Random Bits

If I ask you to look at the above photo and pick out the turkey egg, which would you choose? Probably not the tiny one on the far right, but believe it or not that midgit showed up in the turkey pen the other day. All the rest in the photo are average run of the mill brown chicken eggs. Haven't really researched what causes that; since then they have laid 2 perfectly normal looking eggs in the nest. Hate to crack it open to find out what's in it, as its such a neat size, would be fun to joke that we have a hen that lays "bantam" turkey eggs. We're doubting that there is a yolk, probably just white, maybe it was just the result of a turkey oviduct malfunction.


Over the weekend, we did some around the farm spring cleaning . . . putting stuff away, getting equipment ready in preparation for baby poultry, and transplanting peppers and tomatoes from starter kits into pots. Part of putting stuff away was working at salvaging (i.e. pulling nails and cutting off rotton parts) some lumber that was removed from our house when the new roof got put on. I didn't really thing that most of it looked that old, until I started to notice that the garage floor was littered with these:

 



















The old kind of hand cut nails. Wish the 12" wide poplar boards Ryan pulled them out of could talk. And even though parts of the boards had water damage or were split beyond use, we saved enough to be useful in some little project down the line. Saves money, and in a tiny, tiny way preserves a piece of local history.

Now living in the garage, anxiously awaiting their debut in the garden are the tomato and pepper plants. All of these guys got potted out of seed starting packs into these little pots, where hopefully they will only live a couple of weeks. They are really getting too big for the grow light, and will get spindly on us if we can't get them in the ground soon. We planted them too early for this late, wet spring.

The sunshine reflecting off this flower this morning caught my eye. Strawberry blooms finally! I will have to go back in the farm journal and count how many weeks until strawberries now.


And just when I think that barn cats might be somewhat more industrious than the well fed house-dwellers . . . I find them sprawled/snuggled on the hay in the hay shed in the middle of the day, when there's plenty of work to be done like catching mice, moles, etc.