More yard work and the ebb and flow of prepping

Of course yard work never ends.  It doesn't end for people with postage stamp sized lots, I don't know why I'd think it would ever end here!  We got 1/3 inch of rain last night which gave everything a really good soaking.  Maybe the lawn seed that I threw out last week will grow.  I hadn't watered it I just spread it around the yard.  I also hope some of the oats and wheat grow.  Again, I didn't plant them the proper way which would have meant disking the soil prior to throwing the seed out or using a plug to plant the seed into the ground.  No, I just threw out the seed and hoped for the best. 

We are missing one of the two chickens that I put out in the front pasture.  I have a feeling that it got carried away by a hawk or something.  Yip-yip can't get in.  There are no feathers showing evidence of a struggle by some other creature.  It's not walking around the neighbor’s yards.  It just disappeared.  The other chicken is lonely. We are going to get some new chickens this year in addition to what's in the coop.  I was thinking about putting the older chickens out front and keeping the younger ones in the coop as my new layers.  Can chickens survive ok if they've lived their lives in a coop and then you let them go?  Will they know enough to scratch and peck for enough food?     

This morning I got up and planted the 30 new strawberry plants.  I also extended the hose out front to water the new raspberry plants.  I still only have two of the ten raspberry plants in the ground but I'll be more comfortable getting them planted now that there is water out to them. Living in a place that must have irrigation makes me day-dream about living somewhere that has enough rain to only need irrigation during times of draught. 

That was all the yard work I got accomplished today that has to do with being more self sufficient.  The wind blew hard last night and tore off one of the panels of the shed that covers our trash/recycles/firewood.  That had to get fixed before the rain starts again.  I worked for 8 hours today just like I'm supposed to.  Boy was home from school for Lincoln's birthday holiday and had a friend over.  Girl didn't get back from Army daughter's house until right before dinner.

We had a completely home grown dinner tonight.  The kids were not at all happy with me!  I made chicken liver from the chickens we butchered, which I like and they don't.  I also made mashed potatoes with the end of our home grown crop.  I was able to harvest some tomatoes off the plants that I dug up and potted before frost.  They didn’t taste great but at least they weren't store bought.  I chopped up the tomatoes with a fresh onion from the storage bins in the garage.  There are only a couple of onions left.  I added cilantro and made fresh salsa as our vegetable.  The kids don't like fresh salsa.  They'd rather it was canned to meld the flavors together and to lessen the sharpness of the onion.  We had home made lemonade from the lemons in the garden.  It was an odd dinner as the salsa and lemonade didn't go well with the liver and potatoes. 

Dinner was sort of like my prepping mood this past week.  Every once in a while I get the attitude that I have to rush and get everything as ready for the end of things as I can.  Not this week.  My attitude has been more of who cares; I'd rather be oblivious to the problems of the world.  Nothing bad is going to happen anyway.  That doesn't stop me from doing prep work; it’s just running through my head that I'm wasting my time.  I know that preparing is extremely important, and probably a life saving effort, but that's my mood lately.  Perhaps it's because it's still winter and I'm just starting to get the winter doldrums. 

An end note of no particular importance...on the way to Army daughter's house yesterday I asked the grand kids if they could guess what we were going to eat.  They had no clue.  I guessed fried tacos, chili and Fritos, or spinach ravioli.  Then I said that it would be fried tacos because last time we had ravioli and the time before that chili.  They knew I was going to be wrong and she was going to make us something we've never had before.  We had fried tacos.