Same song, different day

This past weekend, my friend Mary visited us, wanting to have 'farm therapy' which is to say a day of getting away from all the world you inhabit. We planted jalapenos and tabasco peppers, about 20 plants. This is added to the nearly 200 plants, now -- most of which are tomatoes.

Our Guineas are getting bigger and made their presence known when they could fly up to the top of the coop and see out. Unfortunately, they could fly out if they wanted to, so Mike worked on putting hardware cloth up so they could see out -- but not fly out.

The composting isn't fast enough for what I'm using these days and so I think I'm going to have to start a new pile and let this one be. Maybe get some compost from the forested areas on the farm for a while.

We captured a raccoon in the live trap, one that seems like it's a baby, which can only mean there must be a larger one, the one that killed two of our chickens. Mary went with us to, well, dispose of it, although she prefers this more humane method than the one we first thought we would do --which is to shoot it. We've lost one of the barred rock hens and one of the roosters -- the pretty aurecana with black feathers that had really nice, dark green highlights in them. The rooster's feathers were in a field opposite of where the remaining body parts of it were. Very odd because the rooster was quite a large one. The raccoon had to have been large enough to haul it almost a tenth of a mile.

We caught a possum a few days ago and set it free by one of the creek entryways at the back of the property. It probably won't come back, seeing as it was pretty well pissed off with us for merely capturing it.

Barbecue now knows another few commands -- 'roll over' and 'shake' although she does the 'shake' part whenever she wants to impress us -- without us asking her to. She is getting bigger and more like a dog every week.

Mike busted his balls this weekend. We also bought a new lawnmower. The one we had was from my father's house (after he passed away) and we've already spent enough money on it -- 45 dollars the first time and we got it running the second time -- well, almost. Mike broke the cord on it when he tried to start it. Not sure if it was that he doesn't know his own strength or that the cord was just worn out. Either way, more money would have been spent on the dang thing just to get it back to running condition. Never buy Murray products...

We purchased a Honda, a higher-end model for 500.00 and some change. It works really well and although it surprised us by being self-propelled (a feature Mike scoffs at), I think we both like it that way.

So Mike mowed parts of fields that he could not get with his big mower and one of those areas was my gourd and potato patch. Now I don't have to worry about stickerburs when watering or maintaining the vines. Yay.

Mike also cleaned out the gutters as well as the hottub this weekend, so I know he is sore, sore, sore. But... that's what we're HERE for, isn't it?