Spring Things

Frosts and thunderstorms, weeding and transplanting, new chicks and dead hens, bees and blossoms – it was a week full of spring things at both ends of the vernal spectrum. Spring is a volatile season, shifting dramatically from warm to cold, wet to not as wet (it hasn't been dry at all), sunny to gloomy. I'm ready for it to settle into something more stable – milder, calmer, sunnier, and dryer, but not too dry.

Monday morning we didn't have frost! The morning was chilly, but in a refreshing May way, not freezing February. After the sun was up and it had warmed into the 50s, I felt bold and took all the covers off the plants. They'd been covered since last Wednesday. They looked pretty good, but they needed some sunshine. 

Later that morning, my chicken lady, Pat, delivered the chicks she'd been raising for me. I had their pen ready with fresh straw and their own water and feeder. I set up a heat lamp that I'll have to turn on during the nights for a while. They are nice looking chicks and very calm. They will stay in that pen for at least a month before I let them out into the main flock. Meanwhile down in the coop, the guinea hen abandoned her nest that morning. I'm glad she did. I don't think it would have worked out well.

New chicks in their pen.

The rest of the day was lovely, warm, and breezy. I spent some happy hours working in the garden – at last. I planted more spinach and lettuce seeds to replace my first attempt that was decimated by the frosts. Then I spent most of the day weeding. It looked overwhelming at first. The weeds had flourished despite the bad weather, of course. I resorted to a method I've devised to make it seem more manageable. I focused on just one kind of weed at a time. I started with sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosus) in the asparagus patch. I went through the patch and found every sunchoke sprout and pulled it up. Next I moved on to one of the flowerbeds and attacked the corn speedwell (Veronica arvensis). This weed is pretty, but vicious. It has tiny bright blue flowers, but it spreads and forms a mat and takes over quickly. I ripped every single one out of that bed. Next was cleavers (Gallium aparine) another rambunctious spreader. The orchard is filled with it and I don't bother with it there, but it pops up in the flowerbeds and I have to be vigilant in controlling it. By the time I finished with the cleavers, my energy and ambition had waned. There were still plenty of other weeds to eliminate – dandelions, chickweed, sheep sorrel, and the accursed quack grass – but they would wait for another day.

Miriam spent time that afternoon preparing the hives for bees expected to arrive on Wednesday. By dinner time the hives were scraped, scrubbed, and ready. She left them by the back porch to dry in the afternoon sunshine. 

Dinner that evening was special. We love Cinco de Mayo. Not for any historical or political reason, but solely for the food. We've made it a tradition to give us an excuse to have a fiesta of delicious Mexican food, not that we really need an excuse. This year celebrating on the fifth was not convenient, so we had a Quatro de Mayo fiesta instead. The celebration was at our house. The Fosters brought beef tacos al pastor and sofrito rice. The Shilligs brought chili rellenos, refried beans, and guacamole. Miriam made horchata, arroz con leche ice cream, and a chocoflan. It was all so good. And to make it even better, Stacey arrived home from her trip out west in time for dinner.

Our Quatro de Mayo fiesta.

Early on Tuesday morning, I was awakened by a thunderstorm at 4:00. It went on for an hour. I laid in bed and counted the time between the flashes and booms. The closest it came was three Mississippi. I fell back to sleep at 5:00 and when I got up a half hour later at my usual time, I expected a gray and rainy morning, but it was lovely. I went out first thing to check on the new chicks – they were fine – and to take my morning walk. The sky was clear. The air was fresh. There was low fog over the upper part of the beaver pond. I startled a great blue heron hidden in the brush along the edge of the pond that in turn startled me as it suddenly flew away. The moon was still up, almost full in the west. When the sun finally came up over the hill, the whole world sparkled. I looked forward to a long and productive day. And then I checked the weather.

Tuesday morning.

The forecast said that rain was coming. I could hardly believe it, the sunshine was so bright. But there it was – rain starting in the early afternoon and continuing on for the next two days. I hurried to get as much done as I could before it arrived. I did some quick weeding – dandelions this time. Then I drove to the builders supply in Genesee to get some lumber so I could start on my next big garden project, putting gravel in the paths in the raised bed garden. No sooner had I gotten home from Genesee when the phone rang. It was Sarah informing us she'd been informed by the post office that our bees had arrived – a day sooner than expected. They were waiting for us to pick them up at the post office – in Genesee. So Miriam and I drove back to Genesee. She ordered two packets, but there was only one.

We brought the bees home, but their enclosure wasn't ready. We thought we had another day to prepare it. So we hurried and enlisted Kurt's help. There was an old pile of wood that needed to be moved. He got out the tractor and moved it. Miriam and I put down landscape cloth and then fenced it in. We set the two hives in the enclosure. By the time we were done with that, Miriam and Kurt had to leave to go to a concert at the children's school. I returned to my garden project just in time for the rain to begin and put an end to it. The bees, meanwhile, were waiting on the back porch.

The first packet of bees on Tuesday.

Miriam waited until evening to install the bees in their hive. That's the best time of day to do it. The rain had let up by then. She didn't have any protective clothing – it was due to arrive on Wednesday. It took a while to figure out how to open the shipping box, which was different from the ones we'd had before, and install the queen. She had bees buzzing and crawling all over her the whole time, but she stayed calm and got the job done without a single sting. Stacey was in the enclosure trying to help her. I was standing a safe distance away watching. I can't risk getting stung anymore. Just as we finished, the rain began again. We said a prayer for the bees, came back inside, and had dinner.

The beehive in their enclosure behind the pavilion.

After dinner, we played a new game. Well, new to us. While she was out west with her sisters, Stacey was introduced to mahjong. Her sister Audrey's family plays it and she taught Stacey how to play it and gave her a set of tiles. So after dinner, Stacey taught Miriam, Hannah, and I how to play. I first encountered mahjong when I was in Japan on my mission, but it was something we missionaries did not approve of. A lot of Japanese men stopped at mahjong parlors instead of going home after work and they would play and gamble and drink sake into the night. But we didn't bet and we were sober and it turned out to be a fun and interesting game.

Learning to play mahjong.

While we were at the table that evening, the peacock came up onto the front porch to visit. Miriam can call to him and make him call back. They get pretty noisy. We fed him some blueberries and now he comes to the front door all the time begging for a treat. He also goes over to the Shillig's back porch and begs for treats from them.

The small reprieve from the cold, frosty weather didn't last long. Wednesday was a chilly, rainy day. I went out in the morning to see how the bees were faring. They did not look good. Many were still in the shipping box. There were a lot of dead bees in the box and on the ground. I knew they were hungry. With the cold, wet weather, there were no flowers available. I came back and reported the situation to Miriam. She mixed up some sugar water and filled a feeder bottle and we went back out. She opened the hive and shook in the bees that were still in the shipping box. She set the feeder inside the hive and closed it back up. These bees arrived under terrible circumstances weather-wise. We can't bother them too much as they try to get established, so we don't know how things are going inside the hive. The second packet of bees still has not arrived. We called the bee people and they said the other packet would arrive on Saturday, but it didn't. Maybe tomorrow.

The forecast said to expect a freeze on Wednesday night, so I went out once again and covered plants to protect them. I'm tired of doing that. I find myself wondering if the warm weather will ever come, if we'll ever heat up again. I'd love a bit of 80° weather, like five or six months of it, but at this point I'd settle for mid 70s, even high 60s would be nice. Will I ever be able to sleep with the window open again? Will I ever work up a sweat as I labor in the garden? I need some heat.

My venture into the world of Nobel Prize winning literature was not a success. The fault was mine. I'm sure the books are great and I would have enjoyed reading them if I had been in a different frame of mind. I tried each of the three books I got from the library. They were too thick, too serious, too slow paced, and too detailed. I wasn't in the mood to tackle that much weighty storytelling. So I postponed my ambition and went back to the Discworld with its lighter, faster paced, satirical stories.

I spent a good part of Thursday acting as chauffeur. In the morning, Stacey had a doctor's appointment and had to leave early, so she took one car. Miriam was in school, so I drove her there. Then I came back and drove Hannah to work. She and Stacey usually drive together. Then in the afternoon, I had to pick Miriam up from school. Stacey and Hannah came home together, as usual. In between car trips, I resumed working on my garden project.

While driving Miriam to school, I saw a dead fox in the road just up from us. I wondered if it was what was killing my chickens. I'm sorry to say I didn't feel bad at all that it was dead. There was a time when I would have been, but my heart has grown a little harder after battling predators to protect my flock for so many years. I like foxes, but I like them to be far away from my property, the same goes for  woodchucks, rabbits, skunks, possums, raccoons, bears, weasels, fishers, coyotes, bobcats, and deer. Stay far away and let me admire your natural beauty from a distance, preferably at least a mile, maybe more.

Thursday was a sunny day, but cool – good weather for working. My first task was removing the frost covers from all the plants. Then I spent the day in my raised bed garden getting things ready for planting out day. With such persistently cold weather, planting out day seems like a distant and doubtful possibility at this point, but I decided to demonstrate my faith that warm days will come. My main project this week was filling the pathways between the raised beds in my vegetable garden with gravel. In order to keep the gravel from spilling out onto the lawn, I had to nail boards across the path ends. That took several hours of measuring, sawing, and nailing. The next step was to carry gravel from the pile in the driveway and fill in the paths, but I didn't have time or the energy to work on that part that day. A bucket of gravel weighs about 50 pounds. Besides, I wanted help. I thought setting up a bucket brigade would get the job done quicker, so I decided to wait for a day when there would be others to assist me. At the end of the day, I put back all the frost covers since we were expected to get frost again that night. That's a pattern I repeated over and over for the rest of the week and it looks like it will continue through this week too – covers on in the evening, off in the morning.

Five years ago at this time, my garden looked like this.

This year, it looks like this.

I looked back through the last few years of my photos and saw that, most years, by this time, the apple trees are in full bloom, the flowerbeds are full of tulips, daffodils, and forget-me-nots, and we are eating asparagus already. Not this year. I'm glad the apples are late. If they had bloomed, they would have been completely frost blighted. A few tulips and daffodils survived the frosts. Even the very hardy forget-me-nots are stunted and sad this year. The asparagus is sending up shoots, but they are turned to mush by the frosts before they are even an inch or two out of the ground.

Early Friday morning, around 4:00, I was awakened by the smell of skunk. Somewhere nearby, a skunk, or something that had been sprayed by a skunk, was wandering around. By the time I was up and outdoors, the smell was gone and I didn't think anymore about it – until I went down to the chicken coop. There was a dead hen. Apparently, something had waited for the coop door to open at sunrise and then grabbed a hen. A skunk? A sprayed fox, perhaps the mate of the one dead in the road? I changed the settings on my automatic coop door. Instead of opening at sunrise and sunset, now it doesn't open until 8:00 a.m. long after the sun is up, and it closes at 8:00 p.m. well before the sun goes down. Even though it's still light out, the chickens have gone to roost by then.

Friday was one of those days where at the end of it, I couldn't account for having accomplished much of anything. Most of the day was too chilly to want to be outside. Toward evening  the sun broke through the clouds and I went out and sat in the garden and let all the work I hadn't done run through my mind. That evening Stacey and I went on a double date with Kurt and Julie to see Sheep Detectives. It was a cute movie. We enjoyed it.

Saturday was rainy, but at least we had no frost or freeze during the night. I had errands to run in the morning. When I returned home, I spent the afternoon transplanting tomato and flower seedlings from seed trays into individual pots. It was indoor gardening on a day when I couldn't do any outdoor gardening. I had to set up a table on the back porch to hold the transplants. I'm running out of room and I still have at least three more weeks before I can plant anything outdoors.

Transplanting tomato seedlings.

Transplants on the back porch.

After dinner, the sun tried to shine for a while so we went out and worked on my gravel project. We carried gravel and poured it in the pathways. We didn't finish, but I will work on it more this week. It will be nice when it's done.

Pouring gravel in the garden paths.

Graveled paths.

We had another thunderstorm last night. It seems we've had more than usual this spring. Just one more weather oddity this year. It was wet and chilly when I went out this morning. I didn't take a long walk, just a jog down to the barn and back. I was not happy with what I found there – another dead hen. I could see where whatever it was that killed her had pulled out a barrier I had put under the main door and dug under the threshold and into the coop. It has to be a small animal to fit through such a small space. I think we might be dealing with a weasel, although they usually don't kill just one chicken. It was not a nice way to start the Sabbath.

Our church services were good. We don't have any children in the branch to sing Mother's Day songs. The women were given a box of chocolates and a potted flower.  I'll call my mother later this afternoon and wish her a happy Mother's Day.

I went down to the barn after church to check on the situation there. There were no further deaths. After lunch I'm going to go next door to get a load of paving stones and line the front of the barn with them. I don't think whatever animal this is will be able to move them. I guess I'll see in the morning.