Humming Along.

It's been a while since we updated the old blog. Quite a bit has been happening but we've not taken the time to note it all down Here's an attempt to recitfy that situation.

Things that have happened since the last blog update:

• We visited family and friends in New Brunswick, and attended Laura's brother's wedding. It went well and was a very good time.


• While there we walked a lot on the scenic path by the harbour. We found a strange sign to send to ZeFrank.
  




• Came home and finished building the tractor for the meat birds and moved them into it. We've been dragging it around the yard a little bit every day.
  




• (note the fancy skids!)






• (Another view with the meat birds)
  



• The place is definitely starting to look more rural. And that's a good thing!



• We made good progress on putting in raised beds for the garden. There's still more to do, but the important stuff is planted and the beds will be set for next year.


• Our cousin Jim put together a custom panorama head for our tripod and camera. Very soon we'll post a cool panorama picture or two, so you can get the feel for "being there". :-)


• Shortly after our last posting about the eggs we were getting from Priscilla, she decided to go broody. :-( So of course she wasn't laying at all, and we had to pull her out of the coop each day to get her to have some food and water and move around. She seems to have finally come out of her broody-ness. She's out and about with the rest of the birds, so maybe she'll start laying again soon.


• I did a minor tune-up on our Airens lawn tractor. This doesn't sound like much, but it's a big deal to me because I've never been much of a mechanic. Usually I'm of the "break it and pay to have it fixed" school, so this was a revelation for me. :-)


• A while ago we had our neighbour come over with his tractor and dig a big hole, which was to become a fishpond. Once we looked into it, we decided it would just be too damn expensive to make, so he came over and filled the hole in. ;-) I'm going to rake it a bit more flat and throw some grass seed on it, and eventually you'll never know it was there.



• We've had rainbarrels for a quite while now and I've been meaning to install taps into them so we can more easily fill the watering cans and stuff. I finally started doing that, as you can see here. I've still got one more to install and then I need to build stands for the barrels, so they'll be up in the air a bit.




• Last fall I chopped down some crappy scrub trees in the side yard. A couple of weekends ago I helped my neighbour use a big wood chipper on a bunch of branches and trees on his property. As a payment, be brought the chipper over and chipped up the stuff I had cut. We dumped it onto a tarp, and I'll drag that over to the garden, to be used as mulch between the rows.



• I learned the proper techniques for slaughtering and preparing a chicken. One of our turkens wasn't doing well (it had leg problems, and was having a hard time getting to the water and food), so we decided to cull him. Thanks to our neighbour, the process went smoothly and I learned the right things to do. We now have a small chicken in our fridge, ready for the BBQ. Now I feel I'm prepared for the bulk processing of the rest of the meat birds in the fall.
  



• Again, thanks to my neighbour, we now have a universal string head installed on our weed-whacker. The bump-n-go systems never really work well, and I had lost the reel part that contains the string. So I bought a universal head from Lee Valley and Terry showed me how it all comes apart and goes together. It was very educational. The only downside is that now I don't have an excuse to avoid doing the weed-whacking. ;-)

• Started a new flower bed at the end of our laneway. The plan is to put in a few plants and shrubs, and a tree (or two?) that will eventually provide a bit of shade for the house, which gets very hot in the summer. (We'll do a posting on energy efficiency soon, where we'll talk about the house's total disregard for the huge number of BTUs being pumped into it by the sun in the summer).
  

Things we have planned for the near future:

• Put the landscaping cloth on the raised beds. I've been cutting up clothes hangers with my angle grinder, to be used as landscaping cloth pins. We might even be able to plant a few late-season things. I'll leave that part to Laura. ;-)
• Finish tapping the rain barrels and building their stands. This will make watering the various things easier.
• Rent a trencher and bury 200ft of garden hose, out to the chicken coop and garden. The coop has an auto-waterer (what a wonderful invention) and we've just got the hose laying across the driveway. I want to clean that up by burying the hose. While we have the trencher, I want to run a line out to the garden, so watering it isn't such a huge chore.
• We're going to expand our chicken coop and run a little bit, to give us a bit more room to segregate the birds for breeding purposes.

Things we plan on doing in the medium future:

• Hang a new screen door on the front of the house, to encourage cross-breezes.
• Paint the garage door.
• Sand and stain the deck and railings.
• After it cools off a bit, re-roof the south-east side of the house. We did the south-west side a couple of summers ago, and now it's time to do the other side. The whole north side is fine, though.