Scoop from the Coop

It has been a very busy week here at Raven Call Farm. The weather has been good for working in the garden, although the nights still get into the 20s and 30s. I have a table reserved at the Hope Faire Market tomorrow morning, and have been potting up berries and herb plants for sale. The car is packed with the bounty of my garden, and in the morning I will add the cooler with eggs and fresh mozzarella. If you are in the area tomorrow, stop by and shop! And if you haven’t got a card and good wishes for your mom on Mother’s Day, I’ll be your “Poet for Hire”–just look for the sign at the Faire Market.

We will also have a sale on the farm at the end of June, with more plants and crafts and more. Workshops are in the works, as well. Details will be posted here soon, but here is the list:

Ancestral Remembrance: An Introduction to Deep Genealogy, July 1, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

The Poet Naturalist: A Walk through Rhyme and Nature,  August 5, 10 a.m. to 12 noon

Basic Vegetable Gardening, September 9, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. (Garden tour to follow.)

A Hen’s Herbal, October TBD

If you are interested in any of these, please let us know.

Love and blessings to all the mothers, especially my mom, Marie, and my mother-in-law, Dreva. Love you!

Joyful return!

Yesterday our first Rufous hummingbird returned. He looked in the window as I was talking to my mother on the phone as if to say, Here I am! Where’s the grub! It is time to get out the feeder, and fill it up for our friends.

It’s time to do more early planting here. Besides the greens coming to life in the cold frames, and the fava beans and peas planted out in the old goose pen, we need to get the root crops and more cool weather crops in now. A deluge of rain followed Brother Hummingbird’s arrival, but there is supposed to be a break in the weather by the end of the week. In the meantime, I got some tomatoes, peppers, onions, artichokes and cardoons seeded inside. I am short on time this year, and took some shortcuts:

1. Egg cartons, plus...

2. Bucket of compost (from my 2-year-old pile)...

Equals many seed trays in the window!

There are already some Cherokee Purple tomato seedlings popping up! I am going to do more direct seeding in the garden than I had planned this year, and hope for the best.

Today is the end of April and of Poetry Month. I have only written half as many poems as I had intended this time around. There have been too many other writing deadlines to meet for my clients, and lots of clean up around the homestead to do. (And garden prep! And new lambs!) I have plenty of lovely drafts of poems to work on, though, so I am not worried about having too few finished pieces for my chapbook. (How many of you have been keeping up with the Poem-a-Day Challenge? Please share!)

I must apologize to those who may be searching the Hen with Pen website for updated photos and workshop information for 2012. My computer crash early this year, and the ensuing upgrade, has made it impossible to work with my old website layout. I am in the process of reworking the whole site, so look for the new (and, I hope, improved!) Hen with Pen to launch sometime next week. If you are interested in what classes we are offering this year, and can’t wait for the new page, let me know where to reach you, and I can email the list to you.

Tomorrow is May Day! The blessings of Beltane on each of you. Sunshine, sweet rain, sprouting seeds, and a happy heart!

Sassy Stellar Jay.

We have been having some beautiful weather: hot and sunny. The birds are busy and they are everywhere. Jays and woodpeckers, warblers and juncos, robins and nuthatches, flickers and ravens–everyone is arriving. The chickens are loving the warmth and foraging the good greens popping up. The lambs are growing up fast. (We are still waiting for Storm to have her lamb.) The cats are recharging their “solar batteries.” Hazel-dog is running through the woods, sniffing everything. (She really hates robins. Don’t know why; she just does.)

I am trying not to get too giddy about the weather, as snow is predicted by Friday. I did finally get our tomatoes, peppers and some onions planted indoors. I am starting these seeds later than usual. Last year we found that we didn’t benefit from starting earlier. Outdoors, on the lower 7 acres, the cold frame is providing us with some chard, sorrel and arugula (the arugula is already bolting!). Steve put in  a bunch of peas and fava beans where the old goose pen was. There are trillium and squilla are blooming in the woods, and today the first sweet violet opened up. My favorite! On Cross Mountain, there was still snow–about a foot, and more in some places–so we have at least two weeks before we can start planting cold weather seeds. Still, there is plenty to do.

Lambs in the manger.