Big Days Going By...Thankfully, Less Veg

The last of the counter-top tomatoes! Soo excited about this! There are more in the garden, but they're not as plentiful. I've even been feeding tomatoes fresh off the vine to the chickens, just because I'm tired of tomato labor. I have many, many pounds of roasted tomato glut sauce in the freezer and many canned jars.

A handful of pole beans, a scrawny cucumber, and two gorgeous, huge red peppers.

Some more carrots, yellow squash, and sigh, more tomatoes.

Two kids on their first day of school today! S is starting 5th grade and Little E, kindergarten. Neither was sad to see me leave this rainy morning. Which is great, I'm glad they're so excited about school. Little E is my baby though (at least for a few more weeks). I kept asking him as he sat at his spiffy new desk with his name tag on, "Are you okay? Do you need to use the restroom? Here's your water bottle. Are you all right?" YES, MOM! I managed not to cry until I made it back to the car. Bittersweet, but exciting!

In other news, we picked up two new pullets last night from a lovely local woman with a lot of chickens. Our current birds are two Rhode Island Reds and two silver-laced Wyandottes. The reds are awesome layers. The Wyandottes, not so much. One the Wyandottes lays maybe 2 times a week if we're lucky. The other gal, not at all. She's huge and lovely, but completely daffy as chickens go- which isn't saying much. So sadly, she's stew pot bound. Having an ordinance on the number of chickens we can have makes keeping a non-layer sort of difficult. I really don't mind paying for her room and board, as it were, but I'd really like to have all our birds be layers. I just read about "lazy layers" in the recent issue of Backyard Poultry. Their physical characteristics totally match Spot's (our non-layer). Big bird without a comb on her head, hard abdomen, pubis that doesn't have a palpable separation... sort of interesting.

The two new birds are Black Australorps. If the garden weren't so wet, muddy and full of mosquitoes right now, I'd walk out and take a picture, but I can't muster myself to do so. They're beautiful shiny, sheeny, healthy teenage girls who are just starting to lay.
Spot the lazy layer will be processed soon. Dotty, the hit or miss layer might just be relocated to my friend's farm very soon. Hopefully she'll be goaded into action by being surrounded by so many happy, laying chickens, or at least like free-ranging with a couple handsome rooster around.

In the meantime, we've made it through birthday parties, a blessingway, back to school night, the first day of school without any births upsetting the schedule. 3 more women due ahead of me. I'm looking forward to finishing up the garden once and for all, to having a freer calendar, and to meeting this baby. I'm so ready for it!