Shazam

It has been almost magical - the lapse of time from my vacation to now - when I can get 15 minutes to put together this post. The magical part - as in "where has the time gone" is one of life's great mysteries. It only seems like yesterday - and then it is two or more weeks in the future, and I apologize. I really try to keep up.

There really has been an incredible amount that has taken place since I last posted - so here we go, in no specific order:

The sunflowers on the 1/4 acre I planted are all in bloom!

These are all black oil sunflower - so I am hoping to harvest enough seed to get me through the winter with my birds, and maybe a little extra.

At Horus Hill, everything is in bloom. The front gardens boast bee balm, coneflower, coreopsis, cleome and so many more.

Also, without pictures (coming soon tho), is the relocation of the hens. It was very much like the running of the bulls! But without the sharp pointy things (excluding beaks and talons). Fran and I were the Chicken Wranglers. Yesterday, we were ready for the move. We went to the farm and figured out how to get hens from point A - to point B. Doesn't sound too complicated, but if you've ever had chickens you'll appreciate this. After trying to grab one or two by slowly opening their henhouse door we realized it wasn't going to work. Nope, not even a little bit. So we let them all free, and I played St Francis of Assisi -I called the hens and they came running behind, streaming into the new pasture. Well that was easy. Only they were not interested in staying for long, so we had to shut the gate as they all started flowing right back out again. Trapping perhaps 2/3 of them in the official chicken yard, we set about collecting the remaing dozen plus. Except for every two we'd put in, we'd see four more coming from another direction. This continued for about 20 minutes until we realized they had to be getting out somewhere (d'Oh!). This was very disappointing as we had already spent a good 40 minutes patching some fence areas that we suspected they could push through. Turns out when you have enough chickens pushing on something for a while... its gonna give. And they had pushed out the fencing under the barn gate. So we fixed that with timber and concrete blocks and decided to just give up the chase for a while and work on moving the roosts. This went extremely well. They came out without too much fuss, and fit almost perfectly in their new location. Plus no blood was shed and there were no trips to the emergency room. Yay! We decided it would be easier to just wait til sunset and collect the remaining stragglers at that point. Which is what we did. There were 12 renegade birds in the old henhouse whom we collected and moved to the Chicken Mansion. We got every one settled down, gave them extra corn as a treat and called it a day. Mission accomplished! Then, this morning.... there were 3 eggs in the old henhouse. (heavy sigh) Farming's fun.