After breakfast, Lindsay and I went into Manhattan to take a sewing class at City Quilter on how to make stuffies. We were asked to bring a couple of drawings, which we would then turn into stuffed felt creatures.

Lindsay made these two drawings:

After a few hours, she made them (with very little help from me) into these:

That evening Neil took us out to The Farm on Adderly, which specializes in seasonal, local and wild edibles. It was delicious!

This is a vintage hankie I found last weekend that I’m adding to my collection. Isn’t it sweet?

In the afternoon a Japanese tv crew came from El Mundo, which is a show on NHK. Folks who subscribe to NHK programming in the US can watch the show. They were covering lots of different angles on chicken keeping and we represented the backyard chickens as pets portion. The host, Hanna very gamely tried holding a chicken.

They were mainly interested in talking to Lindsay about her pet chickens. It was a little intense in the beginning for her, but she held her own and did a great job.

I’ll post links to these shows when they are available.

When the gallon-sized bag is full, I put everything in a stock pot and cover with a couple of inches of water. I simmer for about an hour, or until the aroma makes my feet lift off the floor and I float towards the kitchen.

I scoop the big pieces out and then pour the stock through a mesh strainer. Voila! It’s much better than those cartons of chicken stock. And it’s already made with everything I like to eat.

If you’ve spent time reading this blog, you will know that the soil in my garden isn’t great. The term to describe it is “rubble.” I don’t really trust growing food items directly in it. Besides the sunniest area of my garden is paved, so that limits my options. This has lead me to trying raised beds. I have a mish-mosh of containers that I hope are creative and fun and not reminiscent of the set of Sanford and Son.

These are the wine crates I salvaged last year. They are holding up well.

This year I’m not going to grow beans or try and coax tomatoes to grow in a partly sunny garden. I’m going to stick to herbs, which do very well in my yard. I love mixing flowers, herbs and vegetables together.

This Saturday Neil and I went on a morel foray. Although the spring has been extremely dry, it rained recently and we were hopeful that that would lead to some good morel hunting. Nope. Between about 60 people, only 4 morels were found. I wasn’t one of the ones who found one. Bummer. And it doesn’t help that a good friend from Seattle is practically tripping over morels in her garden. And doesn’t believe me when I tell her they are real morels. So she doesn’t eat them. Wah.

But, it was a beautiful sunny day out of the city. I can’t disclose the location, although with such poor results, I doubt anyone will be banging my door down to tell them. And I saw a turtle. You have to get excited about something, right?

This year we finally got smart. Over the last 8 years or so we have had a neighbor’s mulberry tree drop berries in our yard. I have very fond memories of climbing mulberry trees as a child and eating the sweet berries. That was never possible with this tree. The tree isn’t in our yard, so it’s not possible to climb the trunk. And the branches are so high that you cannot reach the fruit. So by the time the berries drop, they are already overripe and starting to ferment.

I am not a fan of people complaining about “messy” trees. The leaves, needles, pollen they produce are part of the package. This mulberry tree has gotten so large in the past couple of years that it shades and overhangs more than 1/3 of my garden. The chickens eat some of the berries, but really cannot make a dent. I lay out landscaping cloth during the 3 weeks of berry drop to catch the berries. You may have seen me waging war in recent years.

Anyhow, this year instead of complaining about it, we decided to do something about it. We hired an arborist to prune the branches that overhang our yard. Seems totally obvious, right? Well, when you are a renter, there is a weird mindset about paying for stuff like this. Anyhow, we are thrilled with the job they did. They had phone lines, a fence and our chicken coop as obstacles, but they didn’t hit any of them. It is money well spent to be able to avoid 3 weeks of rotting berries dropping on our backs when we are in the back of our garden.

We had the worm compost table next to the chickens, so the kids had a blast picking out worms and bringing them over to feed the chickens. The chickens ate like queens!

This little guy was smitten with the chickens. Whenever his mother lost him in the crowd, she just came back to me and there he was. She finally gave up and just hung out with us.

A friend brought her beekeeping equipment and lots of photos to show the kids about bees. She had popsicle sticks to dip into the honey for tasting. The smart kids used the sticks to dig for worms and then feed them to the chickens.

Hope you are having as much fun on Earth Day!

The white crabapple blossoms make your feet lift off the ground when you smell their scent. I know my neighbors are used to seeing me do strange things in the garden, so they probably don’t batt an eyelash seeing me standing under the tree sniffing for minutes on end.

You are looking at the crabapple blossoms, the double cherry tree (ornamental), my little apple tree, which is loaded with blossoms, a blueberry, the bleeding hearts, a Solomon’s Seal and a couple of ramps I planted last year.

Around Ground Hog’s Day the days get long enough to trigger my hens laying mechanism. This year I had new ones who layed all winter long. When March began my old biddies didn’t start laying. Weeks went by without an egg, so I thought they must have hit chicken menopause. They are almost 5 years old after all. Actually I have no idea when chickens stop laying.

A few days ago, however, I saw a green egg that looked slightly darker than Edie’s eggs. I wasn’t sure until a white egg appeared. Those belong to Andie my silver laced polish hen. Seems like my old gals have decided to begin laying at the solstice now.