A Busy And Blessed Easter Weekend!

Friday started the weekend with a trip up north to Legg's Peafowl Farm.  What a glorious morning for a drive.  I picked up Steve's birthday present, a female Indigo Blue Peahen, just a year old, to be a bride for our Peekachoo!  Peekachoo was not too please to be put in a pen with anyone, female or not.  But their honeymoon suite that Steve built is 20 feet by 12 feet for their outside area, which is plenty for a few months.  They need to stay together during the spring and early summer, as this is the mating season and the female would take off looking for a male to mate with.  Peekachoo will be old enough to mate with her next year.  Right now we have to keep the female accustomed to us and our farm.  By the end of July she will be able to cruise the grounds with Peekachoo.  The two peafowl from next door come to visit everyday.  Their female is quite interested in looking at the birds in their pen and the male just struts around and calls out constantly. Its pretty noisy!

The weather is now fabulous, 50's at night and 70's during the day.  I have begun to plant and over the weekend, I picked my first pound of asparagus from the garden.  The strawberry plants took a beating with the drought but they are slowly coming back.  I see a few blooms starting already.
The cold frame box is yielding spinach as well.  I picked my first 1/2 pound yesterday.

While Steve was building the peafowls honeymoon pen, I was taking care of my least favorite chore, cleaning out the chicken coop.  After such a long and cold winter that coop was really full of poop!  4 hours of shoveling and another hour of placing new hay, it now is beautiful and the girls are very happy.  We are getting 7 to 10 eggs a day from our 11 hens.  That's great considering two of the hens are over 3 years old and don't lay very often anymore.

The pear trees are in full bloom and they look great!  Bees are buzzing and the tiny green shoots of plants are looking good.  Monday after Easter, we had about an inch of rain, which helped fill the pond a bit more.  We need another 6 inches or rain, and  hopefully we'll get enough this spring to really fill the pond to keep it from drying out in the summer.

Since Derek is a converted Jew, we made matzo ball soup, with Spinach & diced chicken in the matzo balls, swimming in a saffron onion broth.  We used the fresh spinach and it was fabulous.
It has become one of our Easter traditions along with Lamb Roast and carrot & sweet potatoes roasted with a molasses & bourbon glaze.  Yummy!

Half way through April and its still cold!

Winter just doesn't want to go away.  We are teased with a few nice warm days of 60 degrees or more then Winter pops up again with 30 degree mornings and wind that just won't quit.
I am longing for a nice long growing season, but this year I have not even gotten my onions and potatoes in the ground yet.  My hoop house, which was not covered for winter yet, has 4 large grow boxes.  There I have tiny starts of mustard greens, spinach, a few turnips, a few cauliflower,  lettuce, beets and spigarella (rapa broccoli greens) and some garlic from the fall planting.  So far they have survived two frosts that recently occurred.
The pear trees and apple trees have beautiful blooms this year.  We are happy to see the abundance of blooms after last year receiving no fruit. Although, just a week ago we had bad thunder storms which produced hail the size of peas that blanketed much of our yard.  Luckily it didn't knock off the blooms.  We were lucky.  This is a tricky weather time which one micro burst can destroy an entire fruit crop.

The top photo is our peacock, who when HE was young, we thought we had a female.  I ordered a male to pick up on Friday April 19th, only to find out we had a male and now I need a female.  So I contacted my breeder, who does have a suitable female and will pick HER up on Friday.  I'll post her photo on the next entry.

I just finished reading one of my favorite blogs "The Chicken Chick" who discussed anomalies in egg production.  I thought I would post a recent occurrence of ours.  My Rhode Island Red, who is one of our original hens has these crazy eggs once in while as she is getting old.  The pale beige eggs is a normal grade A large egg and the brown eggs is the size of a tbsp. Cute huh?  I did not use the tiny egg but when I cracked it open, it did have a tiny yolk.

Its Easter this weekend, hopefully we will have some warmth coming our way!