My Darlin' Clementine

Moms are never supposed to play favorites, but I am not sure that rule applies for chicken moms. I'll admit that Clementine is my favorite chicken because she's so amazingly docile, friendly and eager to please. She never runs away from me when she's out of the coop and when I'm holding her she lets out such a low soft coo that lets me know she really likes the attention. I'd go so far as to say she's a bit of a lap chicken.


I brought her out of the run yesterday for a little photo shoot. We can't let the chickens loose in the yard thanks to the hoards of ravenous eagles and hawks that circle our yard just waiting for one little chicken nugget to be left unattended - plus there's that overzealous German Shepherd who's dying for a feathered playmate. But on rare occasion, I'll lock up the dog and keep an eye on the sky while I let Clem have a little walk around the yard with me. She likes to hang a piece of grass out of her mouth in a tribute to Andy Griffith.


My three-year-old saw her walking by and reached down, scooped her up and sat on the bench with her. This is definitely a life highlight for him since all other small animals (namely our cats) run from him like he's the chupacabra himself. The fact that Clementine is quite happy to be picked up by him just makes him beam from ear to ear.


She looks just as cute walking away.


But no girl likes it when the wind blows your skirt up.


Maybe I should have called her Marilyn Monroe. She is blonde after all.

The Gnome has found a Home! Come see who won!

I can't believe how many people entered my little gnome contest! Thanks for all the kind words and well wishes about my one-year bloggiversary. You all know how to make a person feel good! It was nice to click on some of the user names in the comments section and visit some new blogs too. It's so much fun to "meet" new people.

But on to what you want to hear. Who won?

I added up all the comments and got that number (and took out the reply by me of course) and put it into the random number generator at random.org and pressed the "generate random number" button.

And it was....

((drumroll please))






Number 2 to respond in the comments section is Ribbit!

Ribbit is a wife, teacher and mom of two who has The Corner Yard blog. From the looks of her most recent post, my little nameless gnome will have some froggy friends in her garden! Congrat's Ribbit. If you want to email me with your mailing address I'll get that little gnome in the mail this week. My email address is in the column to the right.

Garden Blogger's Death Day :: June 2009

Ding, Ding, Ding… bring out your dead!

Welcome to Garden Blogger's Death Day for the month of June, 2009! This is the day for gardeners who overwater, underwater, maim, prune or otherwise neglect their plants to a state of dismal droopage or untimely death. This is the day for gardeners like me with black thumbs who kill more than they cultivate, for cadmium-green-thumbed gardeners who have a lapse in judgment and commit accidental planticide, and for any poor soul whose plants fall victim to that fickle mother who controls us all - Mother Nature.


This has been an unusually death-ridden month for my garden. The recovery from the flooding has been impossible in the oppressive heat of this fun-filled Florida summer and I am left with one loan surviving vegetable - the okra. Embarrassingly, everything else is brown and overgrown with weeds.

I have three rogue okra plants who insist on giving me one vibrant green okra every other day. I have no earthly idea what to do with about one okra every two days, so they're going to waste. I'm treating the okra plants like gold since they're my lone survivors, even though I have no clue what to do with the okra they produce.

Everything else has gone belly-up. Roots in the air. Kaput.

Here is my oh-so-sad corn crop. Brown. Dead. This is especially disappointing since we have a huge corn farm not far from here that grows acres of Zellwood Sweet Corn in extremely sandy soil - just like mine.


Here are the bug-ridden, deformed, rotten and downright un-scrumptious ears of corn. The chickens quite liked them, but that's about it.


The tomatoes are brown sticks. And what's left of them has become overrun with weeds. On a bright note, I did have a pretty good tomato harvest before they bit the dust.


My bean plants washed away, leaving me with one lone dried-out bean pod clinging on to the teepee. I'm sad about the beans because this is twice now that I've lost my entire bean crop to flooding.



So how about all of you? What fell victim to your gardening wrath this month? Feel free to leave a comment explaining what you killed or maimed this month. If you have a blog leave a link to it so we can visit and check out post mortem photos too.

Remember, we're here for you. Let's not judge, but support each other like a good pair of pantyhose or a well-staked garden trellis.

(And if you haven't done so yet, don't forget to enter to win a free garden gnome! The contest ends tonight at midnight and the winner will be announced tomorrow).

Wildlife Weekend :: Who you callin' chicken?

I don't know how it happened, but it seems like overnight our big German Shepherd is afraid of everything. He just seems so hen-pecked these days and we can't put our finger on what's different about him. Maybe this means he'll be nicer to the hens, but we don't want to count our chickens before they've hatched.

I mean he's always been a bit of a bird brain, but now he's getting his feathers ruffled over every little thing. The other day there was a thunderstorm and he was running around like a chicken with his head cut off! Could this be a sign of our dog becoming friendlier? Possibly, but we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket.

I guess he's turned into...


...a real chicken!




Okay, not really, but I amuse myself sometimes. I suppose it's my way of compensating for my lack of wildlife sightings this week, which means I'm plum out of ideas for today's wildlife weekend photo op. This'll have to do.

Garden Memory Game for Kids

I've got two exciting anniversaries coming up - This Saturday is the one-year anniversary of the blog and it's also the day we officially decided to start our garden! (I'll be celebrating my bloggiversary on Friday if you want to stop by). I wanted to find a fun way to document the first year of our adventure into gardening for the boys, because at 3 and 5 years old, they aren't big blog readers. I thought about making a photo album from the past year, but how often do you see young kids thumbing through photo albums? Instead I found a way to combine our first year of gardening into a game that my boys love. So we came up with "Our First Garden Memory Game."


I should warn you that if you try this, it's much more time-consuming and fiddly than I originally anticipated, but the end result was awesome.

I went through the past 12 months of garden photos and tried to pull out a representative group showing some of the gardening events that would be memorable to the kids. We've got our first harvest, hornworms, ladybugs, making a space toad house, building a tent from garden stakes, fishing for tadpoles, making mud puddle angels, and even pictures of the pets, the whole family making butter and some close-up photos of our best harvest.


I made a grid in Photoshop and placed each photo inside 2.5 x 2.5 squares on the grid so I had 12 photos per page. I printed out two copies of each photo on cardstock paper. I made 36 matching pairs and tried to get an equal number of both boys because…well, if you're a parent I don't need to finish that sentence.


Then I cut out the photos so I had 72 little square photos. I then got some green construction paper and folded it into thirds lengthwise and then folded it down into four squares widthwise. This makes a nice green backing for each photo and gives each one a nice green mat effect. This step was very time consuming, but we have another fun memory match game I printed out from Jan Brett's website that the boys love, and although it's done on cardstock, my 5-year-old has figured out that if you stare hard enough at the backs of the cards you can make out some shapes and colors and make a match every single time. This sends my 3-year-old into an unrecoverable downward spiral. To prevent this, I went with the green backing.


I then glued 72 green squares to the backs of 72 little square photos. You only need one tiny little bit of glue in the middle, so this step went pretty quickly.


I then put the cards inside a laminating sheet, leaving just enough space between each one to be able to cut them down to size. The problem with this was that the green squares were each about 1/8th of an inch too big to fit perfectly inside the laminating sheet. This would have caused me to use a TON of laminating sheets since only about 6 per page fit. So I sat there with scissors cutting a thin strip of paper off the edge of every single side of 72 little squares - the entire time thinking, wow - this was clearly a dumb idea. But I made it so that I got nine per sheet, so it was worth it. So if you try this, make your backing squares small enough so you can line up plenty of them inside a laminating sheet BEFORE cutting out all the individual squares.


I ran them through the laminator and ended up with a handful of laminated sheets of memory cards. I cut them out and the game was complete.



My mom found a cute green box at a craft store for $1 that we decorated to use as the game box with a little graphic I also made in Photoshop.


The boys are in love with this game. Because 36 matching cards are entirely too many to use at once at their current skill level, we start out each game with each boy picking out a handful of pictures they like and the remaining ones get put back in the box. We then mix their cards together, flip them upside down and start the memory game.



The boys are more thrilled with this game than I expected. I love hearing them get excited about the photo and then start talking about the memory associated with it. I knew it would be a memory game, but I didn't anticipate the garden memories that went along with it. It's great hearing them say "Ohhhh - this was when we learned to shell peanuts!" and "Oh! I remember when we planted those seeds in that tray!" and "Look how dirty Jace is!" and "Look! There's Nanny making butter!" I know that as they get older, we'll be able to keep adding cards into the game until they're finally using all 36 matching pairs at once. It'll be fun in a year or so to look back at how little they were in the pictures and remember the first time we planted a family garden.

A personalized memory game like this would be tons of fun for any child - from a first soccer team, to a kindergarten class, to a fun summer vacation. Kids love turning over pictures of themselves and family members and talking about the memories associated with the pictures. Making our garden has been such a great memory for us and I'm glad to know that the boys won't soon forget their first year as junior gardeners now that they have this game.

A Garden Chicken Moat

As you may have read before, Farmer B and I are on the quest for the perfect attached run for the chickens. They currently have a run-less coop and a separate hoop-run that we move around the yard every couple of days. We know there has to be a better method, so we've (meaning "I've") been researching the heck out of chicken run alternatives.

One alternative that I found fascinating is the Chicken Moat. When I mentioned this to Farmer B it led to an interesting discussion about whether chickens can swim. (This has been much debated, but yes they can swim, although usually NOT by choice. Who knew?) Instead of a water-filled moat, this is a ground-level fenced-in "moat" around a vegetable garden.

picture from Mother Earth News

The chicken moat is a fenced area that runs along the perimeter of a garden that keeps the vegetable garden pest-free as the chickens scamper around the moat snapping up weeds and bugs. I read about it on Mother Earth News and think it is a great solution for someone with a vegetable garden and serious carpentry skills. I envision little drawbridges, turrets and dragon stencils around the edges, but that's just me. You can click here to see some great photos.

Another really cool idea for people with a raised bed vegetable garden is to build a chicken run that is the exact size of your raised beds.
picture from Garden Girl TV

Each season you place the chicken run on top of one of your raised beds that is out of commission for the season. That bed becomes the flooring for the chickens who will scratch around and prepare that bed with all their nitrogen-rich chicken poo for the next planting season. Each season you rotate the chickens to a new raised bed where the process continues again. You let them do the work for you.

Yes, you there - you chicken - you lay fresh eggs AND prepare my garden bed for next season's planting!

Garden Girl TV has some great photos of a chicken run on a raised bed and even a tutorial for making a raised bed run.

As cool as both of these ideas are, sadly neither one will work for us. I think we'll end up renovating a chain-link dog run into a chicken run if we can acquire one on FreeCycle or CraigsList. We don't have the time, energy and mad carpentry skills to make a nice, fancy wood and wire chicken run, so I think adapting a pre-made dog run to meet our needs is the way we'll go.

Wildlife Weekend :: Deer Ole' Dad

Happy Father's Day to all the dads who read my blog and to the dads of my readers too!!!

Farmer B woke up this morning to hand-made cards, creatively-wrapped presents, wrestling with the pajama-clad boys on the couch and then a breakfast of home-made French toast...just a really great start to the day.

Father's Day is a bit bittersweet for me. I love celebrating it with Farmer B and the boys, but I'm always a bit sad that my dad is no longer with us.


Here he is on the last day I happened to take a photo of him - less than a week before he died. He's wearing the dog's reindeer antlers on his head because that's just the sort of guy he was. I was about eight months pregnant when I took this photo and my oldest son was just shy of two years old. He was laughing his toddler head off that his Grandad was wearing the dog's reindeer antlers and acting like it was totally normal. It's such a great memory.

Miss you Dad. Happy Father's Day.