Tired but .........

Phew... it was a long weekend here in more ways than one! Not only was it a holiday weekend, but it was when we ran the SCA event FOOL, which is a weekend of hands on classes. Lots and lots of work, but despite the rain, people seemed to have a lot of fun.

At the weekend event, I taught 2 classes. The first was on skirting and washing a fleece which went over surprisingly well, considering I really didn't think anyone would be that interested. However we had a full class, lots of laughter and fun, despite being under a sunshade in the pouring rain! The other class was an indigo dyeing class. It is a bit of a hurry up and wait class and really, I only taught it because a friend requested it. Normally I do Indigo as part of an all day class, with lots of other dye vats, so there is tons to do while waiting for the Indigo to reduce!

I came home to a jungle instead of a garden! The grass is now mowed and the garden is starting to look a bit more civilized. The weather turned really warm and the Arugula has bolted to seed before it was even big enough to harvest, not even a single leaf! I've got more seed and will start doing small plantings every couple of weeks to try to keep the greens coming. Although I really think we should have been harvesting by now, the weather didn't cooperate earlier in the spring.

I did get some tomatoes planted last night... yay... They still need an addition of a bit of top soil, but since tomatoes will grow roots from their stems and do well being planted quite deeply, it should be fine to add the soil on top.

Guess who has taken up residence in my greenhouse? Yes, the snake. I saw him on Monday when I got back from the event and worried that I'd gotten him on the shelf by accident and was in danger of starving. I couldn't figure out what would be worse, being startled by a snake or finding a dead snake. So I had my sweetie move the tray he was sleeping on out of the greenhouse and we prodded him out into the grass. He slithered around disoriented for a few moments and ran back towards the greenhouse. Since he lives UNDER the greenhouse, I wasn't worried. However he's been back several times since then. He obviously can get up there at will and must take delight in scaring the crap out of me. Hopefully he'll have moved by the time I want to plant the things he's currently napping on! The Chooks! Aren't they getting huge? You sure can see the size difference now between the white meaties and the black layers. The white ones are dual purpose heavy birds, but they take much longer to run on than the meat hybrids. I think if we do this again, we may just go with the hybrids which take only 8 weeks to mature. Chickens are little poop machines and that would be a much shorter time to deal with all that poo than the 16 weeks these boys will take!