A Winnie and Daddy day.

The big kids all got to go fishing with Deedee and Papa over this last three days, so Winnie was an only child for a few days. While she likes having Mommy and Daddy all to herself (she especially enjoys lying across both our laps for our evening Rosary) she misses her siblings when they are not around and kept asking where they were and when we were going to go get them.

That didn’t stop her from having a very busy day at the farm with Daddy.

If you’re going to be the only kid, you may as well also join Mommy and Daddy in their bed.

That way when they get up you can have the big bed all to yourself.

She slept in that hair.

Then a delicious and nutritious breakfast of left over applesauce pie from Easter week and we were off!

First job on our list was a dump run.

Then back to the farm to drop off the trailer.

Winnie likes to help with every little thing.

She can even turn the jack handle by herself (but only when there is no weight on it. Otherwise, I would have to tie it down to keep her from raising and lowering the trailer for fun when I am not looking).

Next job on the list is cleaning out the brooder. Now that the meat ducks are on the pasture, we want to get the brooder cleaned out and ready to go, because Mommy and Winnie want some more egg ducks.

Winnie is convinced she can do this all by herself.

Part of the process of cleaning out the brooder is putting all the spoiled bedding on the compost pile. This means we need to clean up the compost piles a little bit.

Looking for fishing worms on Saturday morning, I got three loads of compost moved to the garden, and set the piles back in order. Brand new on the left. Empty in the middle, partially aged on the right.

On Monday, between the ducks and the cows, we had enough to build a whole new compost pile, so we did.

Also, this I cut this elderberry to a stump in February of 2024, and look at it now! So healthy, with dozens of flower clusters on every shoot. We are going to have to look into all the things we can make with elder-flower and elder berry this year.

We also checked our rat traps. We have been killing rats pretty regularly at the compost pile for the last week or so. Having two cats living in the barn area now has lessened the rat pressure in that area, but they have now moved to the garden where they have eaten a good deal of seed. We caught a couple with peanut butter, and a couple more with vanilla extract on a cotton ball, but apparently this trap didn’t catch a rat at all. Those are feathers on it, which means that it was a bird that tried to take this cotton ball, and something (likely a rat) cleaned the bird carcass up.

I hate rats.

Tasting the Swiss chard and some volunteer nasturtium leaves.

A compost pile won’t compost unless it is wet so we set up a sprinkler to get it well soaked after we built it.

While that was soaking, we got to work planting, or rather, re-planting.

The cucumber and melon starts did not do well. All the melon starts died, and 3 of the 5 cucumber starts died. We are going to give them a go at re-planting, it is still early enough in the year we might get something out of them.

Whenever we work in this block, we always have to pull potato shoots from potatoes left in the ground from last year. We 75 square feet of potatoes elsewhere, we don’t need volunteers coming up among the squash. Also, when we dig potatoes this fall we need to do a better job of catching all of the taters.

None of the corn came up, so we re=planted it. This will be a bit later than we would like, but corn has a tendency to be somewhat slow and sporadic around here, because the soil takes so long to warm up, but then it usually takes off around the fourth of July.

So we will see how it goes.

This little patch of cabbage and onion makes me very happy. Winnie too. She likes to pluck cabbage or nasturtium leaves and nibble on them.

Finally, the beans have not grown worth a darn, so we replanted all of those as well. (Green beans only, we don’t have any cannellini bean seeds left, and anyway, those did a little better than the green beans did). Not sure why they didn’t come up, soil temp has been consistently above 50 degrees. I have noticed some shoots that came up and had the leaves bitten off. Rats? Not sure. Maybe need to invest in a game camera.

This brought us to Noon, and lunch time. We had a delicious and somewhat informal lunch, and then went to the farm store to look for new baby ducks.

Mama Duck was passed out by the time we got there.

Unfortunately, they were out of baby ducks, but they plan to have more this week.

So we bought a new manure fork. The old 10-tine forks don’t work well for us, we have broken two in the last two years, so I went with a sturdier 5-tine design.

We will see how long it lasts.

By then Winnie was pretty tired so we got started on afternoon chores. First we moved the meat ducks and fed them, but then we noticed the cows were down to their last paddock but one, so…

We built more paddocks.

Och, moo, thank-ye Lad!

That will get them to the end of the week, I’ll need to move them back to the North pasture on Monday.

And that was our day. This was one tired little girl, but boy did she have a great day!