Weeds and Boris.

The good news is Boris is doing very well, he's about fully healed at this point and only occasionally stumbles. The bad news is, he's the only chicken we have left. Between sickness, fatigue, etc, etc, we didn't get the electric fence up yet, and what was probably a fox again came and took all of our laying hens leaving Boris uninjured, but panicked. The Lady of the House found him panting and hiding in the shadow of the house, he's not well enough to fight a fox again, though the fact that the fox left him indicates that most likely it's the same fox that didn't want to tangle again, and left him alone. I feel really crappy about myself because I let the fact that I've been very tired lately get in the way of setting up the electronetting, and lost 4 hens because of it. The first one, happens. The other four are entirely because I didn't do my job. We're fortunate to be in a situation where we will be able to get more laying hens that are being de-acquisitioned from a friend's flock. Before we do so though, I'm getting that fence installed and running because I don't want to do this again. On the up side though, the world is turning green.

The increasing vibrancy of the world encourages me to think that we've actually seen the last of the really cold weather. I'm still not going to be risking planting earlier than our 90% last frost date of June 4th because there's no point in taking a risk at this point. Everything is going great tuns though having grown visibly since Tuesday. The apple tree that survived the winter is looking great, and is actually starting to look like a tree. We're not going to be pruning it this winter at all because right now we just want it getting as much sunlight on the leaves as possible. This year again we're going to be trying to get a bunch of clearance fruit trees as the planting season for most of the area ends, and get them in the ground. For how much we spent for the 4 fruit trees of which only this one survived, we could have purchased half of a fruit tree at normal prices, so it's working out so far despite the poor survival rate. That's something we're going to have to do soon given the weather lately. We'll see what happens. Worse comes to worse we won't put more in the ground right now and put them in just before fall. I'm also starting to look into learning how to prune trees since we're going to have to be able to prune our own trees. I think it's really exciting to see our first fruit tree starting to look good. That's one of the long term investments like asparagus that can be a really tough up front cost for folks like us that are living on the edge of making enough to get by on. In a couple years it's going to be worth while.

Weeding is going to be a big chore this year, I hope we can start teaching the Critter to weed. If nothing else we can spend time outside with him while weeding, and I'm sure he'll start pulling things up either way. The question of course will be whether or not he learns to pull up the right things quickly or if we have a lot of immature plants pulled out of the ground. Either way, that's how a kid learns, experience. Really though I'm not expecting much out of his weeding prowess, he's 18 months old. I just hope that I can impart a joy in gardening to him that it took me a long time of my adult life to start getting. Even if I can't he's going to know much more about where his food comes from than I did for a long time.