The Chicks Experience the Great Outdoors!

The coop is secured for day use.

We still have a few more things to do before we can leave the cluckers alone,

and we need to build the hen box for overnighting, but ...

the cluckers got their first taste of the great outdoors today!

They're not to sure what to make of it at first.
Peep! Peep Peep!
(Translation: Let us out!)
Peep Peep Peep! Peep! Peep! Peep!
(Translation: Don't let the dog eat us!)

Henrietta 2 makes a bolt it

Claudette follows close behind.

But Waltzing Maltilda beats them to the food and water first!

After a beakful of eating and drinking, the cluckers are ready to settle

down for a nap in the mottled sunshine.

Then seemed to really enjoy their time outdoors!

In other news of the day, I went to the market with my friend Lisa this morning. Today's finds were potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, rainbow carrots, yellow squash, walla-walla sweet onions, BBQ grilling sauce. Then I had a delicious breakfast of buckwheat pancakes and scrambled eggs out on the deck at Lisa's house. Yum!

Then it was time to brave the sun and transplant lots of mint to the trench around the coop.

Boy, did I ever get dirty!

Next: Harvest time in the garden. Today's bounty included lots of strawberries, peas, kale, zucchini, chives, basil, sage, parsley, and cilantro. Tomorrow, it will be time to add compost around the veggies and turn over the worm bin.

For dinner, I made a pasta dish with turkey medallions sauteed with the zucchini, kale, and roasted garlic. I served this up with a light sage "cream" sauce and topped the dish with a bit of parmesean and chives. The side dish was a bowl of broiled nectarines with sliced stawberries.

From the garden to the table, can't get much fresher!

And a final cluck:

Check out the new book finds.

A Slice of Organic Life edited by Sheherazade Goldsmith and

The Self-Sufficient Life by John Seymour.

These ones are great!

Both are DK books with terrific pictures and oodle of information,

everything from how to bake bread to grow box herbs to keeping chickens to making goat cheese to collecting food from the wild to brweing beer and digging a pond,

and much, much more!