T minus 7 days

The weekends before a huge party are an excellent time to start large projects that you've been thinking about doing for over a year, right? right??

We've been wanting to move these huge planter boxes forEVAH. They are lovely, but we can't sit and watch the kids in the pool from the cool comfort of the shady lanai because of them.
Finally on Friday, Tyson and the gang came over to move them. Here they are, that am.
After they've gone. Everything seems SO much more open! But we can't leave it like that. Kids could purl off of the edge
GB and I spent 3 hours at Home Depot shopping for planters to go there. We brought back a bunch of stuff. Here we're laying out some red pots and some whitish planters.
Stand back and look..... hmmmm.... not sure if we like this.

Fortunately we also had Lena there helping. She and GB were chatting about what to do and GB remembered that we have a TON of terra cotta pots that he brought back from Thailand.

Much Better!

Here it is.... almost done! We had bought way more plants than we needed. Looks great!
Cora helped too! She planted petunias in these planters that already have stuff in them

Voila!

Planters in their new locale.... waiting to be filled (that's a future project- there are humongous!)

And... our 1st Ruby Red Grapefruit!!! This tree was a gift from the Biermans for our housewarming, last October 2008. Young tree produced 5 grapefruit.

this one was juicy and ONO!

What's new

New stuff around the house!

Awesome bar GB found on craigslist. Here we are, breaking it in, on my birthday.


New pond. This is the 1st filling. It's leaking somewhere a bit. So we need to reseal it.More CONCRETE! Here, Eli and crew are working on steps to the chickens.

Beautiful sunrise

a few trees

For the purposes of record-keeping.
Yesterday I planted 3 trees I picked up at the school Country Fair. I was going to get one, but since I had the tree on hold, by the end of the day the trees were all $10.

I came home with a dwarf valencia orange, navel orange and soursop.

Planted all 3 yesterday.

the Teen clears hau

Ra'am has been clearing the hau on the hillside this summer (and beyond).

Here he is, way zoomed in- standing on a horizontal log, and whacking away.

See if you can spot him here, when I zoom out

The Flock Groweth

Egg production has been low this summer. Between molting birds, lunar or other phenomena, we've been getting only 3ish eggs a day. That sounds like a decent amount, but not when you've got 1 teen, 1 almost teen, 1 preschooler and 2 adults. And, mama likes to bake.

So I went out and got us some more hens. We got 6 new ones, to add to the 8. Here are our original ones (all except for one broody hen, who has not left her nest in what seems like an eon). The babes (2 month old) are in that dog crate. I kept them separate for some days, as I didn't want the older hens to peck them too badly. Being henpecked is a real thing.
Here are the chicks. They are a mix of rhode island red (dad) and rhode island white (mama)- those breeds are 2 completely separate ones, according to our book.

First taste of the outside worldThis lady took a field trip with me over to where GB was planting grass. She'd never seen grass.

Luka enjoyed the small birdsand Makalena (not so small)

GRASS!

Our attempt to beat out the weeds.

Adding plugs to the lawn

GRASS!

the Pond

In our effort to get done some of the projects we don't seem to ever have time to get to...

We hired Heather and Anneke (of Green Lady Gardening) to make a pond for us. This pond will use the overflow from the water tank, provide a home for tillapia (which we may eat) and ducks.

On this day, Heather and Anneke had laid out the liner and were filling up the pond... and having way too much fun!

Of course it was so hot outside, I had to join in the fun!

Remiss bloggers

Well apparently we've been really remiss in our blogging! Here it is, almost October, and there hasn't been an update since June!?!?! Maybe that means we haven't done any work here? LOL! Many projects have been started, some completed, some hired out....
I checked out my cache of photos and found these lovelies, taken by Luka, one July 4th.

I couldn't say *exactly* what we did this day. It's part of the whole fix-up-the-corner-of-the-house-and-the-walkway-to-the-chickens.

Clearly we were prepping for concrete

as usual, I am the mixer. it's like making bread

GB placing stones

teamwork

intrepid photographer self-portrait

birds part 2 and more goats

We managed to finish the fencing yesterday and let the birds into their new enclosure. Everyone participated!
So far the hens have only explored the 1st couple of feet of it, and have been mostly concentrating on taking apart the berm they created against the bottom of the old fence.
GB mostly worked on another concrete intensive project- a walkway on 2 sides of the new chicken run. Here's an area he set up where the drainage pipe for the hillside will go under the walkway and then into the chicken run area and into a pond.
Most of his day was framing on this big project that will make it a lot easier to walk around and near the birds.


Our other weekend project was setting up the electric moveable goat fencing. We 1st put them under the big mango tree.... the grass was high there, there's tons of shade, and we could keep an eye on them from the house.

They came easily to the new enclosure and all seemed good until....
They came to the fence-line (to come to us) and when the 1st one got zapped by the fence and screamed, the others freaked and they all ran right into the fence and were immediately entangled! I ran to unplug the electricity and GB and I had a hell of a time trying to untangle them. We were almost ready to scrap the whole thing after that. It was scary.
But we tried again- with GB standing guard (and taking his lunch out with them). They have mostly stayed away from the fence since. They will touch it occasionally, but have seemingly learned their lessons!

We've been putting them in there in the day and then taking them back up to their paddock at night.
Yesterday was so beautiful and GB and I enjoyed the light as we went up to put them to bed.

Here I am feeding them a bit on the way up. They will do anything for food

birds!

There's been a lot of bird related action and activities around here lately!
Firstly our friends were the lucky caregivers of a teeny bird who fell out of her nest. When they came for a visit, so did the birdie, who needed feeding every couple of hours.


Family project #3,462
Expand our chicken run
Our ladies have done a fine job creating all sorts of erosion on their hillside enclosure. There is not one speck of green there and they have made holes and dips.... and they just needed more space!
1st day:
GB, Karen, Noam and Luka are the primary workers. Ra'am is sick this day.
We're lucky.... in a work trade, David has set most of the poles for the fencing in the ground. He's also (with Ra'am's help) dug a trench on the gulch side so we can bury the fence.

Here's were getting ready

Noam tied fence to the T posts. There are a lot of T posts

There's a gate down there at the bottom. GB is on his way back up after helping Noam a bit.

Pau Hana! It's HOT, we're tired and the pool is calling!Expanded run.... more fencing still needed on the bottom (we needed MORE), but this part is done for now. You can see the brown part on the top (old area). The new part is the green to the left and below.

Luka helped for awhile, and then explored what it feels like to drown out sound.

Shortly thereafter, Ra'am found this baby bird under the big mango tree. He's a cardinal who must have fallen out when he tried to fly. The nest is impossibly high, so we cared for him for a couple of hours and then passed him on to the Pelkeys to rear.

Unrelated...

Luka in swimming lessons!

Weekend Warriors

Yesterday Karen and I cleaned the koi pond and took the muck to feed the citrus trees. We also worked on propagating the Ti plants along the side of the house. Well, two weeks of stress at work manifested in my back going totally out yesterday after cleaning the pond, so today I was staff photographer while Karen and Ra'am did concrete work on the garden steps.