I guess I thought we'd be okay until May to get the chimney and stovepipe swept... I guess I was wrong. We're having that done on Thursday, so in the meantime we cannot use the stove and it is downright COLD out there tonight! So, we're turning on the boiler in the basement for the first time since last March. So far it appears to be functioning, thank goodness...
This morning I woke up feeling sick, with a sore throat and runny sneezey nose. I can't tell if it's from the smoke yesterday, or if I am coming down with yet another virus. Either way, it has prevented me from performing in a fire show that we've done each summertime with a local troupe that I was really looking forward to tonight. I figure that breathing in the smoke and fumes of the fuels we burn to perform would not be the best thing for me given how I'm feeling.
So instead of working on choreography, I spent the afternoon gardening and working on projects. We are almost finished building a chicken tractor for the Chickiechickiepeeperpants Clan. All that's left to do is making a door, staple fencing to the floor, and add a handle to the end opposite of the wheels. A chicken tractor has been on our to-do list for some time now. When one of us is home during the day, we let the chickens free range all over the property (and sometimes across the road into our neighbor's property, oops!). But on days that we're both at work, we let them out into the fenced run that joins their coop.
Over the past year, they've scratched or eaten all of the vegetation in that run, and it's a muddy awful mess if it's rains or snows. We also have to have someone house sit anytime that we want to go away, even if it's just one night, because that run isn't quite predator proof. So we are hoping that by making a chicken tractor, we'll be able to rest the run and reseed it with grass, AND be able to spend the night away without a house/chicken sitter every once in a while.
I also made a lot of progress weeding and mulching our perennial garden beds today, and made post-and-wire trellises for our blackberry and raspberry bushes. Our asparagus is thriving, as our our strawberries and the blackberry bush. The blueberries are a little bit spindly, and three of our raspberry bushes had to be replaced this year as they died over the winter. But I'm confident that with some loving care they'll do better this year.
A thorn-less blackberry at the end of the row of teeny-tiny blueberries.
Little green berries are showing up all over the place in the strawberry patch!
The asparagus is on the far left in this photo. We harvested a few spears this year, not much since it's only the second season for the plants. But it was very tasty and tender!! Now if I could only keep the chickens from scratching in the straw mulch around the raspberries...
My tomato and pumpkin seedlings are growing nicely in the greenhouse. I don't think it's been consistently warm enough for the pepper seedlings to really thrive, but I'm holding out hope that they'll perk up once Beltane is here and gone.
Pumpkins!
Tomatoes!
Carrots and green bunching onions!
Some strawberries that I relocated from their settlement in my lawn.
I also took a nice walk in our woods, casually looking for morels. I did not find any, though I did find these GIGANTIC poly pore shelf mushrooms growing on a dead log....
And I found some
