Thursday, June 3, 2010

Susan worked in garden this morning. Tried to set the plastic over one of the hoop houses but the wind was too strong. We moved hoses and yard furniture (swings, etc.) then I got the gas powered lawn mower started and she mowed for awhile. We’ve had a lot of rain the last week and the grass was getting too long for the reel mowers. I worked a bit on an article then decided to take the studded tires off the Cherokee and put the summer tires on it. I have a tire “machine” we bought from Harbor Freight Tools a year ago. It’s a cheap version of the manual machines we had in the service stations I worked at as a teenager so I was familiar with it’s use. They actually work pretty good on 15 inch and smaller rims. I’ve used it on 16 inch tires/rims too but it’s more work and you might have do some things differently. It’s pretty fast when things go well. It takes me about 15 minutes a tire unless I hit a snag. I was taking pictures of each step today so I lost a lot of time while setting up the shots. The bead on the first tire gave me a lot of trouble also. I couldn’t get it to seat to air the tire up. Professional machines have strategically placed air jets to make that job fast and simple. Out here you have to be a little creative at times.

After she finished mowing she worked on washing laundry. We have enough clean rainwater stored now to use it for washing clothes also. We like it much better than well water.

I let the chickens out (a daily thing) and gathered the eggs. We have one hen who thinks she’s going to hatch some eggs out. We haven’t figured out how to get through to her that we have no rooster so she’ll have no fertile eggs but she doesn’t listen so well. She’s very tenacious about sitting on the eggs she’s accumulated so every afternoon I have to evict her from the nest. Not a big deal but you have to be quick or she’ll peck you. The best way is to reach in fast and grab her by the neck then gently lift her out of the nest box. (Once you’ve got your hand around her neck you can control where her head is.) If you’re slow or grab too low you’ll end up with a blood blister where she got you with her beak. Kind of a pain at times (no pun intended) but she’s a good layer so we put up with her.

The movie we watched last night (The Road) was okay. It followed the book pretty good. We’re glad we watched it but we won’t be buying a copy for our home library.

Photos: 1. The tire machine I use. 2, These are beans we’ve sprouted to plant in the garden. Sprouting them inside gives them a head start. These are ready to plant. 3. The one in my hand is just to give a close-up of what they look like. 4. Susan putting rocks on the plastic over the hoop house to hold it down against the wind. 5. Susan washing clothes. 6. The sitting hen. She’s looking down ‘cause she knows she’s about to be evicted from the nest. She was sitting on four eggs. There were two more in the nest box above her. Two of the chickens having some “dirt time.” We have four red hens and three of the black ones. We raised the red ones from babies last year. The others are on their third or fourth year.