Before and After

The front yard is done! 

Before:

After:

We bought the little bedding plants, lavender and rosemary and our landlord got us tulip bulbs, the rhododendron and two hydrangeas. 

We finally slowed down our egg eating enough to collect a full dozen! 

(friends and family in Vancouver - can you please keep your old egg cartons for us?)

Abby and Ryan have been coming into the chicken yard with us in the morning to help check for eggs. They're really good with the chickens - they just walk around them and ignore them, and the chickens don't seem to care about the dogs. 

The naughtier of these two likes to jump up into the hutch-coop and squeeze through the tiny hole into the nest boxes to sniff around when we aren't looking....guess which one that is...

The chickens haven't escaped since we blocked off the hole they were jumping through, so no need for wing clipping. Now when we walk in there they all run to us looking for worms and usually they let us touch them and pick them up.

Eggciting Gardening

Ok that was a pretty bad pun...but we did have some chicken help the other day in the front garden, no yolk. We were digging out all of the weeds and realized that the chickens could help us move the soil around a bit (and it was full of worms and other juicy bugs). 

We brought Speckles, Mother Clucker, Denise and Dorothy out one at a time on a rotating garden helper schedule. They were pretty content scratching around for bugs.

 We found this guy (I think it's a Western Redback Salamander) before the chickens got him.

Yesterday we went and checked out a livestock auction (no, we didn't come back with any more animals). We never even made it to the livestock part of the day! It took them 3+ hours to get through the farm equipment so we ended up leaving before they started with the animals. We did get to see all the animals in the barn - the lambs were tiny and adorable. Maybe it's a good thing we left when we did...

We woke up this morning to a strange scene - the farm gate was open, the landlord's truck was gone and there was a burn mark in the grass outside the greenhouse with an empty, blackened garbage can next to it. It turns out that our landlord woke up in the middle of the night and realized it was frosty out so he drove over to the farm to try and heat the greenhouse up. He attached a pipe to the heat vent of his truck and ran it into the greenhouse, and he lit a fire in the can outside the door and used a fan to blow the heat in. The seedlings all seem fine today (his and ours) - the thermometers apparently read -1 degree outside and 3 degrees inside at around 4am. The fantastic guard dogs never even woke up in the night...