A quick update from the homestead:

Lady Avery has been doing some AMAZING jumping lately.  We keep setting up barricades to keep her from wandering into the driveway (after a scary incident where our neighbor returned her, having caught her right before she walked out into the busy street)… and Lady Avery keeps jumping over every barrier!  Yesterday we left her in her pen, which has a 36″ fence, and we found her wandering in the driveway at the end of the day… pen closed… somehow, she jumped over the fence!

So, there is clearly only one thing to do.  Clip her wings.  I’ll try to document the process.  It’s kind of like giving someone a haircut.  No pain or anything.  But I haven’t clipped hers ever… I feel a little bad, but it’s for her own good.

The beans, peas & edamame I planted in the ground are all sprouting.  Indoors, my pots of tomatoes, broccoli, basil, lettuce and onion are all poking up through the soil.  This is a great place to be at for early March.

Last weekend we went to a dinner party, before which we provided the host with eggs, parsley and tomatoes from our garden.  It felt great to be able to contribute to the meal with food we’ve helped bring into this world in one way or another.

Farmer market news – it’s heavy citrus season.  I’m excited for the moment, any day now, when the market gets so glutted with grapefruits that big, beautiful ones are only 50 cents each.  Then I’m gonna buy a bunch and make one of my all-time favorite sorbets:  grapefruit champagne!  YUM!!  I love the flavor of grapefruit.  And grapefruit in a frozen refreshing treat format is even better.  mmmmm.

Also at the market — yummy young asparagus.  More and more strawberries (the season never really ends her in Cali, it’s just a matter of how many are available and how cheap they are).  Lots of greens.  Apples.  and as previously mentioned, citrus: oranges, grapefruit, mandarins, blood oranges, oro blanco, etc etc.

back to work!

Well, it was a very eventful weekend in our garden!  After prepping the soil as best we could (adding compost from Griffith Park and from our own pile) and a good week of rain, I planted a bunch of vegetable seeds outside -

Green beans

Edamame (really cute little round green seeds)

Sugar Snap Peas

Spinach

Romaine Lettuce

Butterhead Lettuce

And a bunch in pots to start inside -

Tomatoes (3 varieties)

Onions

Sweet Bell Peppers

Basil (3 varieties to see what will sprout – old seeds)

Broccoli

THEN I tried to build a simple fence to keep Lady Avery Chickenstein from eating these plants when they sprout.  The easiest and cheapest solution seemed to be using chicken wire.  Somehow in the process I managed to trip and hurt my ankle and ended up sitting on the ground for a while until Seth came outside and helped me get up.  So the fence isn’t done but that’s just as well because we came up with a better idea today for where to put it to protect both the plants and Lady Avery.

SPEAKING OF … it was a very exciting day for Lady Avery as well.   Some days she seems to really need companionship and some days she seems content to scratch around the yard on her own.  All day yesterday when I was working outside, she was 50 feet away in the yard doing her own thing.  Today, all she wanted was to try to follow us up towards the driveway and the house, looking for a flock to hang out with.  After putting her back in the yard twice and making sure my makeshift fence blocking her access to the driveway was up, I went back inside and worked on Seth’s Valentine’s presents (making him desserts of his choice – vanilla flan and mint chocolate mousse).  Around 4:30 I went outside to check on Lady Avery and finish replanting a few houseplants (cuttings from my mom which had been in a glass jar since October).  Lady Avery was nowhere to be found in the yard.  Starting to get nervous, I walk up the driveway and look under the car… no chicken.  I look in the front of the house… no chicken.  What if she walked into the street?  What if a dog caught her?  What if someone saw a cute yellow chicken and decided to take her home???  Then I hear a familiar little cluck… I look over, and there she is, scratching around the flowers in our neighbors’ front yard.  PHEW!!   At that moment I was so thankful she’s such a friendly chicken – as soon as I called to her, she trotted over and I was able to pick her up from the sidewalk and bring her back home.  yikes!!  I asked her what she was doing wandering off like that, but she just clucked a bit and went back to eating our old broccoli plants.  Sooo… she’ll be spending a few days in her pen (which is generous, just not as fun as the big yard) until we get a better fence worked out.

And in case you were wondering, both the flan and the mousse turned out DELICIOUS.  Add those to the leftover peanut butter chocolate buttercream frosting I made last week (to go with brownies for work for v-day) and we have WAY too much dessert in the house for anyone’s good.  OH WELL it’s winter somewhere and we all need comfort foods right?

So that’s the weekend update…. I’ll try to take pictures soon to get y’all some visual aids.  Happy Olympics!!

Been hitting up the list of 2010 Bloggie Nominees …and a blog called Effing Dykes is cracking me up.  Also really enjoying this wedding website.  I don’t know why, but I love beautiful photos of beautiful weddings.  I don’t want to have a big fancy wedding, but I love looking at photos of them.  I think I just really like seeing normal people (meaning, not celebrities) getting all dressed up and throwing a big event and eating gorgeous looking food and surrounding themselves with flowers… taking a moment to make a ceremony out of everyday life.  We don’t do that very often in our culture.   And I love getting a peek into other people’s families and personalities.

all of the sites are very inspiring and I am tempted to redesign and make this even bigger and better… probably won’t happen soon but it’s awesome to get all these ideas.

pardon the sloppy writing – haven’t left bed yet (rainy saturday) and my brain is still half-asleep.  happy weekend!