Another bout of weed whacking took place last weekend. While I didn't end up looking like a quadriplegic due to a semi-effective "technique" I discovered, it still took my forearms several days to recover. However, the ditches in front of my driveway look fabulous, a fact I do not hesitate to point out to anyone unlucky enough to have to endure a trip to my house.
I spent this past weekend on a huge project that I had been studiously ignoring every time I went into the back yard. I have a large island which contains a huge, gorgeous holly tree, a dead cottonwood or two and some climbing something or other that had taken over, leaving a mass of tangled greenery that needed completely cleaned out. This weekend, I finally gritted my teeth and threw myself into it. I cleaned out the whole island and my dad came over Saturday with his trusty chainsaw and we chopped down the two cottonwoods and the climbing thingamajigger. Despite a few days of hard labor, it looks fantastic and is now ready to be properly landscaped and planted. Underneath that wild growth was an old post for a birdhouse so I duly went out and bought a new birdhouse for finches which I attached to the post. A little more planning and planting and it will be a whole new view for me.
As I mentioned in my last post, Frannie was seeming awfully broody and I was sure she was about to lay any day. It turns out my newly acquired chicken skills were correct! The day after I posted, I discovered a gleaming white egg in the nest boxes. Frannie is my only white egg layer (did you know you can tell the color of the egg a bird will lay by the color of their ears?!) so I knew it was her and I was thrilled to see one of my pullets "grow up". Now that leaves Petunia to start earning her keep although she shows no sign of doing so and I harbor doubts as to whether she will ever lay.
The first Frannie egg!
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Frannie is a white leghorn which, if you do your research, you will discover is the most common breed used for laying and now I know why. Frannie is a laying machine. Once she started, she didn't stop! Whereas Libby misses every other day, Frannie will lay 6 days out of 7. It's kind of amazing to look at such a small bird and think how many eggs she will produce in her lifetime. So now I have eggs to spare and have been able to give some out to the many who have made egg requests. Last weekend I went to an hour and a half seminar on "Winterizing Your Henhouse" which was held at the Issaquah Grange. A very informative session that gave me lots of good ideas on keeping the ladies happy in the cold weather.
In the meantime, my two polar bears have been up to no good in the yard, burying their bones and helping me out by tilling my vegetable gardens so they can sleep in their holes in the cool, moist dirt. Alas, they often appear at my door looking like this:
My nose is always this dirty mom. I swear...
Lola made me do it.
You can see in the above picture, the bark collar PB sometimes wears. It has a small microphone in it and when he barks a short spray of citronella is released. It provides immediate negative feedback and is not harmful to dogs. However, they definitely hate the smell of citronella and when PB is nuisance barking as opposed to barking at something in particular, I put the collar on him. It has worked wonders in putting an end to his attention seeking barking.
I discovered more suicidal frogs hiding under my hot tub cover last week. Still traumatized by the squishing death of the first one, I gently removed this little fellow from the cover:
You do not see me. You do not see me.
Unfortunately, he hopped once which generated oodles of interest from the polar bears and Dexter:
Is he edible?
It's a small miracle Dexter didn't fall on his face.
He moved! He moved!
So while the farm has been keeping me fairly busy on my days off, I have still had some time to go enjoy the outdoor events that fall brings. On Friday, my mom and I went up to Mt. Vernon to the tulip farm to get some bulbs and pick up some lovely fall decorations in their gift shop. Then we stopped by Gordon's Skagit Farms and picked up some really unique pumpkins and some corn stalks for my front porch. We went to this farm last year and were impressed by the unique varieties of pumpkins they had so we made it a point to go back this year.
Today, I took Hannah to Bob's Corn, a small farm in Snohomish for some fun outdoor events. We visited all the animals, took a hayride down to a 10 acre corn maze which we decided we could defeat in no time. Ha. Were we ever wrong. It took us an hour and a half in the blazing sun, lost among the corn to finally find our way out! And that was WITH a map. We finally attached ourselves to a friendly family of four and between all of us we were able to figure it out. Exhausted after our corn maze travails, and just like little mice, we wanted our cheese at the end so we got hot dogs and kettle corn before going pumpkin picking and choosing. All in all a great fall day.
More surgery is coming my way in November so I am trying to get done as much as possible before then. This surgery will be a spinal surgery in which they are going to temporarily kill the nerves that lead from my pancreas to my spine so that even if I am in pain, I will not feel it. I am very hopeful that this will finally give me some long term relief and the doctor feels confident that this surgery will be successful. So the next few weeks will be filled with getting the farm and the animals ready for mom to have some down time before the holidays set in. We hope everyone has been out enjoying this incredible weather and partaking in all the activities this time of the year brings.
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