Growing (A Garden While Trying Not To Crockpot Your Hens)

All those peas? Those two-thousand-plus cute sugar snaps and snow pod seedlings nurtured since two weeks before the last expected frost (or thereabouts)?

Scratched to oblivion by the suddenly not-so-cute chickens while I ran away to the coast for a weekend.

What's with me and running away anyways? Should be apparent by now that the causes of my flight response will STILL BE THERE when I return.

Ah, well. It's not too late to plant another couple thousand pea seeds. It's just that I was feeling so together about the spring garden timeline. It was my momentary though ill-advised foray into planning ahead. And we all know where that leads. To crushing disappointment and more scrambling to catch up, that's where.

Meanwhile, back at the farm:

Sarah is a bit more energetic after being on prednisone and (perhaps more relevantly) receiving visits from her much-loved grandma, auntie and cousin all last week. We are glad she's feeling better while we're waiting for two more cultures to grow in a mysterious research lab at a highly respected children's hospital. That sounds like fun. What if you were the lab personnel? "Let's go weave a replica of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling out of recycled grocery sacks... might as well since the cultures are growing."

We released the pullets, our two surviving adorable Americauna chicks who are now the chicken equivalent of stinky teenagers, into the big girls' house. The hens completely ignore their new little friends, as we should expect from respectable dowagers. The rooster, on the other hand, thinks it's his job to keep the pullets in the henhouse. He gets VERY bent out of shape when they want to venture into the chicken yard unattended. Thus the chickens were let to scramble through the kitchen garden while I was away. Thus the death of my pea starts. More depression.

My goal of completing a month of Nablopomo is miserably failed before it's half (a quarter?) over. I did take my laptop with me this weekend but didn't crack it except to watch the first half of Nights in Rodanthe. I had to fall asleep halfway through, now didn't I?

My other goal of completing the girls' Easter dresses is similarly halted by my now-familiar pattern of overflowing optimism and creative splurge followed by frustration centered around a lack of planning. Who knew hand smocking would be this hard? Suddenly the exorbitant prices on those boutique babies are seeming rather reasonable (and by "boutique babies" I mean of course the dresses -- I know of no boutique where one can buy a baby and if I did I may never have suffered through the ultimate creative splurge-creation panic cycle of pregnancy and childbirth).

Today my goal is small. I will strive to make no more bastard verbs. Reference title and the awkward "Trying Not To Crockpot Your Hens." I'll try. Not to cook them, and not to wrangle any more words into positions they never deserved.