May 1st, 2021 Busy, Busy, Busy

 Last week we took a couple of days off and the world wanted them back, so we did eight days this past week to make up for the malingering. 

Laffee Taffee's pups all came to life in a big way. Their little puppy personalities began to emerge when their ear canals opened up and they became aware of the world.

We started weening, putting warmed milk in a very large feeding dish a friend of the Farm gave us. We had a dish something like it but it was about a third the size. This one allows the pups to all get around it in one go. At times there's enough room to fit a few inside the dish while the others are eating.

On Monday we started giving them about a cup of milk, by Friday were adding a handful of puppy kibble to three cups of milk. They pups, if added together by weight, would out-weight their mother, so she isn't really able to fill them up anymore. The dish fills them up just fine. We have begun letting people visit the pups. 

The House build is still moving along well. I have been working on finishing the drywall in the low portion of the house. This week I was able to put the final touches on the seams and corners of the Closet and Bedroom, and am getting pretty close in the Hallway and the Water Closet. On Friday I put together the texture gun for the first time and sprayed the Bedroom and Closet, the last step before priming and paint. 

On Wednesday I found a commercial painter on Craig's List who had exactly the paint we need to do much of the interior finishing. He had bought a house-full but the job had fallen through due to Covid and he got tired of waiting for the work to come back. We bought about twenty gallons of primer and paint for under two-hundred dollars and the guy even delivered it to us. I will begin painting on Tuesday next week and we will have two rooms of seven completed (except flooring).

Craig's List is a real resource for the House build. I bought the air compressor, paint sprayer, and texture gun in past months for pennies on the dollar. This week we found a few other things we will need, including one of our Kitchen counter-tops. A lovely ten foot piece of quartz for Ann's Baking counter.

The Farm is beginning to show sure signs of Spring growth. The greenhouse is awash with baby plants of all sorts. We have peppers, tomatoes, squash, watermelons, lettuces, and many others growing out there and we will be putting these into the dirt soon enough. There are also many annual flowers growing too. 

The biggest flower planting we do is Marigolds. Marigolds add a great deal of color to the Farm, but they also provide a chemical barrier to many beetles. We plant rows of Marigolds around the parameters of each garden to protect the leaves of our vegetables but this year we plan to add a few rows just for color. Marigold really encourage pollinators. Bumble Bees love to sleep in the blooms.

We also got a wonderful planting table from a Lutheran Church where it had been a kids sandbox for over two decades. The thing is large enough to mix soil and gives us a great place to put seeds into pots.

Yesterday I found a garden cart on Craig's List  for Ann. She's wanted one for a few years and it finally showed up on the listings. You have to be quick to get the hard to find stuff and I saw this nineteen minutes after the seller put it up for sale. Last year, at Mother's Day, I found a nice little fat-tired planting stool for her, another real find, and she's been using it for weeding. This year she gets the wagon to help in moving  the hundreds of things now growing in the Greenhouse out to the gardens. 

Things are really beginning to move at the Farm this week. Puppies have been born and sold, the Strawberries (in their third year) are thick with young fruit, and our house is about four-fifths finished. Covid relief checks came too. So money, though important, isn't nearly so much of a concern. With any luck our plans will now begin to bear out the promise we already knew was there, but had so far been unable to find.

It is good we got a few days off. There will be few days off in the coming weeks.