I can't believe it's been a little over a week!

I haven't blogged in about a week, so I thought I'd better take some pictures and document what I've been up to.  The huge project that we NEEDED to accomplish was "Project Turkey Pen."  Those things were smelling up my bathroom, and they needed to get outside.  They have now been out for two nights, and they seem pretty content so far.

This is my first attempt at uploading a video to my blog.  I thought that video of my turkeys happily roaming around in their house would be better than a picture.  We have two turkeys.  Peepers (formally known as Dot) and Fluff.  Fluff is really small.  I think that it might be a female.  Peepers is getting huge.  I'm pretty sure that Peepers is male.  He was doing some strutting this morning, and using his wings to herd Fluff around their "house."  I'm not sure if you call it a turkey coop, or what.  I think that after the amount of work that Tim has done making this little turkey house (which would convert nicely to a chicken coop) he might be a little more open to getting chickens in the future.  He keeps calling it a chicken coop, and said that if something happened to the turkeys, he'd let us get a little flock of chickens.

Our First Free Day of Summer

Of course, it wasn't totally free.  We had lunch plans and a couple of errands to run.  But, we also got a bunch of little chores done and I was able to run around the yard with my camera.  The plants are loving this heat.  I got six more tomatoes in the ground today and I weeded around some of my onions.  My goal is to weed around one kind of plant a day, so I can keep ahead of things.  Today was the day to weed around the red onions.  It looks strange from the house to have a bunch of green in the garden with a little patch of brown :)  I have a lot of work to do!

Yesterday we worked on trimming bushes.  I weed wacked around our front bushes.  I also trimmed some unruly bushes in the front.  As I was trimming them by hand, I noticed a little nest!  In the nest are four little blue eggs.  I was judging from the size of the nest and the size of the eggs that I had discovered a wren nest.  Sure enough, today when I went back to take a picture of the nest, a little wren flew into the tree and watched me closely.  So, I took a picture of the mom/dad, too. 

I got some lovely tomatoes in the ground today, and was setting up the sprinkler system when I noticed how large my strawberries are getting.  They are looking great!  The project for this morning, which Alex and Kenzie helped me with, was putting newspaper down as paths.  I've been saving paper for quite some time, and I had three huge bags full.  I spent an hour the other day shredding paper to mulch around my plants.  It's supposed to be perfect mulch.  The water gets through to the roots of the plants, but the light doesn't reach the weeds to help the germinated seeds grow.  Perfect!  I watered down my paper mulch and happily went on my way to the Pizza Hut buffet.....

When we returned, to our dismay, we found the paths and mulch blowing around in the garden.  I thought that wetting it down would make things "stick" in place, but I was wrong.  I'll try again a few times.

The strawberries are looking great!  The lemon mint is very healthy (plants for sale for $1 each!) and the tomatoes are starting to take off.  It's starting off pretty good!  Just a couple of critter casualties so far, but I think things are looking great!

Here We Grow!

Things are getting bigger here!  The turkeys are getting their adult feathers in and the birds in the houses are getting bigger and stronger.  We had three tiny bluebirds in one of our houses.  Today, we took an updated picture of the babies, but we couldn't tell how many of them there are.  I love the funky feathers above their eyes.  Here are the before and after pictures:

The strawberries have gone wild, and there are little strawberries all over in the garden!  Along with little green mulberries, little green blackcaps, and (most excitedly) little green apples!

Here are my little apples!  I didn't think that I would have any apples at all this year, because only one of my two trees blossomed.  I don't even have any crab apple blossoms.  However, I have these little apples on the only tree that did blossom.  I'm not sure how that happened!
I can't remember when the crab apple normally blossoms, but I kind of thought it was around this time of year.  But, it's doing nothing.  For the first time, I've only had a couple of tents to deal with from the tent worms.  We took care of them naturally this year, so I didn't have to worry about chemicals!


We have little corn sprouts popping up in the garden, though I think they are unhappy that I didn't water them.  It was supposed to rain three different days, and it didn't rain on any of them.... so my plants were waiting for the natural rain.  They would still be waiting!

Friday morning I got my front flower bed planted before school.  I was up at six and had the bed in the ground by seven.  18 wave petunias, 24 impatiens, and 2 gerbera daisies later, and I had a flower bed!  I don't like flowers because you can't eat them and they have no practical use, but I have to admit that it looks nice when people come to my house!  I have to get the pots for my deck planted, still.  But, I think I'll be able to do that tomorrow :)

I'm not able to upload pictures of the corn OR of my kids with a painted turtle.... but I'll try to do that on a different day.