Why I'm busy

My soap's in the Father's Day gift guide.

Of the June issue of Better Homes and Gardens magazine!



Holy cow. I'm hoping that business will be good, but not so good that I can't handle it. It's coming out this week... wish me luck!

Garden tour

After the gardening conference, we managed to beat the rain and see several gardens on the tour.


This garden, our first stop, turned out to be my favorite. It has its own website. I particularly like the page showing the evolution of the site, which started with some pretty bare bones.


I loved all the beautiful statuary, and the numerous small touches tucked here and there that blended so well with the plants.


A chandelier hanging basket.


A Euphorbia whose full name I didn't catch.

More later.

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Update: I've heard from the gardener himself, and the Euphorbia in question is "Despina". Thanks Phillip!

Camo

I'm about to leave for a gardening conference and don't have time to look up this caterpillar. If you know the ID, feel free to leave a comment. See you next week!

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In the meantime, check out I and the Bird!

Moss graffiti

Springy

Red admiral butterfly on Sweet cicely. (Vanessa atalanta on Osmorhiza longistylis.)

This is the same type of butterfly from last year's butterfly wrangling post.

I know that they are widespread, but somehow it still surprised me to see a picture of one on a blog from Israel that I ran across recently. (Lots of nice flower and cat pics there too.)

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Technical note: Yesterday's bluebird post was MIA for most of the day due to Blogger problems, sorry!

It will probably be Rurality Lite for a while due to several things (none of which are bad news). Some obnoxious bragging coming up soon about one of them.

Happiness

And so remember this,
life is no abyss,
Somewhere there's a bluebird
of happiness.

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Eastern Bluebird (of my happiness), Sialia sialis.
Song lyrics by Edward Heyman and Harry Parr Davies.

Eek

Who besides me is thinking of Bladerunner now?

For more critters, visit The Friday Ark.

The best thing about spring

Wild hyacinth


Golden Alexander


Wild geranium


White spiderwort


Fire pink


Bluestars

Warmer

I'm not sure what happened to spring. The days are consistently in the 80°s now. It's been over 90°.

(That's about 30°C and 33°C, respectively.)

I want to go wading.

I'll probably have to wear my shoes though, or buy some of those sock-shoe combos made to wear in the water. The creek looks idyllic, but a lot gets washed into it. More rusty metal and glass than you'd think.

My grandfather lived by a small creek when I was a kid. There were even concrete steps leading down to it, which I loved. You could sit on the steps and still dangle your feet in the water. Back then the biggest worry about wading was the slippery rock problem, which often led to a soggy backside problem.

Chicken update

Our last remaining Buff Orpington:



We didn't get new chicks this spring. If we don't have too many predator losses we really won't need them. But if the chickens start disappearing at the rate they did last spring, we'll be short on eggs for a while.

Why the coyotes/bobcats/hawks don't go after the roosters, I don't know. We've lost three chickens so far this spring - all hens. We're back to the too many roosters problem of last year.

I'm afraid I've spent too much time with them to use the previous solution. Our sweet Easter Egger rooster will eat out of my hand. Even the Rhode Island Red is nice, if a bit stand-offish. (Email me if you're local and want one of those two!)

Current chicken count:

Roosters:
1 mean Easter Egger, "Stewpot"
1 nice Easter Egger, "Eagle"
1 nice Rhode Island Red, "Big Red"

Hens:
1 White Leghorn
1 Buff Orpington
5 Easter Eggers
1 Dominique
3 Marans

I think that one of the hens is a Dominique. She may be a Marans instead - they look very much alike.

The Marans eggs are lightening over time, and are not all they're cracked up to be in the "really dark eggs" department. Also, they're smallish. But we do get a few speckled eggs from them, which is kind of cool.

The last Rhode Island Red hen got snatched a month or so ago. I guess I've finally stopped crying over missing chickens.

Booty

We found this in the woods. I wonder if it has anything to do with Dave's unsafe socks.

Pete

fallen

fallen dogwood

Country living

No, we didn't get cows. These are the neighbor's cows, back for a visit. Again. For the 50 millionth time.

Jasmine knows they shouldn't be here, and chases them. That scares the cows, and when they're scared they have a little runny-poop problem.

Maybe it's a defense mechanism and they're hoping that the pursuer will slip on it. Maybe it makes them lighter and it's easier to flee. In any case, Jasmine was a little too close. You can't see it well in this picture, but she has it all over her right side.

So guess what I spent a lot of time doing yesterday. Thanks a lot, neighbor.