Hey, Boo

I've been a blogger recluse lately ~ the Boo Radley of the blogosphere, so to speak. Forgive me, but I am in a To Kill a Mockingbird state of mind.

My little book club decided to read TKAM in June, even though all of us had read it at least once before. Coincidentally, a local community theater was staging a production of the play last month. We all decided to go, and along with a delicious supper before, we enjoyed a perfect summer evening. It was community theater at its best. And the "Hey, Boo" scene remains my favorite, both in the book and the play.

Moving forward , or I should say looking back, here is a sampling of the last three months:

Lots of time spent with family and friends  . . . .

Springtime garden with little barbarians
at the gate

and in the garden and with the girls. . . . 

There's something so homey about
making jam.

enjoying the fruits of our labor . . . .

 rearranging one corner of my life . . . .

Ann Rayner by Threads Through Time
40-ct. Lakeside Linen Vintage Buttercream
Mostly Needlepoint Inc. Silk

and spending some stolen moments with my needle and thread.

See you again soon!

When life gives you lemons . . .

 . . .it is a very good thing!

Lemon paradise

Honestly, I think lemons have gotten a bad rap. Replace the word lemons with liver and onions and now we're talking a bad situation. Nothing good can come of that. But lemons? I use lemons for about a thousand different things for which there is no substitute. And ingesting lemons in one form or another is not the only use for them. I just read instructions somewhere online for using lemon waste (the squeezed-out halves) and tap water for making an enzyme cleaner. Anyway, the reason I am defending lemons is that my tree is now loaded with them, and my week will be spent juicing and zesting as much as my freezer will hold.

So, February was quite the full month. The winter garden provided us with tons of good stuff, but none of it preserved. I spent quite a bit of time researching and then trying about 500 ways to use broccoli, as I do not care for it in frozen form. Also, our heirloom lettuces were a great success, and we have more than enough for us, the neighbors and the girls ~ not necessarily in that order. The last couple of weeks of the month were spent planning and then planting our spring garden and pruning our deciduous fruit trees, which are all blooming. It is glorious!

Blossoming apricot tree

But it was not all work. We took time to stop and smell the roses, too. February is the month when most of my husband's side of the family come to visit. It really is the most beautiful month in our desert, in my opinion. Having family come to visit forces us to remember to slow down and enjoy it with them.

So with everything in bloom right now, I am thinking spring cleaning and getting back to basics. I am trying to figure out where I can incorporate a clothes line into my back yard. I love clothes lines. But I don't want it to look like I just wandered down from the hills. More research needs to be done on this. This week, I am also going to make my own laundry soap, which just makes my little frugal, laundry lovin' heart go pitty pat. (The thoughts of spring cleaning were what led me to discover the lemony enzyme thing.)

Lancaster laundry day

As for stitching, I have started Ann Rayner, but I have been struggling with a nasty episode of tennis elbow, so I have been trying to not over do. Next time, I hope to have a progress photo that won't bore everyone to tears. But in keeping with my "back to basics" theme, I will instead post a little finish from last year: Carriage House Samplings' Hornbook Sampler. Basic at its very best.

Carriage House Samplings
Hornbook Sampler

I will leave you with a photo of the girls in their new playpen, which is an old wheelbarrow filled with compost. Once my arm  heals I am going to paint it a different shade of green. That is, if I can keep them out. I may have to do it under the cloak of darkness when they are all snoozy in their roost to avoid a real mess ~ or in my new parlance, one of those liver and onions moments.

And a chicken in
every wheelbarrow!

Happy week everyone!

Cleaning House

 It's been a busy January so far at The Garden Gate and the Coop de Grace, but I always enjoy the fresh start of a new year and the motivation that comes with it to organize and indulge my organizational OCD. (The rest of the year I am in recovery, as anyone who takes a really close look at my house will tell you.) And although packing away the Christmas stuff was easy this year, I am still reminded of the woeful lack of storage in this house. With my newly found love of canning, I had to do some serious reallocation of closet space this summer, but it still isn't enough. For example, I would love to have a pantry that looks like this:

Pinterest

As for other "house" cleaning, we are taking advantage of all of our winter greens to try to mitigate the excess of holiday eating. Right now the lettuces are tender and flavorful, and we have been eating a lot of salads. This year I planted some new varieties of heirloom greens, including Little Gem Romaine, Red Romaine, Buttercrunch, Tom Thumb Butterhead, Bronze Mignonette, and arugula. The cilantro I used in a citrus vinaigrette in which I also used our blood oranges. Remarkably, we are still getting grape tomatoes from one of our plants, and they are very good. The girls are also benefiting from the greens in our garden and it is fun to mix up a good salad for them, too.

Green goodness

Coop de Grace special

Stitching has been at a minimum these past two weeks, as there really has been too much to be done both indoors and out, but I shan't leave you without a house-related stitching photo.

"By wisdom a house is built,
and by understanding it is established;
 and by knowledge the rooms are filled
 with all precious and pleasant riches." ~ Proverbs 24:3,4

Have a great week, everyone!

Home, home on the (free) range

I am still having production problems with the girls. At least the girls who are not molting. This week, Abigail decided it was her turn. This time of year in the Southwest they should be back to the levels of last spring, I would think. (All of the girls have been laying for less than a year.) At that time, we had not yet enclosed a larger run and the girls were making themselves at home all over the back yard and patio.  I took a look at my current coop and run setup and realized that it is now almost completely shaded all day long. Could not enough light be the problem? My husband was skeptical, but he lacks chicken intuitiveness.

The girls and my last eggplant harvest

While getting a pedicure last week,  I happened to quiz one of the nail techs who has a huge flock in a more rural area of town. The first thing he said was, "They aren't getting enough light." Ha! So, with much protestation coming from the no-chicken-keeping-in-the-DNA crowd, I decided to let them free-range once again. Which means watching them like a chicken hawk. We have done some work on our yard since then, and keeping them out of the gardens is a challenge. One of the things we did was remove a small area of lawn (read: ugly Bermuda grass), and began working on a new garden area. As most of our yard is taken up with the cement pond, gardening space is at a premium, and grass just seemed like a tremendous waste of water and real estate. I am now working on a plan to extend the run to replace a problem area in the garden, but one with a lot of sun.

At 2 in the afternoon, not a speck of sunlight

Shaded coop and new garden area

So once again, I have patio chickens;  and on occasion when the weather is nice and I have the door open,  I have kitchen chickens, too. They come for the cat food. Fortunately, Marguerite, the cat, likes only tuna, so Chicken of the Sea is the only chicken on the menu; it is perfectly safe for the girls to eat.

In the meantime, we had a little freeze last night, and my eggplants and basil are toast. We were just about to dig them up anyway, so letting the chickens do some of the digging for us works out really well for everyone.

Making hay in the freeze-damaged eggplant

The jury is still out as far as my egg production goes, although Dolley, my only consistent layer at this point, has stepped it up. I am hoping that the B-52 and Eleanor will soon follow.

A tale of two tushies

The end(s).