Fish On

 

Fish On

 Late afternoon and time for a little fishing after work is done for the day.

 

We have three ponds on our place, the one pictured above being the largest.  The two pics above are taken with Marc in the same spot, I have just moved to different vantage points.  This pond is horse shoe shaped, with a peninsula in the middle. 

 

In it are bass and perch.  We've caught fish for dinner twice.  Catching them is fun but I draw the line at cleaning them.  Cleaning perch is a lot of work, but delicious eating.

Catch of the Day

It's Spring Everywhere it seems!

I was just getting ready to post some pics I took last weekend and I got an email notification of a post on Kathy's blog about Spring in Ohio. This past week I couldn't help but notice the bright green grass everywhere. Our fruit trees are blooming and there's nothing prettier, maybe because the blooms last a very short time and there's the promise of fruit to come.

These are blooms on a Nectarine tree.

The Perfect Day

For those of you UP NORTH... the temp was in the mid- 70's today! I wore flip flops outside! I managed to get a lot done:

• laundry (all of it!)
• clean the kitchen
• organize the laundry closet (yes, I know it's not terribly exciting but it needed doing and I can get more STUFF in there now)
• sewing
• pruned all the fruit trees, crepe myrtles and other assorted trees
• Marc tilled up a flower bed around a crepe myrtle and we planted some daffodils, daylillies and irises that we've had in pots for THREE YEARS in the new bed and around the well house
• enjoyed the sunshine (right now I'm sitting in a rocker on the front porch looking out over the pond enjoying the sound of the birds)

When we sold the house in town we potted up some plants that I had in the yard. It never dawned on me that three years later the flowering plants would still be in the pots. What's really cool is most of those plants were in the yard when I bought that house, but had been neglected for so long they had pretty much quit blooming. I divided them and moved them and they took off. The irises were salvaged from some trash bags that someone had set out for collection after digging up flower beds in their yard. One man's trash is another's treasure.

I haven't had flowers in so long - I am really excited about that. I loved having roses and other flowers in the yard. I vowed that I wouldn't plant anything until I had my picket fence. Marc says he's going to tackle it soon....

Meanwhile, the trees are budding out. The fruit trees will have blooms soon and the bees will be buzzing. If we don't get another freeze, I may have some apricots!

Babies on the Farm!

On February 18th our chickens and ducks turned one year old. On the same day they turned one they became parents. Marc got an inexpensive incubator (at Tractor Supply of course) and after reading and researching all we could, he placed 14 eggs in it.

He also got an automatic turner so he wouldn't have to mark and turn the eggs daily. The turner holds about 40 eggs, but he only put 14 in for the first experiment (now we wonder why we didn't fill it up...). Basically you plug it in and adjust the heat until you have it at 99.5 degrees and place the eggs in, small side down (the head develops in the big end). You keep water in the incubator so the air is humid. You make sure the water level stays constant and that's pretty much all there is to it for the first 19 days.

You're supposed to "candle" the eggs to see if an embryo is forming, but since we have dark brown eggs, we really didn't have much success with that. Thankfully we didn't have an exploding (rotten) eggs. As it turns out, we had two eggs that didn't develop. Next time we will try harder to candle them to make sure we don't have any accidents.

I marked the calendar on the day we put the eggs in the incubator and counted 21 days (or so I thought). Actually I miscounted. Thursday night we heard a strange - chirping - sound and ran to the incubator and saw this:

I looked at the calendar and realized I had miscounted.... Three days before the eggs hatch you're supposed to take out the turner so the chicks can position themselves for hatching. I hoped I hadn't screwed it all up! We quickly moved the eggs onto the wire (after placing muslin on the wire to catch any nastyness) and waited. The first chick came out about 1-2 hours after we first heard the chirping. I could hardly go to sleep that night, it was so exciting.

We figured we'd get about 1-2 chicks out of the deal, but we have 10 chicks. We would have had 12 but we learned, too late, that you're not supposed to open the lid until all the chicks hatch because the humidity drops. But even so, 10 out of 14 is great. Now if only all of them would be hens!!

We have a huge brooder cage in the shed, but it seems like a lot of work to set that all up for 10 chicks, so Marc put a plastic tote in the clawfoot tub and clipped a heat lamp on and that's where they'll stay for a week or so. Aren't they cute?

This is exciting because we can now add to our flock without having to order (and pay for) chicks. Marc is now collecting duck eggs. It will be interesting to see if we have a similar success rate with the ducks. I am envisioning an Easter picture of Journey with ducklings all around....

2010 Garden

Here in Texas gardening is a year round activity. Right now we have lettuce ("Spring Mix" (leaf lettuce) and Red Romaine) and radishes in the garden and we're having salads just about every night. We also have carrots, broccoli, swiss chard, cabbage, cauliflower and who knows what else growing right now. I just cooked the last of the butternut squash the other night (I'll post a couple of my favorite recipes soon).

While it's nice to have fresh winter vegetables, it's more exciting harvesting vine-ripened tomatoes. Marc has started enough seed trays to plant 1/4 acre of tomatoes! Like Blue Bell we plan to eat all we can and sell the rest.

Here's a picture of the seed starting stand he built using PVC pipe and grow lights holding about 12 flats of seeds. We need about 2 more of these units.

Spring in the Country

The bluebonnets seem more vibrant, almost purple this year, and there are so many on our place. The fields nearby seem to be filled with them.




Patches enjoys the screen porch.







I really enjoy hanging out laundry on nice weekends, maybe because it's so low-tech, not to mention free. I love the way sheets smell and feel after being dried in the breeze.




We've been working in the garden. We've planted lettuce, spinach, onions, eggplant, squash, peppers (bell, jalapeno and cayenne), potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers... and more yet to plant.