Well, Sunday the weather cooperated and my wish came true- we spent much of the day in the garden. It was my favorite way to spend Mother’s Day. Jeff loaded up Bracken’s red wagon with starts from the greenhouse that needed to be planted and I did some weeding to get beds ready for the plants. Jeff planted lettuce, cilantro, kale, and more. There’s still so many more vegetables and herbs to plant. All the fruit is planted now. We’re planting lots of calendula this year because we didn’t have as much as we would have liked last year and we want a lot of calendula around here. Our friend Abby shared her abundance of calendula seeds with us that she saved from her garden and we’re planting crazy amounts of it. We use it in our salves and balms. Plus it’s just so beautiful, a fresh burst of color popping up all over.

Here are a few things that have been happening around the yard…
 

 Jeff got out some twine to tie some of the grape vines to the arbor, training them around the wood beams. He pointed out to Bracken and I that there were teeny tiny grapes on our grape plants! We’re all very excited about that.

 Not long ago I hung this wire basket from the chicken coop, near the nesting boxes where we collect eggs. There are so many times we go outside without our egg basket. The bottoms of our shirts work fine to transport eggs inside, but if I want to collect eggs and then work in the garden for awhile, this wire basket gives me a great place to put them in the meantime. 

 Bracken picked a dandelion and gave it to me. Then he carefully picked buttercup after buttercup until he had a whole handful and brought it over to me, saying “Happy Mother’s Day!” Talk about a heart melter. He also brought flowers to Jeff and said “Happy Mother’s Day!,” which made us smile. Mother’s Day was not something he really grasped. He was saying it to loved ones on the phone, just to everyone like you would say “Merry Christmas” or another holiday. Aunt Sam said something to him on the phone along the lines of “you have such a nice mommy, don’t you?” to which he replied “no, mean mommy,” which he thought was pretty darn funny- he cracked himself up. It made me laugh too. He’s quite the little jokester. (He calls me mean mommy whenever I say no to something he wants to do. My mom will smile when she reads this, I think I did the same exact thing to her when I was an independent three year old.)

On a Gratitude Sunday post recently, I wrote that I was happy that the chickens had plenty of nesting boxes now (since we added three more) so they wouldn’t have to fight over the nesting boxes anymore. Laura Jeane made a comment saying that hers fight over them anyway, no matter how many they have. Oh, she was so right! It didn’t take long before I noticed the very same thing. There would be plenty of empty nesting boxes and yet I’d see three hens trying to cram into the same one. Silly girls. I check each of our six cozy nests, full of wool and straw, and yet I find the majority of the eggs in one nest. The nest of choice seems to change from day to day. There’s no rhyme or reason to the popular nest.

 In other chicken news, we tried an experiment on Sunday. You see, our chicks and ducks were in a much smaller space than we wanted them to be, but we needed to keep them separated from the hens in the coop so the hens wouldn’t hurt them. The chicks are over seven weeks old now (they look a bit like awkward teenagers) so we felt it was finally time we could try something Jeff read about online. He had read about a unique idea for integrating chicks with full grown hens, where you cut a small hole for the chicks to come into the larger space, but where they can go back to escape to a safe place if they need to. At the feed store they said not to integrate them until the chicks are nearly full grown, but we didn’t want to wait that long. They needed more space to move and get exercise and well, it just felt like time. I cut a small opening in their fence. It was a size that let the chicks and ducks out, but the larger hens couldn’t fit in. I sat in the coop with them for a long time and kept an eye on them. Eventually I moved to the garden nearby and still kept checking on them. The hens already seemed pretty used to them, having just a fence separating them for so long. So far it’s been great! Yesterday they were all in the yard together and everybody seems to be getting along. Today the same thing. The integration, as I’ve been calling it, has gone better than we could have hoped for. Bracken’s old swimming pool has become the new duck pond. (Jeff promised Bracken we’d get him a new one this summer.) We put it in the chicken yard where they get to swim every day. They love it. It’s sweet the way the ducks and chicks are buddies and stay together so much of the time. I see them playing in the yard and then going back into their fenced in closure to take a nap, all in one snuggled up mass of feathers. 

In yoga they call this the flying duck pose. Just kidding.

Another great thing about spending time in the garden is that the chickens get lots of weeds to eat!

We created a new bee water. The terra cotta container we were using before was porous so the water would seep out. I hadn’t thought of that at the time. This one is bigger and we need to find more rocks and pebbles to fill it up all the way. (Bracken also put some flower petals in there in case you’re wondering what’s floating on top.) I put fresh water in it regularly. Bracken I get really happy filling up the bee water and rearranging the rocks from time to time. For the first time the other day, I saw a bee drinking from it!

I used the terra cotta piece that we had for the old bee water as the new “clay spot” for the mason bees. It’s a porous container that works well for that. It was Jeff’s idea. Before I had been watering some clay-ish looking areas on the ground for the mason bees. He thought it would be a good idea to put some clay in a container and keep it moist, so that’s what we’re doing. Mason bees need clay. (You can read why mud is important here.)

And look at the mason bees‘ nesting tubes! Seeing clay in them is a good sign, it means that they are laying eggs in there. Can I get a Woo Hoo?!

And on a bizarre note: Jeff found two lizards on the side of the greenhouse and one was biting the other one’s neck. Bracken and I came over to see. Weird mating ritual? Two males fighting over territory? We have no clue. We’ve been meaning to google it, but haven’t done that yet. I’m glad we got pictures of them though. 

Other things around the yard: we have a mama robin right by the front door. She has babies in her nest and we see her all over the yard searching for food and sometimes returning with a worm dangling from her beak. It feels simply magical to have the nest so close and to be able to see her so often. She has gotten really used to us and lets us walk past her and her nest most of the time without making a fuss. 

The ducks are eating huge slugs already and they aren’t even full grown. The idea of them keeping the slug and snail population down in our garden makes us very happy. We don’t know yet if our ducks are male or female. I’m really hoping for at least one female, for the eggs. But even if they’re males, at least they’ll be good for slug and snail patrol. We’ve seen more snakes in the garden than ever before. And I have a feeling it’s going to be a very hot and dry summer here.

What’s going on outside your door?