Hey everyone, been gone for a while trying to get settled after moving. Still plenty to do, but not feeling quite so overwhelmed as before. I had a lot of reading to catch up on! Congrats to
@Shadrach for all the views, my condolences to
@no fly zone and
@ManueB for the passing of their birds.
There’s plenty I wanted to chime in on, but I managed to refrain except for one thing - the baggy pants. I’ll pay tax for reverting to an old off topic tax at the end.
I’ve been a teacher for over a decade now and have seen the baggy pants come and go, and most actually do wear a belt, surprisingly enough. Suspenders would be very, very uncool. If one needs to run, they’ll either hold onto their pants with one or both hands so as not to trip themselves. The swiveling way one has to walk to keep the pants up can lead to hip problems, but trust someone doing something ridiculous to look cool to ignore future health problems at all costs.
What I wanted to share was that in the US, anyway, the low baggy pants are a carryover from prison culture. Inmates have sexual urges and satisfy them in different ways - the lower your pants in a prison, the more an ‘invitation’ it is to other inmates. Most teenagers have no idea what it is that they are copying, they just see older, “cooler” people wearing clothes a certain way and mimic it.
My new house has precious little shade, which I am working to remedy, but it will take time for the trees and shrubs to provide adequate shade for my girls. For now, they have access to the underside of half my deck so they have ample shade in our mid-90 (~35 C) degree weather we have all summer. They love having more space to roam, and the grass has held up pretty well since they have the added space to spread out their scratching. My end goal is to have the chicken area planted with fruit trees with shrubs and herbs in their understory - a permaculture approach to an orchard. I also plan to seed a forage mix to compete with/replace the grass so they have better quality forage available also. I’m also planning to plant an area of the yard as a pollinator garden, as a lot of people have grass and non-flowering shrubs, so my bees have fewer options than the old place.
My neighbors thought the chicken coop was a shed, and we’re surprised to find out that such a large structure was for chickens. Lots of people have chickens here, and the extent to which they let their chickens out to forage varies a lot. My husband calls it the chicken palace, and while he isn’t much of a chicken person, he does understand that it’s important to give these hardworking girls a good space to live, and also that it’s important to me that these ladies have as much freedom as I can give them. He and my father in law did most of the building, while I was busily getting grass ripped up and planted into a garden.
Cordelia is recovering from an impacted crop, which I have never dealt with before but finally caught in to what was wrong when she kept in doing a funny head bob trying to readjust her crop. She hates being touched but I told her this morning that I’ll stop bothering her in a couple days when I know for sure that things aren’t backing up. The funny thing is she’ll come and hang out next to me if I’m just sitting in the grass, so at least she doesn’t view me as a complete enemy.
Tax:
1. Cordelia, the day I treated her impacted crop
2. Sophia, currently broody
in this heat!
3-7. Everyone enjoying the cooler evening temperatures
8. Garden is mostly thriving. Lots of composted manure from a local boarding stable to amend the heavy clay soil here.
. Only one survived from all the seeds I started inside ! They were thriving at first but got eaten up by some kind of bug. And the one and only borage blooming now really doesn't like the heavy wind we have here, so I had to tutor it. I also had a few that grew among the vegetables reseeding themselves spontaneously, but when we started restricting watering, they all died! But I'm not giving up, now I know in which spot of the garden it survived I'll plant more there next year 
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