Baby Week

We seemed to be overrun with babies of one kind or another this week. We started the week off by stumbling across a mother turtle laying her eggs in garden #1.

This is our first turtle nest, so we read up on it and found that the mom turtle drops her eggs off and will not return to the nest. So we covered the area with chicken wire to prevent skunks and other egg stealing critters from getting into the nest. The interwebs say it will be seven to ten weeks before the eggs hatch, so we will be keeping an eye on the nest until Aug/Sept.
We have a rabbit with a family, we assume. She keeps pretty close to the new clover field, and since we don't have bees we figure the bunnies can eat themselves silly in the clover patch. Maybe they will stay out of the garden this year?

And on a garden related note, we managed to get in the garden and run the tiller through it. The rain has kept us from being able to work the soil for the past couple of weeks and we were about to get overrun by weeds.

After

We had to replant one row of beans and one row of corn. We also put in a new row of collards, because somebody has a huge collard fetish.
Our blueberry bushes are covered with fruit this year, so we're keeping our fingers crossed.

Lawman had a little free time this week, so he took a couple of jars of our canned tomatoes from the new shelves and picked fresh basil/oregano and made a batch of pizza sauce, then canned it. We are all set for pizza nights again.

Towards the end of the week we tackled what we thought would be a major job. Turns out it was pretty simple, if you overlook the massive spider that jumped off while we were working. The two or three regular readers will remember that Lawman is just one bad day away from setting the Junk Deere on fire. That day almost came last week when he tried to mow. He turned on the blades and the drive belt snapped. Amazon Prime got us the new belt by Friday, so we went ahead and installed it this weekend.

Lawman fired it up and it worked like a top. A top manufactured by Junk Deere, but it got the banks mowed. He also swapped out the blades and greased everything up while he had it apart.
Sunday evening when we gathered the eggs, we found new arrivals.

This little guy had just hatched, he was still wet when we picked him up.

This little guy had been hatched out for what looks like a whole day, but the six crazy birds in the box he hatched in apparently trampled him to death. Now that the guinea eggs are hatching, we will keep a close check on the box until all the eggs hatch to see if we can keep them alive.
We ended the week with wings.
K&K