Busy Times

I have been neglecting this thing pretty badly for the last month or so. To damned many things going on and not enough time in the day to get it all done! Or so it seems.

Well lets see, a few weeks ago it was a rush to get the chicken coop done in time for the new arrivals. Went down to Brooklyn CT two weeks ago today and picked up 36, 18 week old RI Red chickens. After acclimating themselves to the new digs, they have rewarded me with my first dozen eggs over the last three days. Well, actually only 24 of them have been on watch. The other 12 went to a friend for whom I picked them up!

In the mean time, a couple of the older grand kids wigged me to the point of distraction so I up and ordered for them, from McMurray hatchery in Iowa,4 Red Frizzle Cochin's and 4 Buff Cochin's along with 18 Cornish X Rocks. These, the X Rocks are the birds that generously donate their used body parts to the deli counter down at the BIG. You know, those whole legs that look like they came off of a 50 lb turkey? Anyway we have been in the throes of raising these little cuties for one week today. They showed up as one day old's in the USP Office last Monday. The little Cochin's race around the pen like NASCAR drivers gone crazy! You know, go fast, turn left? Those X Rocks just sit in front of the feeder, literally SIT with their heads stuck in it and munch pretty much continuously! Once in a while time out for a drink of the special kick-a-poo juice I'm feeding them. In ten weeks or so they go into the freezer to show up on the table for Saturday night, or Sunday dinners!

The garden has finally dried out in enough places for the planting of selected things to go to ground. Onions and three kinds of spuds are in and plant tops are up about six inches. Just hilled them all up today for the next to last time. Peas, turnips, 4 kinds of lettuce, beets, carrots,tomatoes and peppers are all in and up and doing well, but only after I got halfway smart and wrapped some floating row cover around the peppers and tomatoes as they were all getting wind whipped pretty severely. Put in the pole beans yesterday along with 4 hills of Zucchini, and two of yellow crooknecks.(I don't like those little yellow bastards but Mama-san does so-oo-oo!) A nice big row of Cilantro and one of Cumin for all those Latino dinners we should be getting used to. Read about a trick for the tomatoes I hadn't heard of before. Drop a handful of crushed up fine egg shells in the bottom of the hole first and then the plant. It stops the blossom end rot for the most part because it, the end rot, is caused by calcium deficiency.

Spent about a week this winter sandblasting and painting my old 35 years, Kemp Hammer mill Shredder to get it ready for another 35 yrs of use. Well one hour into the first usage, ENGINE SEIZURE! It broke a ring and that was the end of that! New replacement engine came to about $300!! That was about half the cost of the shredder all those years ago. Can't complain though, it has been well used in the intervening time!

What else is going on? All kinds of crap from the O man that I cannot deal with anymore! I'll just leave it up too the future generations to see if they can ever recover from the damage that this one individual is doing to this country. Oh yeah, please don't forget about Petrified Pelosi's help and lies!

And on the local level, I see that we have two much more qualified personnel looking out for our welfare than the biologists etc. from the EPA! Not that I am very much enamoured of that particular group, but one would tend to think that if so august a body should declare a particular herbicide to be safe when used as directed, then who are the locals with somewhat less ability to do the studies that preceded the EPA's declaration, to tell us that they are extremely dangerous to us all and prohibit the use of same? Smacks of demagoguery no?

I guess this is enough to get a few folks started on the usual round of put downs, so I'll be down in the cellar, "girding my loins" as it were to be ready to forestall all the slings and arrows. Actually I'm going to load a couple hundred rounds of super hot .45 ACP!!