Sunshine!!

It's nice and sunny this morning, it has been very chilly and dreary here all weekend. Today is supposed to be 60 and sunny so thats a nice change, good for the seedlings too. Heres the spout updates, first off are some of the herbs, some of those seeds are soooo tiny its amazing anything grows out of them.

These are mostly the surplus tomatoes there are also some peppers and eggplant too.

Tomatoes are on the far end, I will post a closer pic of those later on. I think a couple of the earlier really cold nights had stunted some of them, it seemed like some were even burnt and all their leaves fell off. So I figured that what is it gonna hurt to leave them and see what happens, well all but like 9 made it and have mostly all of those damaged ones have caught up with the good ones.

Here is the red raspberry patch, they just started to come up like a week ago and have been growing fast.

Here is the public service announcement of the week. Do not ever use those expandable peat pods with the netting over them to start your seeds. They are marketed as you are to just plant the whole thing in the ground and they will degrade, well this one had grown a season and then sat in my compost for at least 2 years and look how degraded that netting is. Right. Also notice how the roots started growing up through the hole instead of through the netting, not good!

Lets visit the girls. I am pretty sure there was some disappointment yesterday when they realized the compost pile was gone (thank goodness). When I let them out of the run they usually start to walk then full on run over to the pile, they did this and then just kind of poked around the flat ground and wandered away.

Before.

After.

Funny girl found a nice spot where the pool used to be to start a good dust bath.

Heres one days jackpot, of course these were not all in the basket, they were all over the coup.

My dad was talking about how cool he though double yolkers were and that store should sell them, I responded with mine did that all the time when they first started laying and did for a while after but its been many many months since I had seen one. Next day ->

This little sunflower started itself right in the middle of the floor in my greenhouse. Well I am going to see just how far we can go with it! Most of them got way taller than the roof last year so we shall see what happens.

The gourds are clean and I have started painting and staining. This is not all of them, I have about 1/3 more to add. If you wish to see one closer they will hopefully all be for sale at the Hartville Flea Market memorial day weekend. Tell are your richie shabby chic/country lovers to come on out and buy one for everyone they know.

Letting them overwinter in the leaves in the garden produced the most awesome designs on the gourds, I think they are beautiful. I am also a nerd. I want to do a bunch with just clear coat on them, hopefully others will like the natural look. 

Heres the test batch, there will be a learning curve on the stain, the first little blue one showed lots of "brush" marks so I had to figure how to put it on to work with that, there is no way to do it without marks, it does not absorb stain like wood would do. The paint is pretty easy. I just love them, I want to keep them all and hang them from my trees like a crazy collector. Well at least I will just keep the ones that crack or are defective somehow. Drive by in a month and see how that worked out for me.

I had wanted the big compost pile to work so badly but it was just too big to turn and got out of hand. While moving this pile we got to the bottom and look what I found! Perfect black gold, I got a total of 3 full wheelbarrows, enough to spread a thin layer on all the garden veggie beds. I was pretty awesome. Its just what it is supposed to be, crumbly soft and earthy smelling. Just lovely. Its showing up a bit light in the picture as it was pretty black looking in real life.

I will leave you with this picture of the new feature at the chicken spa-dust bath area in my flower beds. Its the hosta salad bar! I think it took 2 whole seconds before the polished off all 4 of them on the side of the house. Opps, small fence now up, the spa is shut down for now!

It's been a while~

Well I have been busy lately, but for a while all it did was rain and make things miserably soggy and on top of that it wasn't warm. So there wasn't much to take pictures of or to talk about. Now the weather has broke and things are getting busier, I love the beginning of spring knowing that the good weather is here finally. 

My moms shih tzu had puppies, they are impossibly cute, see for yourself. This black and white girl will be a handful, and she sits/sleeps with her tongue hanging out just like her dad, which is really funny. I know they a bit blurry but have you ever taken pictures of puppies?? They never stop moving!

I started a bunch of seeds that I had leftover from the last couple of years, I guess I will try to sell them and give some to family/friends. If they all sprout that is. I also started the broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. The cabbage and broccoli sprouted within two days, like magic. Heres the starts, I used mushroom containers that I have saved forever and didn't know what I would use them for. 

I gave molly a lift to the greenhouse yesterday.

Lets talk chickens for a minute. These crazy birds practically ran to this spot next to the house when I let them out yesterday. They had never really wandered this far before so I was keeping an eye on them. Well they starting dust bathing in the dried up mulch and it was way funny. The one all the way to the right was seriously on her side all flopped over, it was quite the spectacle. You can see the dirt flying good in the one photo. After these three had spent a good amount of time there the others started to take notice and at one point I think there were eight of them hogged into the spot.

When I went out to shut up their gate and do I head count I snapped this picture of them in the dark. If I turn the light on they all hop down to see what I am bringing them and i'm afraid they wont make it back up so I use the light sparingly.

Food! This egg I cracked on accident while washing so I cooked it up for molly. The yolk is so huge. Her beard was all yellow for half the day after eating it.

Heres is the fresh mayo I made to use in deviled eggs for easter. Its pretty much my staple now for what I bring to family meals. If it works go with it, right?

I made this cake today for a friend at work. I wasn't planning on decorating it at all but I like to do it so much that I couldn't help myself. I don't think it looks too shabby! I am getting a lot better at making the layers level and keeping crumbs out of the icing. You have to use wiltons food colorings, its the key to awesome icing. Its gel and in these tiny containers, you stick a toothpick into the coloring and just use the tiniest bit and it makes the best true colors.

And here is my lentil soup that I made up while the cake was cooling. I really enjoy taking pictures of food lately. It's too bad you can't taste this, its so good.

My pretty forsythia bushes seem to be doing good, I planted them early last year. I can't wait for the leaves to come out, it seems like centuries since I have seen them last.

Early this evening I took mabel to the park, she didn't seem to interested in playing with any of the huge dogs so I took her for a walk instead. At one point she was in the creek trying to catch the stones I was tossing in, she has such a good time with that. She will stick her whole face in the water with her eyes open to try and get a rock that she wants, it looks pretty funny. This is a dog having a good time.

We have toads that live in the cracks around the front garage, I hadn't seen them yet this spring until the other evening. We also have some resident frogs in our pond now, one was even practicing his ribbit today, it was funny, like he is in puberty, all broken up and not so deep sounding yet.

Let them eat crooked cake!

Say goodbye to this horrible compost pile. I could never really turn it properly so that it would get cooking so we are going to move it and mix it with the mound of chicken poop to the left and make sure it heats up right so I can finally use it. Then I am going to only compost the chicken poop with the bedding (near the coup, novel idea I know) and give kitchen scraps to the worm bin that is in the works. All that will be left to do is plant some grass in its place. Good riddance. The feral cats and raccoons are going to be pretty pissed that their buffet is leaving. You can see molly sneaking behind the pile, she came limping back out from it with a nice pine needle stuck in her foot.

Heres a funny pic of one of the girls squatting and foot stomping for me. If you give them a couple good firm pats on the back it seems to make them happy.

And here they are eating all the worms I worked hard to get into the garden. It was a buffet, they were sucking the worms down like spaghetti. 

Me and miss hanger-on went for a good walk one day when it was nice and sunny. We walked past our neighbors the horses, she used to want to sniff them when she was little but now they just scared her. She wouldn't look at them, just sat with her head pointed towards the road. They must just look like really big dogs to her?

So I did a bonehead thing the other day. I opened the baggies of sprouts in the greenhouse and forgot about them. When I went out in the morning, after they had been in the heat and under the lights all night, they were bone dry and all shriveled up. So I had to buy new and start over on the peppers, eggplant and rosemary. Heres to second tries. 

It was my mom and brothers birthday last week so I made a cake and everyone came over. At the last minute I decided I should try to make this cake look better than just plain old icing. This is how that turned out. It leaned a bit to one side, but thats cause I was too lazy to make each layer level before I stuck them all together, no one cared though so that worked out. Next time i'm going to use that to my advantage and make a mad hatter style cake. 

And a little while later...

We said goodbye to the scarecrow, he worked a while last fall until his legs started to fall off and Mabel made off with them. It looks very sad but no one cried.

Oh my, heres a good one. Today I finally sprayed the window and made a curtain in the bathroom. Now the bath has only been finished for almost a year, but for some reason it didn't bother me to leave a folded curtain smashed into the top window as a nice ghetto window treatment. Those days are over now! woot!

In the first pic you can see how I left the top unfrosted so it would let in more light.

In other project news I have a couple sewing things to get done. First is an easy pillow that I want to cover to give to mom. I wanted it to be a birthday gift but that super fancy cake held me up on sunday. I got 4 yards of different fabrics in key west at this cool shop that had really wild bright prints. Mom mentioned she liked this one when I showed them to her so I figured a pillow would be nice and functional.

And this puppy is going to be awesome. I found a great shop on Etsy (Studio Cherie) that sells patterns, this one if for a large duffle that I plan on using when we go to florida in july. The second pic is from her page that shows a couple finished bags. It took me ages to pick out the fabric to use. The larger piece is the main fabric and the butterfly will be the strap. 

And as our conclusion this week I give you dirt dog, this is what she has looked like after spending a whole day in our yard/swamp. And you know her mind is on our bed, if you don't direct her straight downstairs to the shower its an automatic 2 load laundry evening. But thats only if you don't mind sleeping on muddy paw prints.