Leaving the Past in the Past

With the nasty weather continuing, I decided to do a little housekeeping. Not in the house: that would be too ambitious. No, I tidied the blog.

This blog originated in 2011, right before I moved to North Carolina. Over the years, I learned and blogged a lot about preparedness, self-reliance, and provident living; however, that was then, this is now. That stuff is all history now, so I cleaned out those old posts. After all, a lot of the links to other sources were no longer valid and no ones cares how many peaches I canned in 2013. If I want refresh or expand my understanding about a particular topic, I’ll just write a new post.

Happily, the rain stopped this weekend and it warmed up. Consequently, we got a little bit done outside.

With the rain and cold, I’ve been unable to plant my spring seeds. To help things along, we put a couple of cattle panels over the brick raised bed and covered it with a tarp. The intent is to start warming and drying out the soil for planting. It’s not fancy but I think it will do the job. Maybe next weekend I’ll be able to plant.

Attach a couple of horses and we’d have a covered wagon!

One of the apple trees has a few nubs that look like they might turn into buds when the time is right. It inspires hope. The other one still looks like a stick.

My boysenberry plants were supposed to arrive yesterday but UPS appears to have lost them. That seems to be happening a lot with stuff that gets shipped to me via UPS. Somehow, things get to Greensboro and then disappear. I’ll give it a few more days before calling the nursery.

In chicken news, something is going on with Eager (the Blue Belle). When I let them out to get to the fresh grass yesterday, Road Runner, the rooster, was treating her poorly. He kept chasing her away anytime she approached the others and sometimes even when she was hanging back. Today she was acting afraid of him so we let just him out to run free and let the hens have a little alone time. Even then though, Eager just hung out in the coop. Every time I go check on her, she is sitting in her nesting spot and she growls at me. I don’t know, maybe she’s broody (though she has no eggs to sit on). Her head appeared to be tender so I dabbed some ointment on it but other than that she seems to be okay. We’ll see what happens over the next few days.