First hard working day of Spring

Today was my first hard-working day of spring. Unfortunately, I woke up with a slight hang-over, and was not excited to get up and get going, but in hindsight, I'm glad I just busted through. Now it's early in the afternoon (tea-time) and I have sore muscles and a sense of accomplishment.

Our main tasks today were to clean out the chicken/duck coop and to set up our deer-netted bed.

We clean the coop seasonally, and especially in the winter when the birds just want extra insulation, we just add more bedding as needed. We use pine shavings and straw. We shoveled and swept the debris out, scraped it out, scrubbed it clean, hosed it out and are now waiting for it do dry in the sun and wind. Will carried bins and bins of coop bedding down to the garden compost. I just had to crawl inside the ammonia smelling coop to scrape it clean and scrub it until my knuckles bruised. No big.

Last summer Will made a perimeter around one of the beds in the garden with deer netting that we got from my sister when she moved to Colorado. (The stuff is expensive but super useful!). This year, we wanted to expand it and do it early enough that we could plant all season in there. The perimeter of the bed is deer netting about 3 or 4 feet up, staked into the ground, and with boards holding it down on the outside to discourage tunneling under by our frenemies. We managed to salvage all the boards we needed from the property, especially along the riverbank. Will mentioned that it made him feel like the Nearings, gathering driftwood from the sea and building with it.

We saw an intact but dead vole and a mostly intact but dead garter snake. There must be another cat around, because we couldn't think of any animals that would kill them and then not eat them. We checked for ramps and fiddleheads on the island, but they aren't popping up yet. Still a few more weeks for those!

Before

After.  Of course, bedding was added next.