At a week old, Jodie the chick is starting to get some wing feathers in, and is following her mother around the yard like an old pro, watching and learning. She can move surprisingly quickly, and hop into the garden beds, so she had a wonderful time exploring and digging - and eating what her mother found for her to try.
We were busy hauling lumber and working in the backyard, so we let the two of them out for a few hours with some supervision. Nugget took a couple of nips at the little one, so she went back in to the chicken tractor to consider her actions. Jodie observed Celine delighting in taking a 'dust' bath after being confined to the safety of the dog run on the grass all week, and joined in beside mom, wiggling herself into the bark mulch and sand. We stood and watched - it was absolutely adorable.
Work was started on the outside rabbitry extension today, and later chores included examining the hoophouse plants for damage while chopping back the squash, cucumber and tomato plants in there to encourage the ripening of the already-existing fruits and veggies. It could be a raccoon (?) The neighbour has had some of her ground-grown potatoes eaten, and that has to be a big disappointment. Could be the same opportunistic animal, as there are a lot of gardens in the neighbourhood, to tempt them, and we've run across both racoons and opossums in the yard. I was able to harvest quite a few cucumbers, so I'll need to find that recipe for dill cucumber slices soon (the problem with having too many preserving books sometimes!)
Tomorrow we hope to finish the building project, and I need to finish harvesting the potatoes we grew in buckets, and pot up some plant and herb divisions with the extra soil from that process. Some of the divisions are moving out to the front yard, to help fill in our plantings. I also plan to harvest the Alisa Craig onions which I grew from seed, and to tidy up a few eyesores which have been on the to-do list for a while, but ignored because of the oppressive heat of summer.
A hive inspection tomorrow (it was overcast until late today) will tell us whether the colony is indeed doomed, and then we will need to think about harvesting most of the honey and wax before our weakened colony is robbed. The girls are still working hard amongst the blossoms, and I want to find a balance between letting them cap their finished honey, and risking robbers finding the hive.
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