Finnie- Finally A Journal

[Finnie]

Lovely site -- and bird housing! No way my chickens get to see that.. Chicken strike!!

I do see the neighbors house, so that's closer than expected from the road. But doable! Lot of open green in the back.

Chicken strike for sure! I only got 23 eggs yesterday from 63 laying-age hens. (Plus 9 older hens that I don’t expect much from. My 2 oldest are 8 years old, but I see them on a nest occasionally.)

Usually I expect production to go down during the worst of the summer heat, then back up once the weather breaks, then down again when they molt, then back up again until winter solstice. They skipped the upswing this year and have gone directly to molt. I just hope they stagger themselves this year. The past 2 years they went down to zero eggs per day during the molt, and that’s something I don’t usually see until winter. And even then I usually still have several laying when the others quit.

 

[Finnie]

I’ve never had geese. A neighbor has geese and he loves his gander. The gander leads his girls up from the lake to the house every evening for corn. He keeps the dogs in line too and quickly teaches any puppy the Goose Rules.

A lake or even a small pond is one of the boxes I want to tick for my next property. Even if we have to dig a pond ourselves. My geese would be so happy with a real pond instead of wading pools.

 

[Mini Horses]

No geese here either. At a previous farm we dug a pond on brim of pastures & low land. It filled beautifully and we had some ducks. But, turtles arrived took out ducklings we had an island in middle, so adults used that. Funny thing was one of my mini horses used to take occasional swim in summer

Geese can be good guards for some things.

 

[Finnie]

Funny thing was one of my mini horses used to take occasional swim in summer

Aw, that is awesome! I can just picture it. Happy horsey!

Sad about the ducklings. Snapping turtles can be a problem around here too. I’ll have to keep that in mind.

 

[Finnie]

So my DH has been on a trip, and the first day he was gone, I sat around on the internet and ordered African violets.

They got here on Thursday. The first group is from Lyndon Lyons. I ordered 2 violets, 1 streptocarpus and 1 primulina. This is my first primulina. I’m sure that if I like how it grows and blooms, I will get more of them.

I indicated no substitutions, so I only got one of my violets because the other one was unavailable.

Standard violet “Sunrise Tide”

Left to right, Streptocarpus “Neil’s Circus”, Sunrise Tide again, Primulina “Naine Argente”

The second group I got off eBay. The seller has a really good shipping policy if you order multiple plants. First one at full shipping price, and then $1 more per plant for each additional one. So I got 4 from her. 3 Streptocarpus and 1 trailing African violet.

Streptocarpus “DS Strawberry”

Streptocarpus “UA Tiramisu”

(When it blooms, it should have white flowers speckled with purple.)

Trailing African violet “Ellie Gardner”

(Will get light pink flowers and if I can keep it alive long enough, it should trail over the sides of the pot and hang down.)

And Streptocarpus “Franken Blackberry Lace” (my favorite so far!)

Then wouldn’t you know, I was at Lowes on Wednesday and saw this beautiful violet that I’ve never run across at any of the big box stores before, so I had to snap it up too.

I blame all this on @farmerjan - if she hadn’t posted about ordering violets from Violet Barn, I wouldn’t have even known there were all these different varieties you could get! Or that streptocarpus and other gesneriads even existed! It’s all her fault!

 

[Mini Horses]

Go ahead, blame her!! it really IS her fault

The last one, flowers look like mini roses. You were alone there -- who do we blame for that one??

 

[Finnie]

DH, of course! Else I wouldn’t have been at Lowes all alone!

 

[Finnie]

So he’s been away for a week on a motorcycle trip with one of his riding buddies. He gets home tonight and has tomorrow to rest up and then leaves Monday morning for a work trip to England. Will get home from that one on Friday.

So I’ve got a little less than a week of my “staycation” left. I thought I would get a lot of stuff accomplished around here, what with not having to stop and cook dinner most nights. The weather has been wonderful. I don’t know why I haven’t accomplished more. I did get all the mowing done last weekend. Did a feed run to TSC today. Hauled all 25 bags to the cans in the storage shed out back. And the reason I was at Lowes was to get mulch for all the flower beds. Got that, but also accidentally brought home 10 more perennials to plant. Thought I was almost done planting for the year. Just wanted a few mums and a couple more plumbago. But they had lots of plumbago on the clearance rack, so I bought 6! I was really good and didn’t buy them all! But then later I wished I had bought them all, and I only talked myself out of going back for the rest because I told myself they were probably already gone by now.

I did tell myself that if I was good and got all these 10 plants in the ground promptly, that I can go back and look for pansies to add around them. And then check if any plumbago are left. But I really need to wrap up the planting tasks so I can focus on fall coop cleaning and winter prep.

 

[Finnie]

I wasn’t sure where I was going to put all my new plants. I kind of want to keep them a little bit away from my old plants. I finally decided to move a tray of plants off the kitchen counter and put the new ones in that space.

The tray of old plants got moved to the window seat in the living room. That’s a north window, so violets usually do pretty well there.

These old ones are in sad need of repotting. I’ve had them 8 months and they should be blooming by now.

 

[Mini Horses]

So he’s been away for a week on a motorcycle trip with one of his riding buddies.

. You deserved to buy more plants!!!