Tristan Vitali

You REALLY know you're a permie when the first garter snake sighting of the season happens to be a pregnant-looking lady weaving her way up your cordwood walls on a chilly, blustery day, and all you can think is "I hope she finds a nice cozy spot in my walls to birth a hundred more voracious slug eaters"

Jolene Jakesy wrote:When your yard is full of buckets and milk containers for various projects.

... and salvaged doors / windows

... and stacks of cardboard

... and piles of rocks


;)  

You know you're a permie when you finish up with some paying work and decide to take a quick break before starting on the next thing, and that quick break entails checking out the "You know you're a permie when" thread

You know you're a permie when:

...you have two calendars on your wall, one for tracking planting times and fertility dates for the critters, the other huge at-a-glance calendar for keeping track of daily duck and chicken eggs, sitting and hatch dates, RMH wood use, seed planting and sprout dates, harvest dates and notes, roadside stand sales... all the important stuff, even the once-a-month trip to town!

...you save your pasta water to pour on your "indoor" sunroom garden because you know all that starch will kick-start the soil microbes to help warm that chilly winter soil

...you use the offal from duck and chicken harvests to build nutrient-dense squash and tomato hills that after a few more years will be replaced with fruit trees

...you spend 8 hours straight working out the finer details for a goat paddock shift system that you probably wont be able to afford for another two years (even though the pioneer growth you're trying to combat is perfect for them NOW)

...the answer in your head to every question, and I mean EVERY question, starts with "It depends", but you try to never say that part out loud because it really irks people

...your solution to the so-called "climate change" situation is plant diversity and ruminants...and that includes both cows that fart and those so-called "invasives" - oh the horror!


and finally, you know you're a permie when you can't help but laugh out loud at the image in your head of Paul's eyebrows when he reads that he's been officially named "Paul Wee Wheaton".

Paul the Wee, perhaps?


Anyone know if Hugo's snail destroyers will settle for slugs? If so, I'm willing to put down a deposit for my spring order!

I did take more pictures today, but I'll have to leave it with this for tonight...strawberries  Also, there's a shot of the garlic putting on scapes, peonies in bloom, comfrey (there's three clumps, two of which have been harvested for mulch) and you might be able to spot some of the roma tomatoes mixed in with mint under the garlic or along the bottom of the hill with that single line of garlic.

Strawberries and garlic scapes...who could ask for more, right?

And here's an update on tomatoes directed seeded with bottle clotches - these are the black cherry tomatoes. As you can see, I haven't thinned them yet. I'll probably leave two plants per so they can be trellised out in opposite directions

Here's the rest of the gosling/duckling pictures

The (pekin) ducklings and (french toulouse) goslings from the previous posts have settled in nicely. Here's some pictures of their first day under blue skies. Need to split this into two posts as it wont go through with too many photos attached.

Here's a couple of the aptly named Monster sitting on her nest from just over a week ago. She hatched 7, of which she lost one that night. She then promptly adopted the pekin ducklings and the goslings, abandoned her ducklings and hasn't bothered with them much since. The golden 300 layer that we let sit this year adopted them and abandoned her nest, but was so mean to everyone else, and noisy, we had to kick her out to the summer house. The 6 poor week-old ducklings are now being looked after by Surrogate (who's a week overdue already) and the "whitehead" while Monster spends all her time looking after her new favorites.

The third picture is of Surrogate today when we noticed a broken shell in her nest, as if she hatched a duckling finally. After searching around I did find it on the floor behind her nest, alive but barely. Seems she rejected the duckling and kicked it out of the nest after it hatched. I tried warming it up and putting it back in her nest, but she rejected it again a while later. That little one is in here for the night with a warm water bottle to see how it does. It might have paralysis on one side, or it might be a broken leg from being kicked out of the nest today - it can't stand up or move around without dragging itself and the one leg seems completely limp...but it's certainly a fiesty, lively and talkative little duckling now that it's warmed up and rested. It'll be sad if it does turn out to be a permanent issue as this little guy wants to survive.

The last one is Monster's ducklings - the lighting in the duck house is terrible, but you can at least see the lighter colored ones in there  They don't spend much time outside since nobody's watching out for them, but they've been out a few times already. Adorable little guys, too

More picture updates for tonight before I get caught up in everything else going on again. First off, here are the chooks doing their thing in their enormous (for such tiny things) house and run

Miles Flansburg wrote:Hay Tristan, thanks for the update! Looks like you have made a lot of progress. Good stuff!

Slow progress, but progress nonetheless :)  Thanks for following things in the thread - knowing people actually view it does inspire me to keep up with it as much as I can. Back before I got started with everything, it was always threads like this that had me thinking "maybe, just maybe, even I can do something like that". For anyone else out there that happens upon this one and is thinking the same thing, it's easier than it sounds but harder than it looks :D