As of April 2000, this diary has been pretty well superseded by my journal. There may still be occasional updates here, but there won't be a lot of them.
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| Here's what's been happening around the place lately. Aren't you thrilled?
To the right you can see the house, barn and stable, taken over one of our
fields back in February '99. In June, this same field is hip-deep in grass.
As of April 2000, this diary has been pretty well superseded by my journal. There may still be occasional updates here, but there won't be a lot of them. |
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The guinea fowl have been taking dust baths in the garlic patch. This wouldn't be a problem except that it tends to tear up the garlic plants. I finally got wise and ran a sprinkler there for a few minutes this morning. Surely with 87 acres plus the neighbor's fields to choose from they can find somewhere else to take their dust baths.
Classic farm scene for the day: one of the sheep forced his head between the bars of a wooden fence to get to the grass on the other side, and then couldn't manage to pull it back out. I thought for a while I was gonna have to grease the darned thing, but eventually he popped free with a bit of help.
The guinea fowl started screaming bloody murder about 4:30 this morning. They did the same yesterday. This is unusual behavior, so finally I got out of bed, got dressed, and went out to investigate. They were all up in the trees. My conclusion: the moon was just up (it's rising a little before the sun these days), it was quite bright, and they got confused.
I don't know whether it happened yesterday or the day before, but we seem to be down from 13 to 12 guinea fowl. Perhaps they wandered a bit too widely and ran into a coyote, or perhaps one of the coyotes got bold enough to come close to the barn.
I was feeding the chickens this afternoon and all of a sudden there were baby chicks running around in the main chicken coop. This was bad, because they're supposed to be in the other room of the chicken coop. I caught them and took them back to a rather upset mother hen and then investigated. Turns out that they'd tunneled under the wall. I put some lumber there to discourage such activities in the future. I don't care what they think, I don't think they're big enough to tangle with the real chickens yet.
First sign of life from seeds planted outside this year: the early radishes are up!
The very first daffodil of the season is in bloom.
I spent a good chunk of today starting tomato seeds, since it's about 6 or 8 weeks till our last frost. We have this little gizmo that makes starting pots from newspaper strips, so it's use that, put in dirt, add two or three seeds, repeat. I'm starting 13 varieties this year, but it's not my fault. See, we picked six varieties we really wanted from the Territorial catalog and ordered them. But then I ran across the Internet Tomato Trials (http://www.internettomatoes.com) and signed up. It's a neat idea; they send out mystery seeds of various heirlooms, you get to try them, contribute to the database, and help save seeds. But they sent me six more kinds of tomatoes. And then Shumway tossed in a tomato seed sample with our order as a freebie. So…thirteen varieties. But it's not my fault!
Today's amusing farm combination: llamas and guinea fowl. The flock of guinea fowl has been roaming more and more widely as the weather gets better and they get bolder. Now they're getting clear to the back pasture where the llamas are. This morning I watched Tango (one of the llamas) try to get a good look at a guinea. I've seen him do this with the dogs and cats; he puts that head down close to the ground and walks slowly up to the other animal. With dogs and cats this works, because they're curious too, and they end up nose-to-nose. With guineas, though, there's a distance within which they get uncomfortable, about 5 feet. So Tango would put his head down and walk slowly towards one of the birds…and it would walk slowly away. Then he'd turn towards another one, and it would retreat. The end point this morning was a confused and frustrated llama surrounded by a circle of guinea fowl. He turned in circles a few times trying to find one who wanted to play, and then galloped off in frustration.
I was passing through the garage tonight, on my way to make my final checks on the chickens and ducks, when I heard a small sound coming from above. Sure enough, Casper was up in the rafters over the back bathroom (which was built out on to the garage), where she'd chosen to have her kittens. I don't know how big the litter is, but I saw at least four when I was taking her some food and water. She certainly picked an inaccessible spot for this exercise.