The Blur that was May

Here are the items I want to post about, before I forget:
1. the Tully tree gets planted.  Hawthorne Crabapple?
2. New outdoor furnishings -- 2 chairs, 2 new nifty folding chairs for going to events or for cocktails in the coop, [for G's birthday: ]a very handsome 9' umbrella, a new birdbath and a spiffed up birdbath out of a former plant stand
3. G planting and tending new grass right outside the front door
4. G buying and planting a Spanish broom 
5. New raised bed  & new half barrel
6. G buys and installs a tea tape system in the garden proper
7. MOTHS either Monday or Tuesday we had a 3rd wave of those goofy brown moths!  (~21st)
8. Temperatures.  OMG so hot.  Sooo bad.  Setting records.
9. Chicken report   G extends their lair to include the apple tree.  We have that horrible interlude with Scarlett's bloody head!  :(  Starting Sunday, since it has been so hot, we decided to let them sleep with the roost open... basically trust to the integrity of the coop itself, and the open window/ baby monitor.  That way we also don't have to go let them out as early.  (When is the solstice?)  Lola has been pounding on the doors a few minutes earlier each day...  think she currently 'goes off' at around 5:50.  >That is getting old, at least on weekdays when every moment I get to lay there snoozing is precious.  Now they can come downstairs in their jammies and have some breakfast at their leisure.
10. Annular Eclipse!!  Sunday May 20th  ~7pm.  What fun to watch with friends and other jolly folk sprawled at a high point near the UNM golf course.

General Garden Report
Think it went straight to too hot for the peas.  We probably won't get much of a harvest.  The garlic fields everywhere, on the other hand, look lovely.  Not sure what all the heat will do for their size though.  I suspect we've been cheated out of a month of growth.  The row of swiss chard in the ground looks fantastic.  I transplanted several as I thinned last weekend.  Not sure any of them will make it.  I probably should have put shade cloth over them?  Dang.  G put in onion starts, which are looking good.  And leeks which didn't do as well.  We got her a whiskey barrel so she could start some potatoes... which she did.  We planted nasturtiums, some of which are coming along.  :)  G has a lovely flock of tomato babies she grew from seed.  Some pepper plants and eggplants she bought, which will probably finally make it into the new raised bed today or tomorrow.  Oh, and two basil plants M brought her.  G is sprouting a sweet potato so we can get cuttings which we can then put in water to root.  >Quite a production.  Kinda cute.  Makes me feel like a happy 6th grader again.

My balloon flower made it, by the way.  :)

Grazing Chickens

10AM - "BEFORE"


NOON - 2hrs Later - "AFTER"

First two weeks of April

Composters in action:
Yesterday (Sunday Apr 15th), we took apart the pile that had gone down to ambient temperature. It didn't look ready to harvest, so we put half of it in one of the tumblers with some coffee grounds and urine (hoping the nitrogen and increased mass would jump start that one). We used the other half as the bottom layer of a new pile, and flipped the pile that had so much chicken manure in it. As the books warned, it was pretty gushy. We're hoping the air will help it cure. We're not sure if we feel like it was a success or not. It climbed up to 150 at some point. And definitely cooked along. Then it hovered at 130 for several days before tapering down to 100-110. G thinks that we might have liked the output better if we had flipped it while it was still hot vs. waiting for it to cool down. *Not sure.* If nothing else, my dissertation bits have completely disappeared. And the pile is now a third to a quarter its original size. Most of the straw is gush.
The ingredient list for our third pile is pretty impressive. We estimate the pile requires mixing, then lifting and arranging 9 full wheelbarrows of materials.
~6o gallons of leaves from G's herculean efforts cleaning out the ditch
~30# shredded office paper from NMEL (that was a heavy bag!)
~3 gallons of chicken manure stew
~1.5 gallons urine
~5 gallons of expresso grounds hauled all the way from the coffee shop in the library at UNM (~40pounds!)
~7 gallons of alfalfa cut from along the ditches near the house and chopped into small, salad-like bits
1 black plastic leaf bag full of weeds G. gathered around the yard (pulverized in a trash can using the weed whacker)
1 cardboard filing box full of pine cones (gathered around campus the end of last week)
Oh, and ~1 gallon of mixed kitchen waste... orange peel we chopped finely and soaked in water for a few days, coffee grounds from the house, filters and all, 2 cups of baked beans we forgot to put into the fridge after eating them for dinner earlier this week, some peanut shells (probably should have crunched those up better), a cup or 2 of old, moldy spaghetti, some banana and cucumber peel, and onion skins and tails. :) **Note, the dogs actually followed me to the pile with longing looks on their faces. How do they know?!! I put all of this yucky stuff safely in the middle of the heap.

G checked this morning & found spots where it was up to 120. Cross your fingers! There are a lot of weed and elm seeds in the mix. If we don't hit 130 for a solid day, it could be a mess.


The Plant Parade: The daffodils are now long gone. The lilacs are out; they smell lovely. And at the end of the week the yellow lady banks on the west side of the house bloomed! My eyesight isn't great any more, I had to walk out and take a closer look to make sure I wasn't seeing dead leaves since it's been so dry. The Annual Elm Blizzard: Over the last two weeks we have endured the annual elm seed blizzard. :( After Saturday's bruising gusts, the trees in the yard look bare, so now we just have to deal with what they dumped on us. Mats of papery tan seeds. (I always intended to investigate the facts and figures for the weight, mass and sheer number of seeds one mature Chinese Elm produces annually.) I am impressed and de-pressed at the same time--staring at an enemy face to face, steely and cold. I look at them and think of all the weeding in the months ahead. :( I was worried that my balloon flower didn't make it through the winter, but poking around carefully in the leaves in the approximate spot where we planted it the end of last summer, I spied a little tendril of new growth. She made it! :) The big bush Mary & JJ gave us is in full bloom, so is the red bud (buzzing with bees). And G's rose bush--it has some blooms coming! The yellow irises are up in a neighbor's yard down the street. I'm afraid ours will not bloom again this year. I don't see any sign of blossoms. G's garlic beds look fantastic! We're having trouble forcing ourselves to fence the chickens out of the tomato bed... it will make serious inroads on their territory. Hmmm. We've been trying to figure out how to provide them with various kinds of greenery to shred as compensation-slash-diversion.

Weather: awful winds on Saturday (Apr 14th). Yuck. Very, very dry. Continued generally above seasonal temps. Though it dipped down to ~31 twice in the last week, cold enough to wilt the new growth on Gloria's rose bush. :( Not sure how it affected the apple blossoms. They might have been far enough along, and enough mass on those trees (and a couple of feet higher in the yard, as ridiculous as that seems)... they look okay. We'll see.

April 3rd - Precipitation!

Utterly delicious: after a very long dry spell, it actually rained. A soft, steady rain--ideal for gardens--all night long. And this morning, fat, wet snow flakes. [Look up the records to see how long it has been. Feels like months since we had any appreciable rain in the valley.]

"Day Yard", January weather & Herbella

The holidays seem to have raised havoc with my modest blogging efforts. So here is a 'digest post' to catch up. :)

[Add photos] During the first couple of weeks in December, along with the mania of Christmas shopping, we finally finished a completely enclosed Day Area for the girls. (This spurt of productivity was of course due to our rapidly approaching trip to visit my family for the holidays. We wanted the hens to have at least SOME safe space to run around in unsupervised, during the daylight hours.) Yay! Now Gloria can go to yoga without feeling so guilty.

Herbella's face has been bright red for several weeks now, and her comb is puffing up like odd fungus or huge warts or something. (Comb development seems to go crazy right before sexual maturity. Amazing!) I think it was last Wednesday when she started doing 'the squat.' Doh. Our last hold-out. So, probably any day now.

Scarlett Eats the Mouse:
Oh dear. Bob & Vicki warned us they could and would gobble up mice. Scarlett got one Wednesday the 4th. Whacked it wildly, outran the gang, then swallowed it whole. *Eek*

New Feeder:
G got annoyed by the amount of food the girls have been tossing onto the ground -- hence the word "scratch". She heard of a new design for a feeder & got one. Bright red plastic. Kind of looks like playground equipment. :) [Add photo] The girls seemed to like it (honestly? anything new. they hate to be bored!)

Weather:
Has been lovely since the last week of December. Sunny. Calm. Highs in the low 50s. Lows in the 20s. What could be better?!

Yay Maude! First Egg Friday

17 December... Friday afternoon, Maude laid her first egg! Have to say she is a bit of a drama queen. Yesterday, while warming up to the idea of egg number two, she claimed the entire coop. Poor Lucy came flying out at one point, with Maude hot on her tail, pecking and shouting. Hmm...

Wind, then cold. Maude turns henish?!

**Dec 6. Last Tuesday night - worst winds in 12 years. Chickens spent the night in the bathtub (going back to their roots).
**Dec 12. Last night temps 30degrees below seasonal normal. It was 7 degrees when we got up. Spent most of the morning stuffing straw into the walls of the roost box & tacking it in place with cardboard. (Girls were baffled... suddenly a lot less room in there! :) ) Put plastic up on the last open panel of the coop proper. G went out shopping for an extra brooder bulb, and a second heat lamp. She ended up running all over the north valley. The clerk at Dan's Boots and Saddles said, "There was a run on those this past weekend. You're late!" :) They had a box ready for next year over at Miller's Feed. While there, G got sucked in by the bag of freeze-dried meal worms. Chicken Cheetos! They were a huge hit.

Oh, straw in the old feedbags like pill0ws up on top of the roost box. And towels like a tapestry to cover their front "window." I wish we had a thermometer out there to keep tabs on the temp, but the wireless remote one was interfering with the baby monitor so we brought it in. Brrrrr. Poor chickadees!

**Dec 11. Gloria turned around abruptly & Maude did 'the crouch!' Oh my, our little tomboy is growing up! (Usually means they start laying w/i the week.)