Since my last post about the spring we had some nice and sunny days, so the crocuses have opened up there flowers to invite the insects. We have found some bees to be very busy with the crocuses. The peony sticks its tips just out of the ground. I just love the flowers of the peony. The strawberry plants are showing some beginning of new growth. I even found one single dandelion. Last year we had a pair of coots nesting in our pond and apparently one coot has already returned. We had found it swimming and eating in our pond and I am very happy it did not fly of when our dogs came closer. Other than that some plants are already showing signs of the coming leaves. Here are some impressions of what I have found on our property.
We visited a friend who sells sheep cheese and sheep meat. He makes the cheese from the milk of his own sheep, so he has a lot of sheep with a lot of lambs. The lambs are so adorable. The children loved looking at them, how they bounced around and drank at there mother. I am really looking forward to having our own sheep, and of course lambs every year, again. Maybe in 2 years that could be the case.
Birds nests
I love it when I can hear the first birds singing again in the winter. For me that means the biggest and darkest part of winter is over and spring can not be long. So it was high time to clean out the births nests we had hung up 2 years ago. We have 3 births hotels for 3 nests of which the first nest in the first hotel was not used and the last nest in the last hotel was not used and the wooden shoe was not used. So we cleaned out 9 nests and it was high time because the space was filled out, because every time the birds breed they will build a new nest on top of the old one. Some nests where build as we typically expect a births nest, open to the top. We also found a nest like a ball with a hole on the side.
Beside the births nests we hung up, the birds also nest in the wall above. These are hollow stones with damage here and there leaving enough space for the birds to go in and out. Since the wall is southeast facing it will warm up nicely when the sun shines. We only have sparrows nesting here.
To build new nests the birds will find enough material here, but what they also love to use is dogs hair. Since one of our dogs needed to be brushed, I provided some nest material. The next day there is hardly anything left of the dogs hair.
Many of the nesting possibility’s are claimed already, so I hope there will be a lot of new birds this year. We love watching the young birds learning to fly.
We cleaned up a pile of our logs. We sawed some of the logs. Some of the logs lay to long and where no good for the sawmill, so these turned into firewood. Other logs where sorted in piles of logs of the same type of wood. Al of this made a huge mess of the ground. To make the ground nice and even again my husband drove over it with our old tractor with a meadow train attached. He did this where the ground was a bit frozen. It works better like that. The end result is better as we had expected. Now the grass can grow back again. We are thinking of planting some fruit trees here.
Beautiful Chaos 