Spring Fever

The ducklings have all been sold! I felt bad for poor Deedee - sitting on that nest for 35 days and then only a week with her ducklings! We are at maximum duck capacity, though, and it only seemed to take them disappearing out of hearing range before she was back to normal. It was so easy to sell these ducklings compared to Victoria's back in September. I guess spring is when everyone is acquiring new animals. 

Give a duck a worm and suddenly...

This is why my visions of a beautiful garden bed along the side of the house will never amount to anything. Prime dust bathing location...

Zoey was keeping an eye on a bunch of turkey vultures circling wayyyy overhead. Good farm dog.

They have such a good life! 

(...please ignore the fatness of a certain hairy collie)

Fat because it's buzzy-things season and he prefers to hide inside!

Bad photo, but Abby is loving the new farm sport of dock diving!

I love watching all the perennials come back up. I finally did a good job last year of picking the right combination of shade tolerant plants for this spot!

For some reason, our tomato seedlings really haven't done well this year. We've barely had any even germinate! We can't figure out why, since this has never happened before. Instead of selling them this year, we're going to end up having to buy them!

I went in to check the sheep water and was faced with this...

Check out this guy's funny profile! He looks like he's half bull.

Deedee the sneaky duck

So, Deedee the duck disappeared for the last 35 days or so. She appeared at some point during each day to eat and to relieve herself of a giant, horrible, stinky poop (like, seriously - those poops landed a good foot away from her with sheer propulsion). About 15 days in, I managed to follow her...as she hopped over our fence, into the neighbours yard and under their woodshed. I kept putting off going to the neighbours' house and digging around under their woodshed to find her....so I can't really blame anyone but myself for what I came home to yesterday!

Oh, Deedee, you sneaky girl, you! 8 ducklings.

This is where they were when I got home. Enjoying their first mud bath!

Basically the reason for having a pond ;)

I've sold two of them, and hopefully will sell the rest! These funny tiny ducklings pop through the duck house fencing even when their mom is locked in - so then swim around the pond all on their own while she frantically calls them back! 

Abby doing her due diligence of emptying the duck house of all possible future ducklings. She crawls in and retrieves those eggs without breaking them! Ryan got the egg-retrieval job for all of 1 egg (said egg never made it out of the duck house). Zoey still needs egg retrieval training.

I love my Abby.

And to finish, a fuzzy pile of cute!

Summer already?

My friend Ffion has been visiting for the last few weeks and we've been so busy showing her the best of the island and working on farm projects that I haven't been taking photos! 

A few days ago we went on a mini road trip that included this beautiful lake stop:

The last week has been amazing weather - tank tops and shorts already! Last night we had bbq'd pork while Pippa weed whacked. We are still debating whether she is pregnant. Sometimes she looks big...and other times she doesn't at all. She's a mystery, that Pipsqueak!

The grass is starting to take off and we are just at that tenuous time between running completely out of hay for the sheep and having enough grass that they don't need any hay. Today was the first day they didn't have any hay at all (the last week or so they've had maybe 4 flakes between the 10 of them, and lots of grazing). If we could leave them down on the neighbour's field, they certainly wouldn't need any hay - but they continually end up on the neighbour's lawn and right by the road! They go through the crappy barbed wire fence easily. Today we finally set up some of our electro-netting. We shall see if that contains them...

Today Ffion and I revamped the deck! It is a bug-free oasis (and the netting can be tied up during the day).