Quiet Quarantine

We've been staying home, and it's been pretty quiet. In part because it turns out when you already work from home staying home is exactly like going to work.

I've been in the home stretch of a pretty time consuming project, which started like this in early April:

Fish and Chips on day one

Two teeeeny tiny little kittens, umbilical cords still attached. Both suffering severe dehydration and starvation. On the left is Fish, on the right, Chips.

Fish didn't make it. He went in to the shelter vet after a week of my attempts at nursing him back to health were failing, and they had him for a week before he just failed. The little kittens do that when they are separated from their mothers, it's what makes it hard to be a foster for the bottle fed kittens.

Chips had his own struggle, but he pulled through with only a slight developmental delay (from the starvation and also from not having another kitten) and here we are:

Big Chips

Last week there was the first round of vaccinations, next week is the second, and then... well, the shelter is still fostering all their pets out so he may be here a while.

In the meantime, we have the chickens permanently moved outside to the chicken tractor while we refurbish the chicken coop.

Chicken tractor

They've been there for a few weeks now, and today we decided they needed fresh grass to destroy and moved the tractor over one width:

Moved the chicken tractor

They have been hard at work in there, eating everything green. There's one of them who keeps digging holes which is pretty typical chicken behaviour, but funny when they are in this awkward teenage stage.

Chicken

It took us a while to get it set up right, but you can watch them on our chicken cam. They can be pretty amusing, especially because they like to perch on the camera.

Anyway, it's the start of fruit season in the garden, and even though we've been cutting down trees to reshape the garden space, we have a bunch.

Mulberries

The mulberry is amazing. This tree doesn't fit the garden plan perfectly but it is staying because I love this fruit. Bunny and I go outside every time I take a break and enjoy it -- she snuffles around for fruit on the ground, I shake i off the branches.

Cherries

It was a rough year for cherries. There was late rain which ruined a lot of the flowers, so we had a pretty limited set this year. The few we've gotten have been really nice, but we're talking a handful.

Blood oranges

We cut down a lot of the citrus that got out of control or sported heavily during the construction, but the blood orange is still in pretty OK shape. We turn out to not really use a lot of blood orange except the occasional marmalade, so I'm undecided on this tree.

Apples

In future fruit, the apple trees that survived construction are doing well.

Asian pears

And the Asian pears, as well, though of course they have fireblight. I read a whole lot about fireblight last week and have some new ideas for handling it but the fact that the city has a tree full of the stuff that they don't maintain burns me.

So that's what we have been up to. I keep planning an afternoon off work to do some digging in the garden and getting rained on as soon as I walk outside, so not much has happened since we got past the stage of bottle feeding the kitten every hour. But we have time and so far our health, and everything is going to be OK.

posted by ayse on 05/13/20