Mo’ sno’

Tino
Chris, Tino and Rebecca

We awoke to snow twice this week.  The first time was just a ground covering and the second was barely that, but moisture is moisture.  There are tiny remnants of last week’s snow while the two this week are gone.  I put some pine needles I’d raked down in front of the chicken yard gate and used some bricks to make a path to it so Joyce wouldn’t slip and break her neck.  We’re not used to mud.  It has been wintery all week so not much got done outside.  I assembled the bed frames for the second garden row.  Working inside the shop out of the wind, the temperature is about right.  I’m looking forward to next week in balmy Connecticut.

As I said, outside projects were few and far between but I did make a start on getting the berry patch a little easier to maintain.  Maybe you didn’t know about the berry patch.  Long, long ago my Uncle Marshal raised pheasants.  Why I don’t know, but he offered me a couple.  I told Dad and that being right up his alley he built a cage to house them.  In later years he kept some banty chickens in there.  When I moved back Genna and I tore down the old chicken house and removed the rusty chicken wire from the cage, which is about 12 feet by 12 feet.  Then Joyce decided to plant some blackberry bushes in it but has trouble keeping the birds from harvesting the berries before she can.  She’s tried bird block netting which works OK but it creates a maintenance headache for me.  More than once while trying to mow around it I’ve gotten the netting tangled up in the mower which is good for neither the mower nor the netting.  Also, one of the bushes is outside the cage area, making it that much more difficult to protect with the netting.  So, the plan is to move that bush into the cage area, clean up and repaint the pipe frame, put metal edging from the garden rows around the edge so I can trim against it and put chicken wire back on the frame.  It was too muddy to move the bush so I gathered up the pieces of brick we’d used to hold down the landscaping cloth which was put down to prevent weeds and grass from growing around the bushes.  I used the bricks to build the path across the mud to the chicken yard.  I also removed the wire strands Chris had strung around. He must have been thinking they would support the bushes similar to the way the grapevines are supported by a wire but the bushes down grasp the wire the way a grapevine does so they really don’t do anything but get in the way.  Hopefully next weekend I’ll be able to move the bush.  That should happen before the season advances much further.  There is plenty of time to work on painting and putting up chicken wire.  It will be a while before there are berries that need protecting.