Lavender in the Strawberries

I tackled the strawberry bed yesterday morning. I still need to do some thinning, but the paths between the rows are clear. The strawberry bed is right next to the lavender hedge, so this was not a surprise:

It’s a lavender seedling. It can’t stay where it is, so I will dig it up and move it to a better location.

The lavender seeds I planted in a tray in the greenhouse never germinated, but seedlings pop up in all sorts of inappropriate places in the garden. Go figure.

The squash seedlings are looking good.

The garden and the greenhouse are my two favorite places to be right now.

******

I started a pair of long Free Range Slacks from some black linen yesterday. I got as far as cutting them out and attaching the pockets to the fronts. I am trying very hard to get out of the habit of not working on a project unless I can focus on it for hours and hours, because sometimes I only have 30 minutes. Even if all I can do is rethread the serger and finish some edges, that’s forward progress.

******

I bought four more chicks from WS. He incubated eggs last month, including one of our Leghorn eggs. He is keeping that one, but I am curious to see what that chick looks like, with Little Roo as the dad and a white Leghorn as the mom. All of the chicks seem to be getting along. A couple of the chicks might be roosters, but that’s the way genetics works. We will deal with that when the time comes.

I talk to Little Roo several times a day and I think he has learned his name. He stops and looks at me when I call him.

******

Our homestead foundation has a YouTube channel and I posted a new video to it yesterday. This video was produced by Rhianyon Larson for an eighth-grade history project in 2016. She placed at the state level and went on to the national competition. She has graciously shared the video with the foundation. It gives the history of our community—called Mountain Brook—and I thought some of you might like to see it. My friend Arlene Johnson makes an appearance and there are photos of some of the people who were our neighbors when we first moved here in 1994.

We really do love it here. This is a special place.