Today was the first day of the season that the laundry was hung on the line! It was a sunny 45 degrees today and we took full advantage! I'm sure we'll still see snow flakes, we are in WNY after all.
After church I started taking down our garden beds that had been in the front yard last year, moving the soil to our "back" compost pile. In addition I took our winter compost and moved it to the "back" compost pile as well. The "back" compost pile is about 150 yards from our house and not a place I want to traipse to in the winter until I get snow shoes...they are on the ever growing list of things to buy if I ever dare step into a non-food store again. The winter compost was right outside our back door and easy to get too. I was amazed how much we amassed over the winter months and am very happy to have it all turned and combined now.
Briefly on the topic of compost, in case you don't know, compost doesn't smell, unless you don't like the smell of earth/dirt. I happen to love the smell of the dirt. Compost piles need to be turned and need a balance of "Green" and "Brown" which I will get into at another time. A compost pile that smells is a neglected compost pile, or may simply be referred to as an trash heap by your neighbors. My winter compost pile was hard to manage we had a lot of green going in and not near as much brown as we should have. Additionally it was very hard to turn being frozen and all. I will look to improve upon our design next winter. For those of you who do back yard composting, be kind to your neighbors and give composting the image and smell it deserves.
Back to the Patches' Acre, Dann took down the snow fences while I was moving the dirt piles around and then we re-set up one of the snow fences around our garlic bed and non-to-soon. Deer have already tasted our garlic and I saw three deer in the back yard again this evening. It looked like they were giving the snow fence the evil eye, dreaming of the young garlic growing just out of reach. I just hope they don't plow through the fence to get to the tasty morsels.
It has been a difficult week with the laddies, they have been sick - a cold from what we can tell and as much as you wish to read about here... After some online research we have come up with a random solution - epsom salt in their feed and wheat germ mash (wheat germ and buttermilk). They LOVE the wheat germ mash. As we watched them last evening it reminded me of the game Hungry Hippos, as six beaks in the bowl getting as much mash as they can. Our favorite scene however is seeing them clean each others beaks. It is so tender to watch. Hens that battle every other moment of the day will stand still while their beaks are cleaned by their adversary. We had tried yogurt before the wheat germ mash and oh was that a sight - they also LOVE yogurt - they had it all over - and I mean all over - their tail feathers, their heads, everywhere.
A happy surprise today - while digging out our front garden beds I found a few items (1) a red potato which unfortunately I had stabbed in half with the shovel. Nothing a good cleaning couldn't fix so I cut it up and roasted it along with our dinner this evening - YUM! (2) Walnuts. We don't know where a walnut tree actually is, but we found what appear to be 3 black walnuts in our garden beds. Thank you voles or squirrels or whoever was so kind to bring them to us. Now if we can just find the tree so we can get more!
And Dann would want me to share the vole count with you...our yard is now -3 voles. It is a start, we have a long way to go but our yard has been well aerated this winter to say the least.
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