I’m craving hot dogs. I’m not sure why that is. Just had hot dogs over the 4th of July holiday, so what’s the big deal? Who knows. Maybe it’s just the summer weather that has me in the mood for a cookout or something. Last week we were in some of the cooler temps of monsoon season, this week – as we have mostly sunny skies again – it’s been heating up. Because it’s monsoon time, the humidity has been pretty high, though lower today than normal, it is still well over 35% and at 95°, that makes for some mighty sweaty weather about now. Maybe it’s the salt in the hot dogs that I want. Along with the temps, the other things heatin’ up are the projects we’ve got going. Thought I’d give a quick run down.

This morning, after pulling tumble weeds for the goats, weed wacking the driveway green zones, and cleaning out the Banty tractor of all it’s damp hay,  Sue spent some time creating the wells for the Chestnut trees. We have around 13 Chestnuts and a couple of other fruit trees we’ll be putting out in the orchard, we’ll really be working on that in earnest in the coming weeks.  Sue has begun to remove the rocks and shape the wells of the trees so they’ll collect as much rain as possible. She has already dug trenches to bury the black line and tomorrow I’ll begin installing the emitters and testing the output. I’m hoping that will only take me a couple of hours to get done, but it seems my estimates are generally off. So, at the very least, we should be able to start planting, a couple a day, by next Monday. We’re going take a trip up the mountain with my Sony DSLR and the long lens and take some photos of the orchard, from above, before, during and after planting. We want to do that in general each year anyway, so we can see the progress of the property as we re-tree and work on building up the soil, recharging our water and, in general – improving the land. It’s exciting to think about how it will change over the years. Anyway, this is our biggest current project.

Other things in the works are: moving the youngest Red Rangers out to their tractor. Sue has the tractor finished and ready to move, so we’ll be placing that out in their newly fenced in area in the next couple of days. We’ve been talking about moving the Four Hens and Vicente into the goat area, and that may happen in a week or so as well. I already talked about Broody Hen #3. We moved her out of the Banty Tractor and into the broody hen staging area.  She seems quite happy in her little bucket nesting box. She’s now sitting on 5 Cochin Bantum eggs. We don’t know if they are all her eggs, or if they are a compilation of several hens, so it will be fun to see who pecks out of these eggs. We’ll have to try a bit harder to break these guys of their broodiness earlier.  Or give them other eggs to be hatching. Not much call for people wanting Banty eggs, I tell ya. There’s always something going on here and we love sharing our stories with you. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer them for you. If you are in the area, passing through to other states in the south, or just want to come and visit… we welcome you to do that! Kids are welcome here – we’ll just put them to work! We have a couple of return visitors tomorrow; they’re coming to see the chicks! We don’t always have chicks, so now is a great time to take a field trip. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

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Today’s Weather: Well, we’ve touched on this a bit already. It is warm. Partly cloudy. Two more days of sunshine in the forecast and then a few days of rain and thunderstorms. We did have a few minutes of fat drops this afternoon, but nothing that registered as significant. Currently, 5:49 p.m., we’re at 92° – overnight low will be around 66°.

Egg Report: Tuesday – zero goose, zero duck, 28 chicken.  Wednesday – zero goose, 1 duck, 27 chicken.  I think we’re seeing the median here. I remember days when we were excited to get 12, and then the days we were getting over 40! The flux is amazing.

15 Seconds of Cuteness: Here ya go, just in case you need a mid week lift.