday afternoon, when I went down to do the chores, I found an awful scene in the coop. Fourteen dead chickens! I stood there in shock as I took it all in. They were scattered across the floor of the coop. I called Miriam down to the barn and we began an investigation. We brought their bodies out and examined them. The hens, they were all hens, didn't show any signs of violence, I mean they weren't mangled. There were some feathers on the ground, but the hens were not torn up. There was no blood except on one hen, but that was collateral damage, not her cause of death. Kurt came down to help in the investigation. We considered the evidence. All the dead chickens were inside the coop, none of them were out in their yard. That meant they probably died during the night. We wondered if a disease had struck, but I'd seen no symptoms of sickness the day before. And if it was some fast acting disease, why did it kill only fourteen out of thirty-four chickens? We had to dispose of the carcasses, so we took them up to the burn pile and made a funeral pyre. Then as evening came I began to piece together more facts. The remaining chickens would not go back into the coop. They tried to roost in the trees in their yard. They were afraid to go inside. That indicated they had witnessed trauma in the coop and did not feel safe going in. I didn't want them sleeping outdoors, so I herded them all inside. When I went to manually close their automatic solar powered door to close them in, I found that it was off kilter and stuck open. That meant it hadn't closed the night before. Something must have come in during the night. But what can kill chickens without bloodshed? I remembered that when I picked up the dead hens, they had rigor mortis in their legs, bodies, and wings, but their necks were floppy. Did something break their necks? What animal does that? I still don't know what happened. It is a murder mystery. I am sad to have lost so many hens.
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| Sad carnage at the coop. |
As long as we were dealing with chickens, we decided it was time to dispatch the extra roosters. They were causing mayhem in the flock. So that evening, Stacey and I went back to the coop and caught the four extra roosters. We put them in some old rabbit cages and carried them up to the place of execution. Unfortunately, we didn't notice in the dark that the cages had holes cut in them and two of the roosters escaped into the night. The other two didn't. I'm thankful for Stacey's skill in processing chickens. I helped her a little, very little. She killed and cleaned the two of them and they are now in the freezer waiting to become soup some day. That's too many chicken deaths in one day for me.
The blood moon lunar eclipse happened in the early hours of Friday. I set an alarm for 2:55 so I wouldn't miss it, but I woke up on my own at 2:00. It was cold, 28° and the sky was crystal clear. Stacey and I went out to look at it. The moon was over three quarters in shadow. We went back to bed and waited for the alarm. When it went off at 2:55, we went out again and Hannah joined us. The moon was in full eclipse and was glowing red. While we watched, several meteors streaked across the star-filled sky. It was an awesome sight. As long as I was already up, I went down to the barn to check on the chickens. They were fine.
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| The lunar eclipse. Photo by my friend Paula Mitchell's husband Mike. |
After the massacre at the barn, I didn't trust my automatic coop door opener, so I opened and closed the door manually for a few days until I was sure I had it working properly again. When I went down to open the door on Friday morning, I found one of the escapee roosters waiting for me in the chicken yard. He rejoined the flock, for a while. I don't know what happened to the other one. I took a census of my flock that morning. I now have twenty hens and two (soon to be one) roosters. My egg production dropped from getting eighteen to twenty-two eggs per day, to getting only around a dozen a day now. I'm giving two dozen eggs to a sister at church who will incubate them for me. She likes to keep them for a month after they hatch and that's fine with me. She likes taking care of young chicks more than I do. I was also happy to find that some people in Oswayo on the other side of the county twelve miles from here are starting a hatchery. I already contacted them and told them I will buy chicks from them when they are ready.
Friday was a beautiful day. It was warm and sunny, pretty much a perfect early spring day. I spent the day in the garden. This time, I focused on a part of the long border that had become infested with devil grass. It took me all day to clean it out. While doing that, I dug up lots of rocks. Our soil here is very rocky. Even after twenty years, I can still dig big rocks out of the long border. The freeze and thaw during the winter heaves them up from deep down below. I got most of that bed cleaned out. I will work on it some more this week, and other parts of the flowerbed as well.
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| A pile of rocks and a pile of devil grass dug out of one small bit of flowerbed. |
Friday was 3.14, π pi day. To celebrate, we had a variety of pies for dinner – pizza pie, peanut butter pie, chocolate chip cookie pie. The Fosters and the Shilligs came here for dinner. We had a nice evening together.
Yesterday we went to the temple. The drive to and from Palmyra was okay, but not as pretty as it will be in a few weeks when there are spring flowers and budding trees. We had a great experience in the temple, uplifting as it always is. We were gone most of the day and didn't get home until 4:00. I was late doing the chores. It was clouding up by then and a chilly wind was blowing, so I didn't attempt any other outdoor work.
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| At the temple yesterday. |
Early this morning, when it was still dark, on a whim, I went down to the barn to check on the chickens. They were closed in properly, but when I shined my flashlight around inside the coop, I saw a little skunk scurrying along the back wall. My first thought was that it was the culprit in the murders on Wednesday night, but on reflection, it was too small to have done so much carnage. And skunks, when they kill, don't just break a chicken's neck, they mangle them. Because it was Sunday morning and because I'd already bathed and was half dressed for church, I did not attempt to tackle the skunk. As soon as we got home from church, I went down to the barn. There was no sign of the skunk. I think it got into the coop last night before the door closed and left this morning as soon as it opened. Kurt and I are going to set a live trap this evening. We've trapped skunks before and sometimes it didn't go well. No matter what we've been told, skunks will spray when they are inside a live trap. We'll see what happens this time.
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| After some rain, the snow is almost gone – at last. |
So we're home from church. The Fosters are coming here for lunch. It's rainy today, but not cold. The rain has washed away almost all of the snow. I see that the weather service has issued a tornado watch and a high wind advisory for most of central Pennsylvania, including Potter County. There is a front of cold air moving in. I'm looking at the week ahead and making plans. Tomorrow we're supposed to get freezing rain, It would be nice if this is winter's last hurrah. The rest of the week looks good and I will be out working in the garden, enjoying the spring-like last days of winter. The Vernal Equinox is on Thursday and I'm hoping, be it unrealistically, that we will bid good-bye to winter for good. We'll see.
