Hayes, Chooj and I arrived to a bushy 4 Feathers Farm Friday night. In jest, I said,"That gardener sure is lousy!" I was afraid to walk anywhere!
Fat Boy showed up Saturday morning. We thought he was gone for good but he lounged on the porch and let us pet him. He's not too feral then. It was just two summers ago that he was letting his fellow kittens nurse him. Weird. Weird, weird, weird.
My neighbor Bruce came to help me load farm gates and other stuff from the shed that we need at the Kentucky homestead. He told me Hohenwald had a bank robbery and it was "SO inside job!" What excitement! The robber lightend our local bank of $370,000.
Our phoebe turned her babies out and is sitting on five new eggs. We disturbed her terribly and I know she's glad we left.
Our rainwater catch is working great. Our cistern has more than 400 gallons of water in it!
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Phoebe feeding babies
April 27, 2008
We worked hard this weekend! It took us 30 minutes to get out of the parking lot Thursday evening (“I forgot the keys.” “I forgot the fuel filter.”) and we arrived at the farm six hours later to hear the whippoorwills. I just love hearing them sing. Alex sat outside to read a bit and listened to a lone coyote hunting close by. He surmises it was after our cats.
The first thing we did Friday was check on our bird family nesting on the air conditioner. Sure enough, four babies had hatched and we watched them all weekend as the parents fed them moths and other various bugs. Upon our return home, we discovered this is a family of eastern phoebes.
Alex tilled a couple of our neighbors’ gardens and I tried to weed wack until it broke. After that I took down fencing, pulled weeds, hung my painted windows and such until I noticed a brilliantly scarlet-colored bird. I called my friend Bernadette in Georgia to ask what other kind of red bird is around besides a cardinal. Turns out it was a summer tanager and it flew around all weekend so it must have a nest. Alex noticed bluebirds in one of our boxes too.
An early morning thunderstorm woke me Saturday and I listened to upland chorus frogs sing it in. It was a good thing we harvested frog eggs on our last visit since the remaining tadpoles were fighting for survival in one small mud puddle. Our tadpoles are doing swimmingly well on the porch.
We tilled around the kids’ playset, scraped the driveway and Alex bushhogged the pasture. On our way to town, I spotted a good-sized snapping turtle so we turned around and all got out to investigate. Alex let it bite at his boot (with his toes curled in) and it was determined to beat up Alex so we eventually left it alone and went on to lunch.
We missed our opportunity to meet with the bulldozer guy so after visiting briefly with our neighbors, we packed up and got on the road Saturday night.
Hayes and I hung our heads out the windows and said goodbye to everything: “Goodbye, house. Goodbye, cats. Goodbye, trees. Goodbye, goodbye.”
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