March 31

First of all, last Thurs­day we got 18 more chick­ens, bring­ing our flock to a grand total of 27. Mom and I drove up to New Hamp­shire and bought them off a guy whose barn burned down. They were cheap, but appar­ent­ly they were trau­ma­tized by the barn fire, and then trau­ma­tized again by the hour ride home in cat car­ry­ing cas­es cov­ered by horse blan­kets in the back of Dav­e’s pick­up truck and then trau­ma­tized AGAIN by the move into a new coop (chick­ens are appar­ent­ly fair­ly easy to trau­ma­tize) and so they haven’t laid any eggs so far. I’ve heard that it can take a month or two for hens to get over trau­ma and start lay­ing again, so right now we’re just wait­ing and hop­ing that all this organ­ic hen feed that we’re shov­el­ing into their greedy lit­tle beaks will pay off. So far they seem to have adjust­ed well, how­ev­er, some­times inte­grat­ing flocks can be dif­fi­cult (chick­ens can be pret­ty mean to each oth­er) but every­one seems hap­py and healthy so far.

Sad­ly, while clean­ing the coop out on Sun­day I left the win­dow propped open and it seems that one of the chick­ens got out because Made­line (one of the cairn ter­ri­ers) did­n’t come in for din­ner on Sun­day night, and then Dav­e’s dad Tom found her lord­ing over a most­ly devoured chick­en car­cass on Mon­day morn­ing. So we’re down to 26.

Dave is home for good! He got back on Fri­day night, which was just in time because the real work is just begin­ning. We’ve spent the last cou­ple of days clear­ing brush from the edge of our new veg­etable field. There have been a lot of big old nasty buck­thorn bush­es and TONS of tan­gles of grape and bit­ter­sweet vines to con­tend with, but we’ve been chip­ping away at it over the last cou­ple of days and it’s start­ing to look real­ly good.

There’s a big old stone wall back in the woods that we’ve been clear­ing up to (you can see it in the back­ground of the last pic­ture). There are tons of huge rocks that were prob­a­bly pulled out of this very field when it was farmed in the past. Thank god for good old fash­ioned hard work­ing New Eng­land pioneers!

The plan is to make the whole sec­tion along the wall into a road so we can dri­ve trac­tors and trucks back into the field.

The cold frames and the green­house look great. The real plant­i­ng starts tomor­row, I can’t believe it’s April already. I’ve just been work­ing on real­ly solid­i­fy­ing the plant­i­ng sched­ule so we’re ready for the busy weeks ahead.

And last­ly, I’m delight­ed to wel­come the newest addi­tion to our team: Angus, my new cairn ter­ri­er pup­py, born 1/1/11.