Moving day

Sorry for the lack of updates over the last week! We got dumped on with 4" of snow, which promptly melted 2 days later. It was pretty pointless, but thankfully it's passed now, and we're back into the green of spring.

Moving Day is fast approaching here at the homestead. No, not for me - but for many of the residents here, it's that time of year when chickens, sprouts, and even snakes get ready to leave their cribs and head out into new homes.

The chicks are now approaching 4 weeks of age, and nearly all of them are fully-feathered. Once the coop is painted and the fencing installed, I'll be moving them out of the brooder, and into their coop. I'm actually pretty nervous about it - all the "what if's" are flooding my brain. What if they get eaten by Bodie, the red-tailed hawk that sits, mocking me, at the corner of the barn every morning? What about the stray dogs that have been frequenting my property the last couple of weeks? What if one of them escapes the pasture, and ends up in the neighbor's yard? And so it goes, on and on.

I knew this day would come eventually. Now I just need to be a good chicken mom, and let them go their merry way out into their new, pastured, almost-free-range world. It's just much harder than I thought it would be. I've been comforting myself with the thought of them strutting happily around the grounds.

Secondly, many of the sprouts are ready to be transplanted into larger containers. I'm approaching this with a lot less trepidation than the chickens' big move, but not completely without stress. To be honest, I've never transplanted seedlings before. It seems like such an important step, the last one before they hit the ground in mid-May. I think I'm feeling a bit gun-shy after I found some of my Cherry Roma tomato seedlings wilted this morning.

Lastly, my Puget Sound garter snake yearling is just about ready to move into a planted terrarium. She's been living in my hatchling rack (like a chest of drawers, but for snakes) for the past several weeks while I bought supplies to build her new home. But, with fences to put up, self-watering containers to build, raised beds to install, and coops to paint, I'm just not sure when it will be done.

A hobby farm is such an enjoyable thing. A busy, project-filled thing, but very enjoyable nonetheless.