Weekend Home Happenings

Another weekend is wrapping up, and thankfully it has not contained the wild weather of last week! Instead, we have had two perfect days to get some things done around the house and yard. Some weeks, the chores just build up and rolled over to the next week, especially the outside chores, so it is nice to be able to tick things off the list.

The storms this week left us with leaves and twigs and debris all over our yard, which meant we had lots of raking to do. Raking half an acre is hard work! The bright side is, it gives us good leaf matter for the compost bays.

With the rest of it, we will lay out some new garden beds and leave them until the leaf matter breaks down a bit, ready for Autumn planting.

We have been nurturing tomato seedlings, quite a few heirloom varieties of them, and they were ready for planting this weekend so we popped them into the spaces in our existing beds, then we prepped one of the backyard beds that previously had daisies in them and planted out some leafy greens and herbs. I plan on replacing the daisies we have ripped out with other kinds of flowering bushes to keep our bird and bee life active in the garden.... but I can't stand daisies when they aren't flowering! We will probably plant out more lavender, rosemary and bottle brushes.

Our Plymouth Rock mama and her eleven babies are rapidly outgrowing their little coop and as the weather warms up they will need more space to make their dust baths to cool down, so it was time to extend their pen. Also, right near their pen are two apricot trees, just young ones, and the early ripener was picked clean by the 28s (parrots), so we wanted to protect the late ripening tree from the same fate. We spent most of today building a large run for the chooks and within that, closing off the young tree with chicken wire to keep it covered. The hen and her babies are most grateful to be able to stretch their wings and scratch and bathe!

Our blueberries are ripening beautifully on the bush, and I can't wait to pick them off and make myself a smoothie!

The quails are laying, we think we have at least four girls on the lay so far. They really are the most beautiful eggs! I am tempted to sell them off at a premium as they are sought after by fancy restaurants, but I think we will just eat them!

We finished drying our garlic crop out, and picked out the biggest ones to save as seed for next planting season, then braided the rest. This should keep us in garlic for a long time, and they really are the most beautiful, fat, fragrant garlic heads!

The next door neighbour invited us over to raid her overstocked, bursting-with-fruit apricot tree today as well. We came away with a bucketful AND a bagful, and will make jam, sauce, liqueur and bottled apricots for the year to come. Her peach trees are ripening now and she would like us to pick them before the parrots get to them too. Feels like Christmas!

Lastly, the girls had a lovely time yesterday going for a pony ride on our good friend's old pony. Miya was very wary to begin with, but once Miss Eden blazed the way, she suddenly found her courage!

We hope your weekend was as enjoyable as ours!