Shelling nuts.... and turtles in shells.

The more pecans we pick, the more pecans that fall. I don't know how many pecans we have gathered now..... at least two thousand would be my best guess. I have given some away, to friends who don't have Texas pecan trees in their yards, and our friends who are coming to Thanksgiving dinner in a couple of weeks will be leaving with a cute little shopping bag of pecans. In the shells-- I couldn't possibly shell all those nuts before turkey-day.

I have been shelling some nuts, though.... and filling up a small Santa cookie jar with pecan halves. Between now and the holidays, I intend to do some baking with those pecans and I don't want to be stopping in the middle of a recipe to crack shells. My husband is looking on the Internet for a pecan-shelling place in the area...... you take them all the pecans and you get back the shelled nuts. For a price, I'm sure.... but there's no way we could do all of these ourselves. (Now I understand why the seller of this house had the freezer filled with Zip-Loc bags of pecan halves.)

There is a huge tree out by our pond. I thought it was a Live Oak. Silly me.... it's a pecan tree. My husband was out under it this morning, picking up the fallen pecans. He came back with a nearly-filled bucket. As if we didn't have enough pecans from the trees around the house?

As for the turtles...... the other day as I was driving down our hill, I noticed some turtles out on the rocks in our pond. My first thought was how did they get in there? They must have crossed over the hills from the ponds on the other properties, but that's a good long walk for a parade of turtles. The property next to ours has a pond, and maybe the turtles decided to relocate, but that's still a good long walk. And how long did that take, at a turtle's pace?

The turtles were a good size, about the size of a dinner plate, and there were eight or ten of them-- hard to count because they were bunched up together and sitting in the sun. The grass is high down there, as it grows into cut-able hay, so I wasn't going to be walking through knee-high "amber waves of grain" to do a turtle count.

Speaking of doing a count.... as of today, we've had 71 eggs from our chickens. Actually, all those eggs have come from Dolly (one egg every day) and from Henny Penny (one egg every other day, but once a week she will lay two days in a row). Jaye-Bird is certainly big enough to lay eggs now, but so far she doesn't seem to be interested. She spends her days searching for bugs, looking for Edie (still), and preening her pretty black and white feathers. Audrey is an older hen, and we think she's past her egg-laying days. No fault of Mr. Watson at his farm-- we picked out these hens one by one and he told us he couldn't guarantee who would be laying eggs for us. The two Guinea hens have only given us one egg so far-- and that one was broken in the coop because whichever hen (either Dottie or Jeanie) laid the egg, she was up on the roosting bar at the time and of course the egg fell to the floor and broke in half.

Dolly continues to be the most friendly hen. She will walk up the porch stairs at least three times a day and look into the screen door of the kitchen. If I'm in there, she will just stand there and watch me, with her head tilted to the side and her wide-open golden eyes following me around the kitchen. If I'm not in her line of sight, she will cluck and carry on till I hear her, and usually I go up to the kitchen door and tell her to go out in the yard and look for bugs. At that point, she just stares at me, as if to say Do you realize that you're talking to a chicken?

I have seen hawks flying over our property from time to time, and I would guess that the hens do also. They're smart enough to do their bug-hunts underneath the shrubbery around the house, and when they do go from the porch to the coop, they're usually running with their wings outstretched for balance. The faster they run, the safer they are from chicken-searching hawks. It would be horrible to see one of our hens get carried away by a hawk. As it was, with poor Edie-Bird drowning in the fountain out front, that was bad enough. And to this day, none of the hens have been near the fountain since. And every evening when the chickens fly up on their roosting bar, I see Jaye-Bird looking into the wooden bread box for Edie. Maybe she thinks Edie-Bird will suddenly reappear one night and they can once again cuddle up together in that box. Every morning, the bread box is perfectly clean, just the way it was the day before. Without Edie next to her, Jaye isn't interested in sleeping in that cozy wooden box.

"Another day on the ranch." Which is the phrase-of-the-day around here. The pasture grasses are growing high. I'm guessing the guy with the hay-cutter-thing will be here before the holidays to cut down and bale up the hay. He doesn't charge us for that, but he gets to keep the hay bales. I think there were six bales last time.... huge round ones that weigh one ton each. Who would have thought that grass could be that heavy?

And the eggs that I find in the nesting boxes in the morning.... they are still little miracles in my hand, and they still make me smile. And so does Dolly... she's my little red hen who likes to be petted on her back between her wings, who likes to be picked up, and who will follow me from one end of the property to the other as long as I'm holding fresh corn for her.

The weather for the past few weeks has been beautiful... sunny and warm without being too hot. You can wear jeans and not feel like the sun is cooking your legs as you walk. I don't know how anyone wears jeans here from May through September...... the thought of wearing denim when the temperature is 98 degrees and above just doesn't make sense to me. But mostly everyone does, and no one seems to mind. Maybe that's how I'll know that I've lost all the city-girl in me... it will be 106 degrees in the shade and I'll be wearing jeans and boots and walking through tall grass and not even looking to see if snakes and scorpions are in my way.