Cathcup

May 10, 2010
Some beautiful tulips that have escaped being eaten by the deer!

May 7, 2010
The colts from the horses down the road. Sometimes they are playing - chasing each other around the filed - as we go by. It really is like a postcard everywhere you look.

May 8, 2010
It was quite cool when we werw walking the dogs on Sunday (May 8th). Sure enough, we walked through a bit of hail - see the white spoks on Taz's back.

Berbere Chicken and Peanut Butter Fudge (Yum!)

Berbere Chicken - seasoning mix from Thyme after Thyme (Edmonton). I forgot to take photos during the preparation process. It was quite simple for this. I cut up some chicken breast, drizzled it with olive oil, and then shook the Berbere seasoning mix over the chicken pieces. I left the seasoning off a few pieces (at the bottom center of photo) in case the spices were too hot for Freda.

The ingredients for the Peanut Butter Fudge.

Heat the milk, butter and sugar over medium heat, and bring to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes.

Add the peanut butter, and mix well. Then add the marshmalllow, and mix well.

I poured the fudge into a cookie tray. I really should have put it into a cake pan because the fudge was too thin. It was Yum-O though!

Goldfinches!

 
Wonderful goldfinches! We were very happy to see more goldfinches today, as we only saw two of them last week. There are six goldfinches in this photo, five male and a single lonely female. We are hoping to see more of them in the coming days. I think the record number of goldfinches that I managed to capture in one photo last year was over 20 of the little birds.

We have seen blue jays around here every now and then. I saw three of them this afternoon, and was getting the camera ready to take a photo of one when Tawny ran over and scared off all the birds. Silly doggy! I will keep trying to get a photo of a blue jay for you.

Bird photos

 
Birds: American Goldfinch
 
Birds: Canada Geese
 
Dove
 
Starling
 
Downy woodpecker (left) and young Red Wing Blackbird (right)
 
Preparing to mix up a batch of my all natural plant killer (or non-selective herbicide, if you want to go all chemical on me). 2 cups of salt mixed with one gallon of vinegar in a plant sprayer.

A nice day!

 
Photo after we completed cleaning up the front garden, and Freda planted some flowers too.
 
Action shot of Taz hunting for tadpoles.

Spring == Yard work + baby animals

I showed you the time lapse photos of redoing the main part of the 'flower' bed in front of the garage, where we removed the stones, removed and discarded the old lansdcape fabric and replaced it with new fabric (two layers with big overlaps between them), and then replaced the stones after screening them to eliminate the dirt and plant material that contaminated the stones and gave lots of places for weeds to grow in.

The following photos show the completion of the project.

This is the 'before' photo. You can see the fabric is sticking up in a few places. Except for the weeds, the few plants are not too lively (okay I admit it, they are dead!). In general, it doesn't look very good.

This photo was taken after removing the stones. I pulled off the top layer of stones onto the pathway. However, the stones were too contaminated with dirt and plant material so I ended up screening all the stones and then dumping them into the garbage can. Some of the stones were so dirty (since they were embedded in the dirt) that I had to hose them off.

This is after the landscape fabric was put down and the stones were replaced. I got two large rocks to make the garden appear more interesting. We are planning on putting a large pot on top of the stones between the two rocks. Nothing really grows well in this spot, since it is in shade all the time and it gets a lot of wind. That's a shame since the soil in this garden bed is nice and rich!

Okay, springtime is time for baby animals. Here is a photo of some tiny calves and their mommas, I presume.

A nice day and a nice dinner!

Pano - April 28, 2010

Chicken Cordon Bleu

Chocolate mousse with a dab of strawberry ice cream

They're baaaaaaack!!!

No, it's not a horror movie.

We have a pair of robins that are trying to nest in our porch area. Here they are gathering some dried grass (I cut the lawn on the weekend) to make their next. The male bird is quite a big fellow!


They're baaaaaaaaack!!!!!

Yes, the American Goldfinches are back!!! I filled up the feeders and set them out about the middle of last week, but we hadn't seen the goldfinches return. We thought that perhaps it was a bit too early, and that seems to have been the case because this is the first pair that we have seen. The larger, brightly coloured bird (at the bottom of the photo) is the male, and the female is the smaller duller yellow colour (at the top of the photo, looking down).

The saga of the wild turkey leg

Gentle Reader, you may recall an entry from February 16th titled Strange Things that showed the following photo of a wild turkey leg.

February 15, 2010

The leg was mostly buried in the snow. We were surprised by the length of the nails on the turkey's foot. I am guessing that the nails helps the turkey get good traction on ice, and also perhaps as a defensive weapon.

March 21, 2010

Sometime after all the snow had gone, we discovered that something had eaten most of the skin off the turkey leg. As you can see, there really isn't much there except for skin, bone, and sinew (tendons). And the nails that I commented on above (of course).

April 23, 2010

A few weeks ago, the neighbours' girls and friends came running out to see the dogs. They had been having a birthday party, which is why there were so many friends over. We showed them the wild turkey leg and they were morbidly fascinated by it. A few days later, we discovered that they had buried the leg and made a sort of grave marker for it. Very sweet!

More hard work - and a pretty sunset

This weekend we tackled a big job. We had some landscaping done when we moved in and the landscapers didn't do a very good job with putting down the landscape fabric before putting down the stones. So we had a LOT of weeds growing in the flower bed. In some places, there was a 4- or 6-inch gap between the edges of the lanscape fabric. On top of all that, we had some mint growing in there, and mint is the weediest plant that ever lived!

First we pulled all the rocks off the old lanscape fabric and then we pulled up the old landscape fabric (and as many weeds as we could) and put it in a garbage bag.

Then Freda transplanted some plants to fill in a few 'holes' in the flower bed.

Then we started putting down the landscape fabric and weighting it down with stones and a few garden tools. This represents about 13 hours of work, between Freda and me. We stopped at this point and went and got a burger at Wendy's.

We completed putting the landscape fabric down and put back the rocks, being careful not to put all the dirt that was on top of the old landscape fabric as well. This last part took approximately another 5 1/2 hours. I took this photo after I swept all the dirt off the path, but before hosing it off.

All in all, about 18 1/2 hours work. Besides the very much improved flower bed, our backs and legs and hands are sore as well -- bonus!

But the ultimate reward...

Freda and I went out after supper to admire the result of our hard work, and also to enjoy the wonderful sunset!