Cold day

Four eggs today – three big chicken eggs and another of those small pinky-brown ones. It's the guineas, bless their little brown-egg-laying hearts. The chickens will lay year 'round, or close to it, but the guineas lay for only about six months. So we'll have plenty of eggs for the next six months!

I've been working on installing the central vacuum. Miserable job. I messed with fiberglass insulation, pondered the attic, cut holes in sheetrock, and tapped into a GFCI receptacle for power. Now neither the old outlet or the new one works. Tomorrow I troubleshoot. I'm done for today.

It's chilly, grey and windy out. C. planted more sunchokes.

Egg mystery

So what's up with these? The big one is from Roz. She lays a lovely brown egg every day lately. Did she have too much for one egg, and make a little extra one?

The other chickens lay white eggs. The guineas lay small white eggs – at least last year's guinea girls, the Connies, did.

It's a mystery. It was delicious, though.

Adventures in plumbing

That's the hole to the new crawl space there, below. The new part of the building is two classrooms built onto the south end of school in 1955. That crawl space is infinitely more pleasant than the old one. There's even enough headroom to crawl!

So I was down there last week, trying to get the garden water working. I could see that the fitting I'd put on last year had frozen and busted. I'd tapped into the copper waterline with a sharkbite fitting – those suckers are expensive but so easy to use! – and the ice had blown the plastic parts of the fitting into bits. OK. So I buy another ($12), this time a T so I can add another spigot out toward the new trees. Fine. Pop it in, add the new PEX line, wallow into the old crawl space and turn it on.

By the sound you can tell it's leaking like crazy somewhere along the line. Fine. I wallow out of there, back into the new crawl space, and look for a big wet spot. (I suppose the leak might have been in the old crawl space, but it's so much easier to look in the roomy new one.) Found it. A split in the copper line back by the foundation between the two parts of the building. I've already cut into my roll of blue PEX for the other lines, so there isn't enough to replace this one. I find a length of CPVC (with a fitting!) and glue it up and make it work.

OK. Wallow back into the old crawl space. Turn the line on. Sounds good. Wallow out, look in the other crawl space for leaks – everything looks fine. Try the spigots – the "frost-proof" one I put in last year has a big split in it and leaks like crazy when I turn it on.

This is the third leak on this one line. I just want to be able to water the damn garden. If I have to drag myself on my belly, with my elbows, through the fine dust and dark and asbestos of the old crawl space again, there will be ugly cussing and possibly the pitching of objects. I'll be mean to my dogs. It'll be bad.

So I get a wad of that plumber's epoxy putty stuff, knead it up and slap it on the split. There are a couple of pinhole leaks, but it's mostly OK. I go inside, take off my disgusting crawl-space clothes, and have dinner. That was a simple little job that should have taken a half hour, but instead sucked up a whole evening. And yes, I did turn the line off last fall! Have to figure out a way to drain that line next time. Feh.

Access to the new crawl space on the south porch.

The new crawl space, looking west. Look at that head room!

Looking east. Yes, that's asbestos on

 the white pipes, but it's in great shape, no worries.

Smokey meets Henley

Smokey the rabbit spend the day outside Sunday. It was lovely out, about 60 degrees and sunny. I was working on rock cages, so Smokey and I hung out on the south side of the house. Henley, the boss hen, was fascinated. The guineas were interested for about 30 seconds. That's JnE there, the white one, with Mrs. Davis. He's been recently deposed by some young guinea male, and after spending some days despondent and moody, has been wooing Mrs. D., his old girlfriend. He still gets bullied by the young guy.

Planting trees and seeds

Planted the last of the Soil Conservation District trees yesterday – four caragana and six American filberts. They're small, about 18 inches tall, and bare root. They were sold in groups of five, and those nice folks threw in a couple of extras (I might have grumbled about that as I dug holes). The caraganas – Siberian pea shrubs – went in around the chicken yard and in a group of four to the south of the building as a wind break and a road-noise buffer. Caraganas are thorny 10-foot-tall shrubs that produce pea-like pods that chickens and people can eat, but deer don't especially like (that's what the catalog said, anyway). We planted three last year (two survived) along the stone wall below the school. Last year's crab apple is doing fine, despite being pruned by the long-necked alpaca. I'm hoping the old wisteria survived the sheep. Looks like the raspberries didn't.

C. continues to plant stuff in the garden and dig new beds. I need to get some more terraces built. If I get gabions (wire cages for rocks) in place, she'll fill them with rocks as she digs. If I don't, she'll haul the rocks out of the garden, and use boards or wine bottles for terrace walls. Gardening waits not for procrastinators.

She's planted sunchokes (we need more for seed!), most of the 13 pounds of seed potatoes, peas, greens (we're trying a new one, Good King Henry, this year), some cabbage starts, lots of garlic... and probably more. Varieties of spuds: four pounds Viking red and Kennebec; two pounds Yukon gold, Burbank russet and Dakota pearl. We'd like to grow enough vegetables for us and all the animals for a whole year, and that's a lot. Two flats of tomato seedlings are a couple of inches tall under lights in the dining room. Some 4-inch-tall peppers are in the greenhouse.

We've moved the big animals out of the pasture next to the garden, and over toward the barn and the thickets. The sheep are a bit pissed about it. They like to see what we are up to, and lobby for grain and weeds and thinnings. They can still do that, but at a distance. They did a good job of chomping the knapweed and quack grass and spreading marbles of manure across it, and now it'll be more garden and a small orchard.

Richard and Em are coming up today with the Ancestral Rototiller to help expand the garden.

April at school

Now that the weather is warm and the grass is greening up, the guineas spend their days foraging. The polka-dot girl at upper right is on guard duty, buckWHEATing her "all is well" call. Everybody else skulks around eyeing the ground for bugs or grain. That's Mrs. Davis, the dark one at middle left, and J&E, the white one, just above her. They do this all around the school, up the hill, down at the neighbor's place, on the roof. They'd like to do it inside while watching television. Too bad.

C. gives them fresh water in the afternoons, and collects feathers and eggs (I feed and water them in the morning before work). Yesterday she found this in the bird house. With all those feathers all over, she expected to find murdered (or at least naked) birds, but the place was empty. She concluded that they'd had a pillow fight.

Garden notes
C. planted a bunch of garlic from the ancestral home, and worked on prepping one of the north beds for greens. And she "chitted" some of the seed spuds (I think that's what you call cutting them up, two or three eyes per piece, in preparation for planting). They have to cure for a few days before they go in the ground. She put a bunch of cabbage seedlings in ground in the little hoop house.The tomato plants are mostly up in their two flats in the kitchen window.

What the heck did I do all day? Oh, yeah, I coughed and coughed from last week's goat-combing fest. And I worked on fencing around the barn, to give the big animals some new grass and bushes to gnaw. And I drug sled loads of alpaca poo from the barn to the garden. And I found a dead cat behind the barn. That's about it.

Tonight I made brownies, because I could. I have opposable thumbs – why not use them for good? The secret to making good brownies is to use multiple kinds of chocolate. Mine have unsweetened baking chocolate bars, cocoa powder and chocolate chips. Pecans, too. Mmm.

I know what I'm doing this weekend

So Em, Autumn and I dug up a bunch of Jerusalem artichokes and garlic from the ancestral home yesterday after work. And I bought 11 pounds of seed potatoes and five American hazelnut shrubs and five siberian pea shrubs today.

I do love to buy plants and seeds. But then there are consequences.

The sheep shearing is on hold. The people we got the girls from said they wait until the weather is warm at night before they shear. So we'll hold the sheep-wrestling event later in the month.