It’s ironic, isn’t it, that a week ago it was sleeting and now we’ve just come through several days of near-90 degree temperatures.

I feel clobbered by summer just when we should, finally, be enjoying spring.

The heat’s brought on the spring flowering trees, it appears to their detriment. My wonderful Yoshino cherry in the front yard flowered yesterday and already this morning its green leaves were pushing through tired-looking white flowers. In one day. With cooler weather one could enjoy the pure-white flowers and grey branches alone for at least a week before the leaves come in to make everything look a bit ragged.

I was out this morning hauling five-gallon buckets of water to the vegetable garden. I haven’t yet set up my hoses, and with this heat I needed to water the new peas and recently sprouted greens. We’ve had so little rain lately that these young plants were wilting like it was July, not early April. I would say this is not a good harbinger for an easy summer, if there is such a thing around here, but the variability demonstrated by last week’s weather compared to this week’s shows that there are no patterns nor useful predictions.

I’ve been chipping away at my spring to-do list, which is dozens of items long. It’s times like these that I really feel my singleness, my two small hands that are solely responsible for making so much happen. Most of the time I enjoy working alone, but I do know how much more can be accomplished with the extra helpers that I don’t have. If I still lived in San Diego, as I used to, I would totally have gone down to the nearest big-box hardware store parking lot and picked up a truck load of day laborers. But this kind of help just isn’t as, shall we say, visible here in central Virginia. So I go it alone.

One of my main focuses right now is to do what needs to be done to make summer maintenance a little less exhausting. To that end, I am working on defining beds around the house in order to keep turf and weeds from encroaching. I am also going to mulch pretty heavily, with straw in the vegetable garden, double-ground hardwood mulch in the ornamental beds, and pine bark around then pasture trees, in hopes that it will keep the weeds down and lessen drought stress (and watering) on plants.

But of course, this being the property it is, and by that I mean still young and undefined, in order to do all these things I must do several other things first. So for the past few weeks I have been hauling boulders out of the woods to edge the beds, shoveling topsoil, shoveling and hand-spreading mulch. All hard work that’s a race between physical exhaustion and the disappearance of daylight, and usually I push myself until the sun goes down.

I try not to look at the ten yards of mulch that was just yesterday dumped in my field and think that I will need to position it all, shovel by shovel, in place. Instead I just pick up the shovel, start up the tractor, and take it one bucket-load at a time.

Tonight, near eight o’clock, I was shoveling mulch on the front bed when I heard a guitar. My neighbor, a young guy who rents the the house just up the road, was sitting on his porch, strumming and singing in the sunset. I’m not going to lie, I had a somewhat bitter flashback to being a young renter, with no better way to spend a warm, dry evening than just sitting. I wish I could say the “joys of home ownership” make losing all sense of idle relaxation worth it, but the jury’s still out on that.

And while they’re debating, there is still the veg garden to lime, fertilize, straw, and oh, plan and plant. All I have in now are peas and greens, but in a couple of weeks it will be time to pound tomato stakes and transplant the dahlias that I potted up inside a few weeks ago. And sow the cut flowers, and set up the cucumber trellis. And there are the water hoses to set up, the chicken house to clean, the roses to prune, and the tools to clean and organize, among many other tasks. We’re officially in the season of nonstop projects, and those short winter days spent reading by the wood stove are but a pleasant memory.

If it sounds like I am complaining, I am not. I love every minute of all of this work, and nothing makes me feel more vital than these tasks. I feel like taking care of this patch of dirt is one of the things I was born to do, but I know enough about the sequence of spring chores to know that certain issues, if not nipped in the bud—literally!—make for larger problems down the road. I am feeling behind and panicky. And I still need to do my taxes!

The pressure is on in part because I have have wonderful out-of-town friends arriving in a week. I am so very much looking forward to their visit, and I’d like to have a good handle on all these things so I can be the relaxed hostess they deserve, without having to conscript them into mulch spreading! And, my green tractor is ailing—leaking oil from its front axle—and going to the tractor hospital on Monday for bit of a stay. I need the tractor for most of my outdoor jobs, so I need to get those done before the tractor is away on convalescence. And tomorrow it’s supposed to rain most of the day, which is a wonderful thing for the drought, but not so great for my plans to mulch. So the variables are stacking up, and there’s nothing to do but make lists, prioritize, and push through the best I can.

Spring has forsaken us.

Cut flower season has returned. My vases have been so lonely, my windowsills so naked.

These may be the lucky ones. Their companions, outside tonight:

Let’s go back to this, shall we? Isn’t that color a shock to the heart gone dead during winter?

Now that’s better.

Damage control begins in the morning.  I suspect that soon there will be many short-stemmed daffodil arrangements in this house.

In my front yard right now.

These tiny irises—planted just last fall—are just a few inches tall, and yet their color is so violent in this winter landscape that to look upon them assaults the eyes. In the best possible way.

to take a soil sample for tomorrow’s master gardener class.

As if my neighbors didn’t already think I was a freak, now I am outside at 10:00 p.m. in windy subfreezing weather, wearing boots and pajamas, working by lantern light to extract earthworms from shovelfuls of dirt destined for the Virginia Tech Soil Testing Lab.

Crazy, yes. But I suspect my teachers wouldn’t be too sympathetic if I claimed my dog ate my soil sample.

Last weekend’s unseasonably warm temperatures (almost 70 degrees!) begged for an adventure. I found one in a canoe picnic on the Beaver Creek reservoir near Crozet, Va.

I hadn’t been on the water since kayaking two summers ago. It was wonderful to spend hours poking about, exploring the shoreline. Only a few fishermen were on the water, so it felt like having a private lake.

I enjoyed seeing all the beaver-gnawed trees at the water’s edge, but I didn’t find their dam. The best discovery of the day was a bale of turtles in shallow water at the far end of the reservoir. And we also found scads of huge mussel shells in one area. They were big—the size of the mussels you usually eat in restaurants. I have yet to determine if the mussels live in the lake or if someone dumped their dinner shells…unlikely as the reservoir is surrounded by cow pasture.

Watching the mountains change from blue to gold from the middle of the water was lovely treat. And a fantastic Timbercreek Organics beef hamburger at the always-entertaining Fardowner’s in Crozet capped off a wonderful day!

For weeks now there’s been a mystery among the chickens. They’ve been losing feathers across their lower backs, sometimes so much so that they would bleed, attracting the other chickens to peck at their wounds. They’re too young to molt, and I didn’t find any symptoms of mites or lice, so I suspected the newly “active” young cockerel, Calabrese, of clumsy technique.

But the other day I noticed that even he was starting to get a ratty back. I picked him up by the feet and dug around in his tail feathers. I found a group of blood feathers (growing feathers with active blood supply still in their sheaths) that had been ripped off close to the skin and were bleeding.

Hmmm…the plot thickens.

I looked at the hens again and saw that only one had pristine feathering on her back: Iris, my broody hen. This surprised me, as Lilac has historically been the feistier hen and I’ve never seen Iris attack any of her coopmates. I was loathe to separate her from the flock because of the upset to their social dynamic, so I looked for other solutions. A quick internet search turned up a lack of protein as a possible reason for feather eating.

As a quick supplement I whizzed eight eggs, shells and all, in my food processor and cooked up a giant omelet.

I fed this to the birds as I caught them, one by one, for ministrations. I started with Calabrese, whose broken blood feathers were continuing to ooze and no-doubt attract more pecking from the flock. I pulled each out with my pliers.

Then I rubbed all the birds with blue food coloring, which tints their red skin and makes it less attractive to picking.

By the time that fiasco was over I had food coloring on my jacket, on the coop, my dog’s nose, and of course on my Smurf hands:

But triage is complete and now I must turn my attention to my flock husbandry, which is obviously lacking. I spent the better part of Saturday reading halfway through Harvey Ussery’s wonderful book, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock. I picked this up at the Mother Earth News Fair and just now have gotten in to it. That I can read it straight through like a novel is testament to Ussery’s writing. I think he gives the best advice on chickens that I have read anywhere—really practical stuff presented in a humorous, engaging tone. I appreciate Ussery’s wholistic outlook on keeping birds and his emotional sensitivity to creatures that are often regarded with the opposite of respect.

My reading confirmed what I already knew, that my birds were too closely confined, and bored. I let them out to range the yard and gardens about twice a week, but that’s obviously not enough to keep them happy. So now, in addition to feeding supplemental protein, I need to figure out a way to get the birds outside more often while still keeping them safe from hawks, foxes, dogs, etc. And, I need to take more advantage of the chickens’ manure and their pest-eating skills. And it wouldn’t hurt, what with the cost of feed, to have them hunt some of their own food.

I’ve got a nice compost pile just sitting in the woods, far enough from the coop that the birds don’t venture there.

And I’ve got a deer-fenced garden enclosure, reinforced with dug-in wire at the bottom, that’s now got nothing but a thick straw mulch on it to keep the soil organisms happy through the winter.

I wonder what would happen if I started composting directly in the garden, turning the chickens out in there each day to pick through the pile? The worm life would definitely benefit. The birds would be reasonably protected from ground predators, and if Tucker is outside he helps chase off any threats from the air. I just need to rig a semipermanent passageway from the coop to the garden so that the birds can travel back and forth, both for safety and egg laying, which happens throughout the day.

I’ll still let the chickens out to roam the pasture if I am around to supervise, but this might be a good way to solve the confinement problem I am having while putting the birds to work in the garden. It’s worth a shot.

And then when I do some more research and get some cash flow I will invest in an ElectroNet fence. With that I could have the birds work different sections of the yard without always worrying that they’ll be carried off by a fox. I think it would be good to erect the fence around the garden and run the birds in this “moat” after the garden has been planted and they can no longer be free in it. Perhaps they would help with the insect population if they were serving as ravenous alligators to any bug trying to crawl toward my vegetables!

Have been a whirlwind of productivity and enjoyment best relayed in photographs.

Pervy Tuck

First raid of the compost pile several years in the making.

I know I am an unusual girl to take such pleasure in this handful of homemade worm-happy, vital compost. It is beautiful, and I am proud.

Well house renovation begins with an insulation/drywall blitzkrieg.

And a right-under-the-4:00 p.m.-closing-wire Saturday dump run. Good riddance to this stink bug, ladybug, mouse poo pile!

Lots of wonderful meals prepared, including salmon and sweet potato stew, goat cheese and caramelized onion focaccia, and a roasted beet salad with balsamic dressing. The eating’s been good around here lately!

Vintage gas pumps resurrected from my woods and hauled away to be transformed in to art.

Thanksgiving mushroom walk!

Chicken sculpture

Discovered under my OSB front sidewalk: a whole clutch of snake eggs!

I am still cringing that Mama Snake (probably Mama Black Snake) managed to sneak her brood so close to the house. And yet I saw not a single black snake last year, when they were incubating right on my doorstep! That’s irony for you.

Thrifty new front walk under construction, using stones dug from the property. It’s rustic, but it’s better than rotting, snake-incubating  OSB and sure beats the $9,000-$18,000 quotes I got from the pros for hardscaping this area…

And finally, lots of woodstove sitting, reading, and spending time with this handsome lad, who is relishing his increased responsibility on the farm and every day grows more accomplished. Official presented kill tally: two wood rats and one mole. Way to go, Farmdog!

I spent five hours outside today cleaning out the garden for winter. I chopped down freeze-blackened plants, dug dahlia tubers for storage, pulled out tomato stakes, transplanted tender plants into pots for winter storage, and rewound chicken wire pea supports. I had all nine chickens penned in with me, and I believe they all thought they’d died and gone to heaven as they enjoyed a veritable banquet of bruised greens, displaced worms, slugs and the occasional black widow spider.

All day long Tucker had been worrying a pile of brush in the woods. It’s a spot that’s always fascinated him for some reason. It’s not large enough to shelter a fox, so I figured it must be home to some smaller critter. Whatever it was captured Tucker’s complete attention, and he spent three hours snuffling and digging in that pile with almost unbroken concentration.

I left the garden to grab something out of the garage and as I did, Tucker trotted out of the woods, head high, holding something in his mouth. Without me saying a word, he came right up to me, flung a creature at my feet, and collapsed into a happily panting pile next to it.

A rat! Tucker got a rat! And boy was he proud.

Turns out the rat wasn’t dead, just partially paralyzed. I tried to get Tucker to finish it off, but he just wanted to play.

He was surprisingly gentle with this creature, just batting it and lightly mouthing it. I am a little surprised he didn’t try to kill it immediately. Maybe he is inexperienced or just wanted a toy, or perhaps he saw the rat as a creature to be protected, as English Shepherds are wont to do? Maybe the countless hours we spent learning that baby chickens are to be guarded and not eaten translated to this rat? Who knows? Perhaps with this and his love of water, he really is a retriever in a sheepdog’s clothing?

Regardless, I forgot the first lesson of rodent handling, which I learned as a child keeping mice: don’t try to pick them up by the end of their tails! I tried to pull this little guy out of the grass and his tail skin came away in my hand with a rip. Gross, I know. Sorry. Just reporting the facts. It gets worse so if you are squeamish stop reading now.

I had heard of chickens eating mice, so I picked up the rat and threw it into the garden thinking my birds could use the protein. It got quite a lot of interest from the gang before Lilac commandeered it. She spent about ten minutes tossing it too and fro, nibbling its toes and divesting it of its eyes before she gave up and went on to munch less-challenging bugs. I think it was too big for her to find an easy way in.

At this point the poor rat was still alive and had been tortured enough, so I dealt it a quick blow to the neck with a garden hoe and took it into the woods for the foxes to find. I did feel sad for it—a rat!—but this is pretty close to the way nature works. Proud Tuck, meanwhile, took up his post right outside of the garden door with a keen ear and eye on the woods.

In fact, not a second after I took this photo he was off like a shot to investigate some scurrying action in the leaves. What a good farmdog—in my book he earned his hunting merit badge today!