Today my thoughts keep drifting away to the farm and what I want to do there. Not only the vegetable garden, though that is a big deal of course, but also the hens and hen house, the bees that I want to have, the orchard and the berries.
When the boys and I were visiting my father this weekend, I told him about wanting to have hens, about a half-dozen layers and a single cockerel. He asked how many eggs we would get, and I said "About 4 a day, once they get established, which takes about six months." I'm planning where to put the hen house, how big the yard needs to be, and where the hive would be to best effect for the garden as well as for the bees. At this point, it looks as though the first chicks will come in the spring, and the hive will probably come then as well.
And sometime before spring planting, the garden fence needs to go up (and up and up and up). We have picked out two places to enter the garden: one with an eight-foot gate to accommodate the tractor and one with a three foot gate that is more friendly to the two-legged folk. Of course, I want climbing flowers and shrubbery everywhere.
