Staying busy in beautiful weather!

We've been outside much of the last few beautiful days working on the chicken house and in the garden.  John's finished the chicken "play yard" and I've been working on painting again.  Almost finished -- I ran out of stain again with only about 2 foot of the back wall to do (drat!!), so I started on the white trim.  I'll take a photo when I'm all done, but it looks like we're going to have a few cold/wet days coming, so it may have to wait a bit.

 The gate to the chicken play yard

The chicken from mom's apartment found a home at the entry to the play yard

Meanwhile, over in the greenhouse, the tomatillo plants are up.  I'm going to have to thin these out and re-pot soon. I hate thinning out plants, but I know it has to be done, we can only eat so many tomatillo.

Tomatillo, Green Husk

 Most of the tomato plants have their second, and in some places third set of leaves, so I started potting to bigger pots.  These have been buried up to their leaves to encourage more roots.  I've moved 6 of the 8 varieties that I started.

 I also started repotting some of the cabbages so they don't get to leggy.  These are the Dutch Flat cabbage.

We pulled out the old incubator that we bought many, many years ago, in order to try our hand with a few of the chicken eggs.  My mom always told me that the eggs that are "rounder" are usually hen eggs, and the eggs that are "longer/pointy" are roosters, so we're gonna test that old wives tale.  We're going to set 14 "rounder" eggs and see what we get.  The two white chickens that we believe are Easter Eggers, lay the most beautiful rosy colored eggs, so I'm making sure there are a few of those in this batch.  We'll see how we do -- I'm starting them on Sunday, Feb. 1st.  I hope the old incubator still works.

I found this little puff just sitting in the chicken play yard yesterday when I went out to let the girls out to play.  Some kind of animal was in there during the night -- John thinks it probably is rabbit or squirrel, but of course my mind went immediately to other predators.  Thankfully the flock is locked up nice and tight at night.