Actual Hard work

I am having some bloggers block. We have been super busy in the Harris home/yard. But it all just seem so blah, boring and not that entertaining in my head. Well, at least not that blog worthy. I need a good story. I secretly like it when my life is filled with shocking stories and crazy events that evoke a "Oh my word, you have got to be joking me!!" - although I really only like the wild ones that do not provoke tears. Surprise and borderline shock = good. Tears and disbelief = bad. It is a fine line.

So, even though it is probably skim worthy I write this for posterity.

What have we been up to?? We cut down a small forest of dead limbs and trunks and trees (curtsy our goats and nature) and I got really good at using a chainsaw. This made a pile of 10ft x 40ft x 5 feet of trees and branches that we chipped and shredded to about 8 - 10 yards of bark. (that was fun - feel free to read with sarcasm) Then I brought in 15 yards of compost and amended my soil as it is now crap due to the build (my fault and I sort of hate myself for it and praying it won't plague me for years) rototilled it extensively and educated myself somewhat and bought a bunch of ordimental plants for the first time in my life and planted them - although most are bee friendly. Then I basically did the same to my veggie garden and planted all the cold weather crops with my friend Elizabeth who we will be doing a veggie garden together with due to her lack of sun in her lot and my extreme love of co-partnering with humans on pretty much anything I do. I also started a herb garden for the first time, removed my sick and poorly prunned pear trees and replaced them with cherry trees. I am also putting in 3- 5 new blueberry bushed attempting to grow blueberry bushes that get bigger then a foot tall (the goats may have something to do with that as well. Curse you electric fence!!). May I just say I feel so relieved all that work is done. I would like to give a special thanks to Ryan and the missionaries for all their help. Love those farmer missionaries. They are the best at manual labor!! I want my boys to work like that. Now if I can only find miles of pipe in Renton for them to move morning and night for years..... (I will post pics of the yard in a few days - I have to work tomorrow and it is dark now)

We are going to be replacing what we lost and farming smarter.....hopefully. We have 33 eggs incubating and should hatch in 2 weeks - always good fun. It will be an interesting experiment because 2 of the eggs have cracked. Apparently someone can pop the lock off the door knob and despite stories of horrific chick deaths the perpetrator seems unswade. I asked, Soren, "Did you go see the chick eggs without me?" After a little coaxing he replied, "Yeah, I took a knife to the lock and and showed Abby the eggs." Super! After some research I learned that if you put nail polish on the eggs to seal the cracks it might be just fine. Nail polish? Sounds like brain damage to me!! - But what the heck, I have never seen a brain damaged chicken before.......or have I? I also have another package of bees coming that same weekend. It reminds me of the weekend where I helped my goat birth a problematic set of triplets and installed my first package of bees (alone) all in the same weekend. Now that was blog worthy. I may have to backpost that story as I now have pictures to match.

This picture makes me chuckle. Right before this picture there instructions were "point to the eggs and look excited" Way to go Soren. You nailed it! ;)