The first part of the week was perfect. It was the kind of spring weather that I dream about – warm, sunny, fragrant. I wasn’t in school on Monday. After a damp morning, it turned out to be a beautiful day. I worked at weeding until noon. Then Kurt and I went into town to buy supplies for the pig pen. Later after dinner, we put up the pen. It is 16' wide and 32' feet long, made of hog panels supported by t-posts. I think it will be strong enough. Now we just need to get some piglets. As we finished working, there was a beautiful sunset.
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| The new pig pen. |
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| Sunset that evening. |
There was some drama down at the barn last week. I don’t have names for most of my chickens. I make up silly spur-of-moment names like Agapanthus and Prunella when I talk to them and the names change – except for a few of them. There is an Aracauna hen who gets out of the chicken yard every day and when I go out at chore time, she runs across the front yard to meet me and then walks back to the barn with me. I call her Toots. I don’t know why I started saying “Hiya, Toots,” as she came running towards me, and the name stuck. There are (were) four roosters and they all have (had) names. The Silver-laced Wyandotte is named Mr. Polopetsi after a character in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books that we love. The Black Cochin rooster is called Pretty Boy, because that’s what he is. We acquired a rooster from across the road when the people who lived there moved and left their chickens behind. This rooster was fending for himself and then one day just moved in with our flock. I call him Buddy. Those are all secondary roosters. The drama involved the main rooster in the flock, the Alpha Male, a mixed breed that was given to us when our previous rooster was killed by a fox several years ago. We called him Briggs after our friend who gave him to us. Briggs came down with some sort of partial paralysis two weeks ago. He couldn’t fully use his legs. He got around okay for a while, but continued to slowly get worse. Finally, he couldn’t move much at all and last week we had to send him on to that great flock in the sky. He was a good rooster, a bit scruffy looking, but handsome in his own unique way. Losing a rooster is always traumatic to the flock. Now the pecking order has shifted. With three other roosters, I was anxious to see who would take over the Alpha role. Mr. Polopetsi is the meanest of the contenders and immediately won without any attempts by the other two roosters. Feeling a bit too macho after his coup, he came after me while I was doing the chores on Wednesday. I cornered him, caught him, and pinned him to the ground. I held him down and he struggled for a bit and then calmed down. I held him like that for about five minutes. I told him that, regardless of what he thinks, I am the alpha male and I will cut his head off if ever attacks me again. I think he got the message. He avoids me now.
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| My Black Cochin rooster. |
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| Buddy, the acquired rooster. |
In other barn news, the Black Cochin hen who was sitting on the nest in the corner of the coop, decided not to go broody after all. Last Sunday, she abandoned the nest, much to my disappointment. Black Cochins are considered one of the better breeds for brooding and mothering chicks. Maybe she is still too young to want to settled down to motherhood. I was going to dispose of the eggs she’d been sitting on, but another hen took over the nest right away. She is an ISA Brown hen, a breed not known for their broodiness, but I was happy to let her try. Then on Tuesday, when I went down to do the chores, I found the nest empty. No eggs. No broken shells. Nothing. I can only think that some animal got into the coop and carried them off. I saw no sign of an intruder except for a hole in the floor in the middle of the coop by the waterers. That means a rat. Remember Templeton in Charlottes Web? Well in reality, rats are not cute or welcome in my coop. I set some traps, but so far I’ve caught nothing. I will not try to set a hen this year.
I was in school on Tuesday. It was another beautiful day and I was sorry I was indoors through most of it. When I got home, I did the chores and then I mowed the lawn. We’re at that point in the season where I need to mow twice a week to keep the grass from growing too tall. It will stay this way until late July or August when the grass slows down. By the time I finished mowing, it was time for dinner. After dinner, although there were still several hours of daylight left, I didn’t do any work. Instead I just took a slow and easy stroll around the property, enjoying the combination of wildness at the edges of the yard and the tidiness of the neat lawn, the flowerbeds, and especially the orchard. The fruit trees were just coming into bloom and there were tight, pink buds, soft white flowers, and tiny new leaves all at once. An orchard in bloom is my idea of paradise. In fact our word paradise comes from the Late Latin word paradisus meaning “a park, an orchard; the garden of Eden, the abode of the blessed.” Yes, exactly.
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| A path through the orchard. |
On Wednesday I was not in school. I took a long walk before dawn, enjoying the freshness of a fine spring morning. Wednesday was the last dry day of the week and I took full advantage of it. I spent the morning cleaning out Miriam’s herb bed. It was completely overrun with weeds. Now Miriam needs to fill it with herbs.
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| The cleaned out herb bed. |
From Thursday on it was cooler and rainy. There were a few hours here and there when it wasn’t raining and I was glad for that. Anytime it let up, I went out to the garden to work. After seeing what was going on out west, I was thankful it was rain and not snow. My brother Steve and son Geoffrey out in Utah sent photos of what was going on at their houses earlier in the week. I felt a pang of long distance nausea when I saw them. We haven’t had frost since April 28th. If that statement is still true at the end of October, I will be ecstatic. That day we had a man come by to give us an estimate for fixing our driveway. Half of our driveway is gravel, the other half is mud. When the township fixed our road a few years ago, they raised the level of it so that our driveway is lower than the road and when it rains, the water cannot run off and a small pond forms.
I usually wake up at 5:30. I have a very persistent body clock. But now that the sun is rising earlier, I am often awakened before that. If the night has been warm enough for me to sleep with the window by my bed open, the singing of birds, which begins in the half-light well before 5:30, will wake me and I have to get up and go out to greet the day. The first birds to sing are usually morning doves or robins. Soon after that, I’ll hear crows, red-winged blackbirds, and then the full dawn chorus of birdsong begins. It is a nice way to begin the day. The first rose-breasted grosbeak showed up at the feeders on Wednesday. The oriel arrived a few days before that and has been singing nonstop in the tree tops. I’ve seen, and heard, a house wren that has been inspecting one of the birdhouses out in the orchard. The goldfinches are in their bright summer plumage now. Dozens of them come to the feeders every day.
On Friday after school, despite a drizzling rain, I took a walk in the orchard after I did the chores. I wanted to check on the apple blossoms. The trees are just coming into full bloom and every tree, every flower is precious to me. For two years my apples have been ruined by late frosts. This year I hope the trees make up for that two years’ rest by giving us a bumper crop.
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| It's apple blossom time! |
A package came in the mail for me on Friday afternoon. I’d almost forgotten that I’d ordered sweet potato slips. They came in a little box, wrapped in wax paper with damp moss around their roots, twenty-five of them. They look rather pathetic, but the instructions in the box said that they would and that it wasn’t a problem. They’ll perk up once they are planted. But sweet potatoes like heat and after a spell of nice warm weather, it has cooled off again. I will have to wait a while before I plant them. In the meantime, they are in a jar of water on the kitchen window sill. I’ve never grown sweet potatoes before. It will be an adventure.
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| My sad sweet potato slips. |
One of the sites I look at every day is called Suspicious Observer on YouTube. The commentator is a man who analyzes space weather, activity on the sun, and how those things affect the earth. He got pretty excited last week when the sun emitted six coronal mass ejections aimed at the earth over several days. He warned that there would be geomagnetic storms and auroras far to the south. I also check spaceweather.com every day and the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. They issued solar storm warnings stating we could expect “power system voltage irregularities and false alarms on some protection devices, surface charging and increased drag on low Earth-orbit satellites, potentially causing orientation problems, intermittent satellite navigation (GPS) problems, including loss-of-lock and increased range error, intermittent HF (high frequency) radio communication, and northern lights as low as the southern states, down to Iowa in the Midwest, and down to Oregon in the Northwest.” It sounded so serious. My nephew Sam sent us photos on Friday night to show us what the sky looked like where he lives in Missouri. I went out at 11:00 p.m. and looked at the sky. It was cloudy, but there was a pink cast to the clouds. I set my camera to a long exposure and was amazed to see the color in the sky. Out west, Josiah sent us photos of the sky in Idaho on Friday and Saturday. It was amazing.
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| The solar storm, part one. |
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| Sam's photo from Missouri. |
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| How it looked at our house. |
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| A photo from Josiah and Vanessa in Idaho. |
We had a brief break from the rain on Saturday morning. My morning walk was wet from the rain and it was chilly, but the sunlight was beautiful. It didn’t last. By midday the rain returned. That night Stacey and I went on a date to see the new Planet of the Apes movie, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. It was okay. I never expect much from movies like that. When I saw the original Planet of the Apes when I was ten, I was pretty impressed with it, the sequels that followed it, not so much. This new series that started in 2011 is a little less impressive since so much of the filming is computer generated. CGI takes away a lot of the magic of film making for me. I find myself saying, “eh, they did that with computers.” The movie was just okay, but an evening out with my wife was great.
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| Saturday morning walk. |
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| Saturday morning walk. |
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| Saturday morning walk. |
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| Saturday morning walk. |
Today is Mother’s Day. Church went well. We had good talks. At the end of the meetings we gave the mothers (actually all the women) potted impatiens. We also took eggs to give away. Our hens have been giving us three dozen eggs a day. We do use a lot of eggs, but we’d fallen behind a bit and reached the point where we didn’t have room for anymore in the fridge, so we took eighteen dozen to give away. We like to share our bounty. We’ve had lunch now and Stacey opened her Mother’s Day gifts. Later this afternoon I will call and talk to my mother. I expect our phone line will be busy with calls from our far flung children to their mother. That’s a hint. Good Sabbath.
