Author Archives: jrh

Happy goats at work

The garlic mustard and honeysuckle are out in full force – time for the goats!

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Breakfast time for baby turkeys

These guys are about two weeks old, and are already acting like little versions of grown-up turkeys. The boys will turn their tail feathers up and strut around, and their curiosity has them probing the edges of the brooder when … Continue reading

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Learning to chicken

I see many advantages to natural chick brooding: no need for industrial-scale hatcheries, no energy use or fire risk from brooding lamps, and general DIY goodness. But perhaps the biggest advantage is big grown-up chickens getting to teach the babies … Continue reading

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Hello, world!

Four of the six eggs Buffy has been sitting in for the last three weeks have hatched! The other two appear to have developed embryos in them, so we’ll give it another day to see if they’re just late pippers. … Continue reading

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Expecting

We’ve had a lot going on, and are far behind on blogging about it.  Time flies, whether you’re busily using the first few warm weeks of spring or sitting on a half-dozen hopefully fertile eggs, as Buffy is. According to … Continue reading

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Sprung!

Wow, it seems like the few tantalizing bits of spring we had just last week all intensified almost overnight. We had planned to spend the weekend focused on building a treehouse in the woods, and were making progress until Saturday … Continue reading

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Springing

The typical phrase is “spring has sprung”, and while that may be meteorologically true (recent snow notwithstanding), we’ve got so much springtime stuff coming up in the next few weeks that the present progressive “springing” seems more apropos. Next week … Continue reading

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Early spring morning in the garden

After many days of inviting 50- and 60-something temps, this feels like a bit of a setback. But as young Nora remarked when we were driving through the heavy rain yesterday: “at least we’ll have lots of May flowers!”

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Picking up after pruning

We’re taking advantage of a non-cold non-rainy day to get the pruned branches out of the garden/orchard area before the April showers make the ground too soggy to drive on. With chicken helpers, of course.

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New (to us) Workshop Door

The workshop door was in some very seriously sorry shape:  As could have been predicted, a hollow-core unfinished wooden door can’t really handle being an outside door. Fortunately, I was able to get a solid wood door at the Habitat … Continue reading

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