Everything seems to be a real battle this year. The weather is the worst, cold and wet. The orchard garden is still too wet to plant anything. Things that I seeded a couple of months ago in the garden close to the house, came up, and then did nothing. I just reseeded arugula, salad greens and spinach. The chard needs reseeding too. The broad beans, or at least the ones that haven't been eaten off yet, are doing great. There's a big rabbit around that we see occasionally. I think that must be what's dining on the broad beans and the peas. I had long narrow pieces of gauzy fabric laid over them, but now they are too tall. The broad beans are disappearing again. I've already reseeded them once, and now I have more seeds to do it again.
At least the night temperatures now are closer to normal, but the daytime temperatures are more below normal than not. It keeps raining.
6:30 this evening I dashed off to the Otter Co-op to buy a roll of chicken wire, and then spent an hour out in the rain getting some posts pounded in and the wire up around peas, beans and the stuff I just reseeded.
I asked David if he was into rabbit hunting.
He said they are too cute.
I have seedlings in the greenhouse. The tomatoes are doing fine. The broccoli seedlings that I was too scared to put out because of the rabbit, are now being decimated by mice, I guess, that are getting into the greenhouse. They have also eaten some tiny lettuce seedlings off, and some of the zucchini seeds that were planted have been completely removed. Tonight I have those three flats balanced on the tops of tall buckets and pots. The only way the mice can get at them is to take a flying leap from the potting benches.
I wouldn't put it past them.
Mouse traps are in order I think.
The Abbotsford Farmers Market opens for the season tomorrow. Rain is forecast.
Spring is a write-off.
Roll on Summer!
Meredith that is, not me. I never get caught up. But yeah, Meredith is back from her wonderful trip to Europe, and is slowly picking away at her mass of photos and posting the best and a bit of a story to go along with them. So if you want a cheap tour of Europe, check out www.ofrosesandrain.blogspot.com.
The new hens have settled in quite well. Since they were older when they arrived than the bunch we got at the beginning of March, they were quite willing to step outside into a brave new world right away. They are still penned in just a portion of their field, but it won't be long before I open it right up.
They are creating their own dust bath holes. There's a whole line of them right under this gate. Maybe they're plotting their escape into the garden, or maybe they just want us to twist our ankles when we got through there in the dark.
At least this one had picked a spot way off in the corner, in a none ankle breaking spot.
After the first few days of dropping eggs all over the coop floor, they have now got with the program, and are laying them in the nest boxes. They figured that one out all on their own. Good thing, because I don't know how I would have actually taught them to do it, other than 'baiting' the boxes with a few well placed eggs. They haven't figured out how to get into two of the top boxes yet, but they will.
Well all but one hen have figured it out. Every day there is one egg laid in the top of the oyster shell feeder that is outside the coop. Can't you just picture that hen crossing her legs, waiting for us to open the door in the morning to let her out.
They are eating lots of grass, but aren't too sure about other foreign things. I threw some apple pieces in the field the other day, but mostly they are untouched.
Luna wasn't going to let them go to waste.
50 eggs from 54 hens.
Not too shabby
Waiting at the gate to head to the other coop.
And at the other coop we got 44 eggs from 46 hens.
Plus that tiny little mini egg.
Good thing the Abbotsford Market is starting on Saturday.
Today we went to an agility trial. Luna and Jake were each entered in 6 runs. I ended up running both dogs, as Larry has been having back issues for the last while. Generally his back has been improving, but we went to help set up for our club's flyball tournament yesterday, and things didn't go well for Larry and his back. The first thing was that he tripped over the handle of a wooden dolly that I had left down on the ground instead of flipping back upright. Then he thought that it would be okay to unroll the big rolls of rubber matting by pushing them with his foot, but I guess that wasn't the right thing to do either. So he decided that it didn't make any sense to try run on a dirt floor, in case he ended up jarring his back some more.
It did make it rather interesting for me. For the most part Luna and Jake ran in different rings. Sometimes it meant that I would have to go and walk the course for one of Luna's runs, but I had already walked Jake's course, but hadn't run him yet. In other words I had to keep two courses in my head, and might not run the older course until after the one I had just walked. Running dogs in agility is a bit similar to riding a horse over a jumping course, but I think it is harder. You and the horse are basically one entity, you go where the horse takes you. Well actually you are supposed to go where you direct the horse. Sometimes though the horse makes a sudden unexpected move, and the two of you part company. Been there, done that, not fun. At that point though, generally you don't have to worry much anymore which direction the course headed.
In agility, you have to remember the course that the dog has to take, and then you also have to remember your own 'course', which gets the dog to take it's course correctly. The path your course takes can be drastically different to the course the dog takes. Sometimes I had to remember Jake's course, and Luna's course, and also be studying the map for Jake's next course. Jake was just about the last dog in the ring in all of his classes. So I might run Jake, and then go to the other ring and run Luna. By the time I had come back in from the 'after the run, go outside and play fetch with the dog reward', the walk through for Jake's next course might be happening. If it was a class where I had to make up my own course ( Gamblers or Snooker), well I better have something figured out, so that knew what course to walk when I got out there.
What I'm trying to say with all this rambling is that my brain got a workout as well as my body. And I'm happy to say that both brain and body came through pretty well.
Out of the 12 runs, Jake ended up with two Q's (qualifying runs), and Luna with one. Not a very good percentage, but a few of the runs were pretty close. Jake had a nice Standard run, and a really nice Snooker run. Luna had an absolutely brilliant Gamblers run, her only clean run. She finished first in her group with the highest amount of points, and it went pretty well exactly as planned. Unfortunately Larry had left at that point to go to pick Meredith up from the airport, so it didn't get filmed. Too bad, I would have like to have seen that on video.
That run has moved Luna up into the Master's Gamblers class.
Meanwhile, Luna is still stuck in Starter's Jumpers. That is a pretty simple class, just jumps and tunnels. Being Starters, the course is relatively easy.
There is just the problem of that one bar.
One of these days.....
Oh, and the best part of the day really, was that Luna initiated quite a few on leash greetings with other dogs that were successful and didn't end with raised lips and a showing of teeth. Unfortunately because I was constantly in and out of the ring, I never had any treats on me to reward her, but the praise was lavish.
It just made me smile:) When I think of how snarky she used to be the beginning of last year when we were at a trial....wow, huge difference!
It is my sister Cathy's birthday today, the 28th that is. By the time she reads this, it will be the 29th. If I had sent her a birthday card, it probably wouldn't have got there until the 29th anyway, if I was lucky, or remembered to mail it soon enough. In fact it's already the 29th where Cathy lives, so I'm late no matter how you look at it.
Last year was the big Five Oh, so this year she must be, oh, about 29 I think.
So of course I had to drag out the old photo albums and see what I could find to maybe embarrass her a little bit.
The old photos aren't the best quality, and then they get worse with the scanning and the cropping.
I did find a lonely photo of Cathy's other official dog training stint. This is Tatoosh, a black lab from hunting lines. Can't remember if he failed as a hunter, or quite what the story was. He was going up to a ranch to start a new life, and she was getting him ready for it.
And by the time most people see this, the media will be full of photos of Will and Kate. Cathy can't upstage Kate and her wedding dress, but she can make a fashion statement of her own.
