Going back a ways, the girls returned from a marvelous time in PA last Tuesday. Since then we have gotten to navigate the first virus going through our household since before the pandemic. I had nearly forgotten what a pain it was and how long it takes it to make its way through all of us. Thankfully it's been just a minor cold, but did make for a flurry of rescheduling and changing up our way of being with people for awhile. I was very glad for my foresight in going over to help with/hold Luca the day the kids came home. My arms are kinda aching for it again, but we'll wait until our sniffles and coughs have departed! The colds haven't really changed up the daily routines too much other than tiredness setting in maybe sooner than would normally be the case. That said, it is possible that it was partly what made our most recent family work day feel a bit more tedious and not quite as free flowing as some in the recent past. OR it could be that our last string of family work was a 3 day stretch and this was a 1 day blitz that probably had about as much work as could have fit into closer to 3 days. Sigh! We just kinda kept adding to the wish list. So hopefully we'll get another one on the calendar soon, but that work day did crash into nightfall and then spilled over into Easter in a way we hadn't wished for. So it goes sometimes...
Some of the big tasks of the day included the following:
Jason got into weeding and prepping the delicata patch in the side garden. He mostly ended up working on this solo except for a little help with rock pick up towards the end. I keep marveling how the rocks we are picking out of the gardens are getting smaller and smaller the more years we do it!
The girls and I started unloading the compost chicken coop and the duck coop. All the litter was being placed above the duff in one of the compost circles for distribution this fall. We filled it up, plus some to spare for the currant bed project (see below). Alida and Terah were really inspired to help early on and then tired of it. Kali joined a bit later and then stuck with it until the end. There was some urgency for this project since the mama hens with their 25-30 chicks each in the brooder pens were needing to get moved down to the floor. The chicks were getting more active and the mamas were eager for more space and something to scratch at!
I had fun watching them as I worked in the coop. SO cute! They weren't sure about us being in there for so long with them.
At one point the one mama decided to brood her chicks out on the wire and I was getting a kick out of all the feet on the underside of the pen!
Before going back to reporting on the gardens, I also enjoyed taking occasional breaks to take grass/weeds to the chicks in the red coop. They are growing so fast. There's a great peep hole in the coop so I can throw in treats for them and then watch them from the outside, so they don't feel so skittish. Sometimes one will come up to the hole and look at me through it!
Somewhere in the mix of the morning/early afternoon, we got all the crates off the grain crops in the pig paddocks and the dry land garden. I had some good help AND a helper that was done helping and who instead wanted to sit in the crates and impede progress!
It became clear that a break and some nourishment was in order so I believe that was the break where we enjoyed ice cream cones under the pine trees (why we have a whole lot of Turkey Hill ice cream that I purchased would have to be the subject of a whole different post!!).
It seems every time we stop and gather somewhere, Sneaker (my favorite chicken) comes and finds us. She certainly did at our breaks that day. A bit later, after another stint of project progress, we enjoyed a picnic with the first red buds in our spinach salads!
With the coops cleaned out, we got the mamas and chicks situated on the floor of the coop in separate cages. The chicks were running around exploring in no time. The other big projects of the day were prepping the seed cage for planting (getting trellises set up and final weeding on the beds) and then working on shaping and prepping a new bed in the root patch for a fall planting of currants. After Jason helped with the bed shaping and getting a load of wood chips, he went off to the seed cage and the girls and I worked on the root patch bed. We did a bit of weeding and then put down feed sacks and covered them with wood chips. It was very satisfying, visibly obvious progress. And this was also the point at which the day was coming to a close but not the projects (Jason and I did a quick regroup and decided what point to get to and what would wait for another time).
Jason and Kali went over to get another load of wood chips while I did the evening chores and Alida and Terah got a fire going (there is no way the evening fire would have happened if we didn't have children who could now independently take on tasks like that!). I will have to take it as a small sign of progress that we went ahead with our plan to hang out by the fire that evening even with the lingering projects waiting for us to wrap up the next day, and on a future family work day. It was a gorgeous evening with a full moon rising. The toasted cheese sandwiches and s'mores over the fire were about as enjoyable as could be with the weariness of our bodies by that point in the day!
I finished up the mulching the next morning and Jason got the seed cage planted. I think both Jason and I were pretty ready to sack out by that point but we had some excited kiddos and an Easter egg hunt and egg decorating in our future! So the afternoon had some egg hunting, some egg painting, some baby adoring (from a distance), some lollipop licking, and some hang out time in the gorgeous cool crisp spring air.
And now I think my house cleaning help might be about ready to help, so I better shift my attention to washing spinach, bringing in laundry, cleaning and evening chores. Today is Jason's first day back working away from home after the big spring push here on the farm. I'm eager for the house to not be in the state it is in for his arrival home.
I will just close by saying that one of the outgrowths of some of my journaling time last weekend (besides a good amount of tears) was a realization that I have struggled for some time now with truly treasuring this beautiful place where we live - often being more focused on and overwhelmed by the relentless lists of tasks that I can never seem to get to no matter how hard I try. There's no quick fix for this, but I'm trying to pay closer attention and trying to slow down and breath and savor the gifts that this little piece of earth so generously offers to me every day. Even if sometimes I feel so very undeserving of those gifts. There's lots more that could be said, but maybe at another time and probably in a non-scrapbook format...
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