Weekend Endeavors

I've got some cooly-cool things planned for this weekend. And I'm sure all my wonderful readers do as well.

Let's tick 'em off, shall we? And then chime in with some comments and/or link backs down below with your weekend chore list!

So I will be:

*Sprouting wheat berries!
http://nourishedkitchen.com/sprouted-grain/

*Starting Broccoli seeds for sprouts to be added to salad. I've got a whole packet of broccoli seeds that I'll never plant out this year, so they are being intensely planted in plastic strawberry packages to be pulled when they pop their second set of leaves. Yum! (You can do this with beets, too. Also, I've heard of it being done with sugar snap peas and you just eat the top tendrils once they get about 6 inches tall.) Wait a minute. I have like 3 packages of sugar snap peas AND saved seeds....so....

*Intensively planting sugar snap peas to harvest the tendrils. Hee hee.

*(RE) planting out cucumbers since a marauding chicken dug up the starts I put out there. Boo - Hiss.
http://www.organicgardening.com/learn-and-grow/cucumbers

*Cleanin' hutches, coops, dogs, etc, etc, etc. Hey - this website is hilarious. Methinks he's taking rabbit love to the next level.
http://www.thebunnyshed.co.uk/ThingsToKnow2.htm

*Making some super simple olive oil soap - with a little extra shea butter and cocoa butter for extra luxury.

*Doing some kick- ass parenting including but not limited to: Giving my progeny lot's of hugs and kisses, books, a primer on laundry prioritizing, a good long bath full of bubbles, lessons on numbers, letters, and rabbit procreation (it's time to breed Madge - the quickest rendezvous EVER.) and at least one visit to a drool worthy thai restaurant with plenty of gramma time for extra punch.

I love Spring. So many projects, so little time!

So? What are YOU tackling this weekend?

We've Got Quail!

Oh, my GAWD, Lindsey - stop adding animals to the 1/4 acre...

Never!

Go check out my quail page!

I am loving these little buggers and learning more and more every day. What a super cool bird. And so easy to keep.

Yay!

I swear this will be the last animal to come live on our land.

Promise.

Because the 1/4 acre is too small to have Ryeland Sheep and b/c I'm pretty sure our neighbors would kill us if I brought a milk cow into the garage.

Wind-Pocalypse

I can't tell, but it looks like a storm is coming.

Storm-tacular.
Lightening and thunder and rain, oh my!
"Hey, look at all my frozen freshly butchered rabbit starting to defrost in the freezer!"

Yes. The NW fell beneath the hand of yet another storm. And our storms are big. It's as if our weather system gets tired of being calm and sedate all year and, for a change of pace, goes on a one day bender of wind, rain, hail, blistering sunlight and, consequently, power outages.

Of which ours was out from 1:45 in the afternoon until 5:15 in the morning. Not that I was watching the clock like a hawk or anything.

With windapalooza, we got some colder than usual temperatures. During the day it was warm - that sort of naked, hazy, soggy heat that you can feel on the backs of your hands through your gloves, but after sundown, the temp fell and KEPT falling - all the way down to about 48. Not that we got a frost or anything, but I had already moved the chicks out to the tractor the day before and with the power outage, I was desperately scared they would freeze.

And with the power off I could hear their pathetic little cheeping all the way inside the house. No Showtime to drown them out.

I want you to visualize whirled peas me dressed in pajama bottoms and a heavy winter coat, clomp-clomping around the backyard in the PITCH BLACK rounding up shivering, sleep-dopey chickens to bring BACK into the garage to be reinstalled in a brooder that I had to re-set up after taking it down and cleaning it out thoroughly. And then guilt feeding them, and standing there chewing my lip for 10 minutes, monitoring to make sure they were okay.

This is not fun. This is NOT fun at all. This  wind can not be. This is done in the FALL. (Read it like you would read the Cat in the Hat.)

But today? Yeah. Pretty pretty day. All sunlight and smiles. *eyeroll*

Every chick made it out unscathed. You may ask why I moved them out of the brooder so fast? I will tell you.

On Mother's day my H met me in the hallway with a kiss and a happy mother's day slap on the butt. Then - "Hey, not to be the bearer of bad news, but one of your chicks was getting pecked by the others and there was a nasty flap of skin hanging off so I separated him. Just thought you should know."

You know what? Breakfast in bed would've been nicer.

So I trucked it downstairs to indeed find one chick had been picked on - literally and figuratively. And that made my decision for me to move them out to a bigger pen. Last run I had, there were more chickens and everyone got along fine for much longer. But every run is different, so out they went. Our temperatures had stabilized and for the foreseeable future, things looked calm. If I was a network tv watcher, instead of an iphone weather app gazer, I would have known we had a local weather system moving in, but I'm not, so I didn't, and here we are.

All's well that ends well.

And on the super awesome upshot I got to spend a very nautical day reading books with my ridiculously smart toddler and teaching her how to count miles by seconds in between lightening and thunder strikes. This was her first bowling match between sky Gods and her wild eyed looks at the ceiling informed me that much damage control in the form of Dr. Seuss and popcorn needed to be done. Crisis Resolved.