Well I believe I know what the folks around here spent their stimulus money on: fireworks! Good grief. In addition to the daily evening fireworks for the past 30 days, last night the first were set off around 7:30 pm and intensified to more noise then the Battle of the Bulge and lasted until after midnight. Needless to say I got little sleep last night.
Oh, I hear you! With all the public fireworks displays cancelled, it was like a Baghdad war zone surrounding us last night. Everybody all up and down the street and across the river, competing with each other for the loudest bangs. The colorful decorative fireworks I can appreciate, but what is so patriotic about huge explosive booms in the middle of the day? Even our 14-y-old dog who's almost totally deaf heard those, and kept barking until the noise calmed down at around 2am. Our hens didn't like all that noise either, we've only collected 4 eggs in the past two days.
We got almost everything mowed and weed-whacked, around the house where it's publicly visible, as well as the field, except around the garden and coop. My buckwheat cover crop is coming up well in 2/3 of the garden (thanks to a suggestion from a gardener here) so I hoed the whole garden, pulled up the biggest weeds in the buckwheat area and every weed in the rest, then and planted red cabbage and basil there (in between the dahlias that are sprouting) and loofah underneath the trellis. Risky to be planting at this late date, but I ordered some row covers that can hopefully extend the growing season - we'll see what happens. Lots of overtime at work reduced my gardening time, but sauerkraut and pesto is all I really need for this year, I have lots of beans, peas, butternut, pumpkin and tomato sauce canned or frozen.
Our one hen Creamy who was getting picked on until she was bloody, we put in the enclosed but only partially finished big pen a couple weeks ago, so she could heal. Loki the rooster was acting like he wanted to breed her, but once he caught her he would savage her without even breeding, and the boss hen would join in with pecking. So now that poor Creamy has had a couple weeks away from the flock and is totally healed and fluffy, we put her back with the other hens and put the rooster into the big pen by himself.
So far so good, all the hens are getting along and Creamy is part of the flock. Hopefully, a couple weeks in "rooster jail" will teach Loki to be a better protector. If not, he's destined for freezer camp.
My hope is that once we have the big pen complete and can let them all out there, we won't have any more issues.
They really climb that trellis well. I really can't be too mad they are huge producers even packed in as tight as they are since they were supposed to be climbing:
