There’s seven of them… hiding in there somewhere.  No special arrangements were made, she brooded them right in the coop with the rest of the chickens running in and out.  Although yesterday while I was in the house sewing, I kept hearing a “cheep, cheep cheep”… and it suddenly dawned on me a baby chicken was out in the orchard!  I’ve no idea how it made it so far from the coop on its own… it sure was happy to go back inside! 

He’s pretty excited… we have and endless amount of backhoe work to be done around here.  Of course Jim’s never operated a backhoe, so there will be a learning curve… I’m thinking while the cat’s away the mice will play… Jim will be gone all next week and in Spain half of next month… oooh the temptation!

I told him to go practice on the stump out in the orchard, an old flowering plum we had to take down this spring due to blight.

Before he started though, I had him butcher a couple of rabbits for me.  Dinner was fabulous, recipe posted here! 

What can he hurt?  The mess will be easily cleaned up with the front end loader when he’s done playing!

Hopefully no chickens will fall in and get stuck! 

This one is standing next to my clothesline, looking into the backyard.  I don’t know if you can see well enough in the pictures, but there is a stacked retaining wall behind the arborvitaes.  I will have to unstack it and turn all the blocks around.  Either phlox or woolly thyme will get planted there at some point.  Notice my pathetic hydrangeas, barely alive after being burned up all summer?

You can see the portion of the fence I’m leaving up for now… looks pretty awful doesn’t it?  The garden is positively abysmal… I’ve been weeding it and pulling everything out.  Once I’m done, I’ll be top dressing all the beds with rabbit manure, and planting garlic in two of them.  The dog run is directly on the other side of the fence.  Someday, the greenhouse will be in its place, and we plan to add another thirty of these raised beds, continuing on into the back yard.  They will come nearly over to the corner of the house that you see.

Standing in the back yard, looking toward the road.  You can’t really see them, but behind the ornamental grasses, on this side of the fence and between each arborvitae is a blueberry bush.

I ordered a few more trees this morning, and some more asparagus.  We lost every single apple tree in the orchard this year to blight, and all the pears as well.  I found some blight resistant apples and thought we’d try once more.  This is two years running we’ve lost the apples, so if these don’t make it, I think we’ll nix the apples!  I would like to try them somewhere (not sure where yet!) espalier style, as an architectural feature.  If you haven’t ever seen them grown that way, google it, they look so cool! 

That’s bumps it out into October now, as Jim will be leaving next weekend for a week to go help out his mom up in Columbia.  I’m still waiting for him to announce he really needs the backhoe up there, and that he’ll be hauling it with him!  Actually we can’t haul it anywhere anymore, since someone kindly relieved us of our tractor trailer that we had stored on our place back in Missouri last year.

I spent yesterday morning in the garden, getting it ready for winter.  The only fall crop I’ll be planting this year will be garlic, which I ordered yesterday.  The heat and drought were so bad this summer I let the garden go, and it’s an unholy mess!  It will take me a couple of weeks to get it into shape.

I have never tried transplanting asparagus before, but we have five year old crowns I’d like to dig up and move to a new location, they don’t do very well in the raised beds, and I’d just as soon turn all ten of the raised beds off the kitchen into an herb garden.

Yesterday I ordered another five hundred… yep, you heard me right, five hundred pine seedlings, and a hundred pin oaks for spring delivery.  Last year, I only ordered fifty!  I’m not really insane, honest.  That’s just the only size bundle available this year from the conservation department.  Each year I try and plant at least fifty pine and oak seedlings along our property borders.  Less than half survive, but at ten cents a tree, it’s worth the effort.  They grow amazingly fast!  Some of those we planted two years ago are six feet tall already.

Last night we had the chimney guy out to give us a quote on a wood burning insert.  We’d like to remove our gas fireplace and replace it with the insert, but next we need to get someone out to give us a quote on modifying the chimney and adding a firebox… could be more cost prohibitive than it’s worth.

Back to my coffee, while I ponder the choice of weeding more of the garden today, or trying to get the remaining fence panels down.

If that weren’t cause enough for celebration, I slept for seven… count em’… seven hours last night!  I woke up feeling like superwoman!  Man if I got that much sleep every night, I could accomplish miracles, I’m sure of it!

Little ones anyway.  Here’s my miracle for today, and a couple hours from yesterday.

That’s a whole lot of nails pulled from the fencing boards.  That’s why my right arm is so tired!

There’s the boards pulled from yesterday and today.  And…

Look at that!  I can see into the woods now, woohoo!  A blank canvas to landscape over the years!
Tomorrow afternoon, we have someone coming out to see if our gas fireplace can be modified to accommodate a wood burning insert.  If it can be done, I might come to love this place after all! 

That would be me. :)

It took Jim and I most of yesterday to take the very short front section on one side off, because of the gates.  They were a royal pain in the butt!  But look at the progress I made today, after Jim left for work!

My job is to take all the panels or boards… whatever you call them, off, and Jim will be taking the cross beams off, and once all that is done we’ll pull up the posts.  If we can’t pull them up, we’ll dig them up with the backhoe…. oh it’s not here yet, but for Jim’s birthday this year I got him a backhoe attachment for the tractor.  We’re both pretty excited about it, because there’s a whole lot of water and electric lines we want to run.

I’m hoping I can get the rest of the fence down this week.  I can handle about four hours of using a pry bar to work them loose, and a smaller one to remove all the nails (what a drudge that is!) and stack them, and I’m beat.  By my calculations, I should be able to get it done. Dear Body, please cooperate! 

Once the fence is down, we’ll finally be able to finish the driveway (culvert, gravel, but no landscaping yet).  We plan to reuse all the fencing to build a small rabbit barn in the woods.  If there’s enough, a chicken coop.  Our goal is to eventually turn the fenced orchard over entirely to the geese, and have the chickens in the back where it’s all wooded, to keep the ticks down.

Just for fun, this photo was taken in late fall of 2008, we moved in that spring.

At this point, all we’d done was put in the rows (furthest away in the photo) for the blackberries, and dig the holes for the fruit trees. As you can see, the area behind and to the left of the RV is still all wooded.

I’d love to share photos, but Jim took the little camera with him to England, and I can’t seem to find the card reader for the big camera.

I  re-hung the door to the laundry room (I’d taken it down this spring to make access easier… it’s a three way congestion zone there), closed off the air conditioner vent, and it should be just about right in there for the babies.  I don’t want it too cold, or they’ll go into shock when I return them to their moms at night.  There’s sixteen itty bitty babies in there right now!

This seems to be working out well enough for now, we simply have to devise a better location for the rabbits.

The chickens are laying finally, the eggs are small yet so I’m not selling them, but I’m getting 7 -8 eggs a day… they aren’t all laying yet and I’m trying to cook with them all!  Once the eggs are normal sized, I’ll sell them.  I always forget how fabulous fresh eggs taste when it’s been awhile since I’ve had any!

You can’t imagine my joy at Wednesday’s rainfall!  We got a total of 4.25 inches that day and during the night, but 3 of those inches came down in about an hour, along with hail and high winds.  We lost two more trees, one apple and one pear, and two more pear trees were badly damaged.  On the bright side… there’s a few less trees for me to water right?

As if I don’t have enough to do around here, I’ve been eyeballing the strip of ground between the driveway and the orchard fence we put in this spring.

Actually it doesn’t even look like that anymore, I need a new picture!  But anyway, I want to till it up between the fence and the drive, and landscape it.  That’s a huge area… probably a multiple year project.  It’s the north side of the orchard, so I can plant anything I want even if it’s tall, it won’t shade the fruit trees.

Of course it’s a perfect spot for more garden veggies, but until Prince Charming retires and takes over the garden, I’m kind of “gardened” out.  I want some flowers!  I’d like an explosion of color and texture here… and that’s about as far as I’ve got.  I’m going to get my mom down here to help me plan it out, she’s brilliant at that kind of thing! 

And finally, some fur.

Poor things are struggling with this terrible heat we’re having. 

Five fat littls sassy babies!