Holiday Weekend

Yesterday was a frustrating day. Too hot to work in the garden, a flat tire that meant long hot delays getting where we were going, and a mysterious leak in the basement. Today the only productive thing I did was make these cherry hand pies. They are on my great grandma McDonald's hand painted Bavarian china.

Gluten free, from a King Arthur Flour recipe. My kitchen was too hot for the pastry to stay cold and bake up flaky, but everyone liked them. R visited with the chickens and we marveled that we still have four of our original (she calls them the OGs) girls. This is Cricket, who at age 5 still lays beautiful bluegreen eggs. We still have the OGs Marigold, Egglantine, and Stellaluna, and the later additions Flannery and Willa. We've lost Iris, Colette, Poppy June, Felicity, Fialka and Charlotte to what appeared to be natural causes. All of them just passed away overnight in their coop over the course of five years, no illnesses or predator injuries. (Thank you Charlie the livestock guardian!) Tilda turned out to be a rooster and went to live on a farm since we can't keep roosters in the city.  The next year, Poppy Junior and Bonnie turned out to be roosters although they were sold as pullet chicks, and we adopted them to a farm along with their sister Sylvie who was attached to them.

We have a new batch of chicks who are almost big enough to leave the brooder inside and join the big chickens in the coop. This is Frances and Ginger the day we brought them home. They are bigger than this now. Charlie takes his chicken protector job very seriously. Ginger is a Bielenfelder and Frances is a Cream Legbar, who will lay sky blue eggs. Males and females have different coloring from birth in those breeds, so we know we won't have the heartbreak of raising a chick by hand and then hearing a crow. Then we added Flora the Speckled Sussex and Mila the Red Star, who is also certain to be a girl. Flora is supposed to be a pullet also, but we've had bad luck with pullets turning out to be surprise roosters. We love her and really hope she's a girl. Flora came with Evangeline, who got progressively sicker after we brought her home. She was tiny and unsteady on her feet and we couldn't get her to drink or eat. I stayed up all night keeping her warm and feeding her electrolyte water, but she died in my hands near dawn. It is always hard to lose a chicken, but this was our first chick who didn't make it, and it was heartbreaking. She was the shape of a little bumblebee. I still feel so sad thinking about her.

I'm going to try to wake up early enough tomorrow to work in the garden while it's still cool. After letting the front yard garden languish for a few years as life events got in the way, it feels so good to have it up and running again. I'll take some pictures tomorrow.

January Is Rounded With a Snow

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
- The Tempest Act 4, Scene 1, 148-58

January closed with a big blustery snowstorm.

R's tree swing. 

 

Silver maple in a sugar snow. 

I promise the chickens are o.k. Charlie. We let them tough it out so they'll be hardy enough for cold weather, but when it gets close to zero we put a heat lamp in their coop. Their waterer has a heated base also, so it never freezes. Charlie only trusts himself with their well-being.

Good dog. 

Marshmallow roasting with Daddy after a long, cold afternoon sledding with the neighbors. Charlie used to hate the fire as a puppy. He would bark at it and run upstairs to glower from a safe distance. Gradually he got used to it and now he can relax and warm his fur next to it. Except if someone makes a blowing sound, to stoke the fire or put out a flaming marshmallow--that drives him crazy for some reason. I love all the border collie hyper-aware eccentricities. And that they are so happy to come inside for cuddles on laps when their feral outdoor time is done.

Charlie Has a Doppelgänger

Our neighbor friend S just got a border collie puppy named Dexter. He is four months old.

Ears! I forgot how they have to grow into those. I think Charlie's were even bigger.

R appreciated his fuzzy puppy coat.

S thinks he will be more on the brown side when he grows up. But for now it's like an optical illusion. We couldn't stop laughing.

9th Birthday Party

It has been a long summer without my camera. Since my computer was out of commission for awhile too, there weren't any blog posts. The camera was expensive to fix, so I waited until I really needed it, for R's 9th birthday party. I'm so happy to have it back. It felt like one of my arms was missing.

We had her party at our neighborhood pool.


Suddenly the sky opened up, with rain and hail.




E caught a hailstone.


I captioned some of these pictures to send to family, but I forgot to save a version without captions.

That was a nice birthday memory--a rainbow just for R.

She wanted a wolf cake, with Oreo frosting. It was so much fun to make. She gets to keep the little wolf figurines and play with them. I bought the edible cupcake toppers on eBay.


Then the girls came back to our house for a slumber party. They are picking out books from the shelves D built for me, to hold my Dad's history scholar's library. R has commandeered some of the lower shelves for her own books.

Eleven girls in the basement!

Charlie wanted so badly to go downstairs. But he has a history of jumping on sleeping heads and licking faces.

Poor Charlie!

He got a lot of love in the morning.

The next morning, they opened presents and D made chocolate chip pancakes, the birthday girl's request.

D built this rope swing for R in the backyard. It swings you right into the bushes, and for some reason, every kid who comes over thinks that is just the most hysterically funny and entertaining thing.

It was fun to have a house full of girls for one night. You forget how little fourth graders are, until they are all swarming around you in the kitchen in their pj's, telling you exactly how much butter and salt they want on their own bag of popcorn. 

Rain Garden

A whole night and day of drenching rains, finally. Everything is perking up.

One of the front yard beds is looking better, thanks to my friend Tom and his gift of columbine and snapdragon yesterday. I got them planted just as the rain started falling. The little grassy things are thrift from Tom, I hope they take. Behind that is the pretty white flowers of bacopa, one perennial that came back for me this year. And way in the back, the Shasta daisies. I love the dark green foliage even before they bloom. These came from one seedling I started under lights indoors three years ago.

Charlie gets a wet head from the dripping bushes. Still a handsome gentleman.
Peas planted on St. Patrick's Day, loving the rain.

Magenta Swiss Chard.

Mesclun ready to be planted.

Charlie in the spot where he dug up all the grass. That stage didn't last very long, he is mostly a good dog now.

Georgia O'Keefe in the salad greens.

The dwarf blue spruce planted all around with purple alliums is my favorite thing in the backyard. I wish I could go back three owners ago and say thank you.

Allium and a peony bud in the back yard.
So many things bloomed this year that had been sulky or just absent in the four years we've lived in this house. I think it was the first year without a late killing freeze.

Tom's columbine. I always think of them as blue, I love this creamy color.

I have been planting out the winter sown milk jug seedlings. I'm following the instructions, we'll see if anything actually blooms. That will be another post.
Dandelion skeletons are lovely. I will still work to eradicate them.

Front yard peonies just ready to burst open.

Wild rosa eglantina by the front door. I wish whoever planted these could know how much they are appreciated years later. Who knows how old the gorgeous peony is, how many owners back it goes.

Buds on our Home Depot David Austin rose from last year. I have been fertilizing and watering and putting epsom salts and coffee grounds around all the roses, mostly out of shame for how I neglected them last summer.

April Rain Song 
by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.

Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.

The rain makes running pools in the gutter.

The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.