Welcome back, Scarlett.

My red hen Scarlett is now officially out of her "broody" stage. It may happen again at some point, but for now, she's out of the nesting box, out of the coop, and back to her happy little self. One thing has changed-- she now eats out of my hand, certainly because I was hand-feeding her bits of bread and lettuce when she refused to get out of the nesting box for nearly 40 days. She is as gentle with my fingers now as she was when she was sitting on the fake egg that I gave her, which is very nice because the three other hens have a tendency to grab at the bread pieces and manage to get my fingers inbetween their beaks. Doesn't hurt much, because they don't have teeth, but the sound of their beaks against my fingernails is a clickety-clack noise that makes you get your hand out of the way real quick.

When it's time to lock the gate on the coop at night, Scarlett is back to her old tricks... she is the last one to get into the coop. The other hens will follow me into the coop, but Scarlett will wait just outside the gate, knowing full well that if she goes in, I'm going out and then locking up. And Scarlett doesn't want anyone telling her when it's coop-time. So I have to just wait till she gets herself in there, then go back and lock the gate. Scarlett. I certainly gave that hen the right name.


The wildflowers that C and I collected last weekend...... the wax paper that I had them pressed between didn't work at all. When I checked the flowers, they were slick and sticky and sort of nasty-looking. Into the trash they all went. Thankfully, I had marked the pages in the wildflower book, so I know each and every one that we have on the property. I'm sure there must be a certain type of paper necessary for pressing flowers, and I will have to find out if the stores around here carry that. We don't have near as many stores here that we had in Clear Lake, so I will have to hunt around, or just look somewhere like Hobby Lobby when we drive into the bigger towns.


People are still out driving around and taking photos of the wildflowers. On any given day, I see cars pull to the side of the road here and someone will get out with a camera and start clicking away at the flowers. We have an abundance of "Wine Cups" on one side of our field, and the color is just magnificent. They are the color of the Magenta crayon in a box of Crayolas. An entire field of them would take your breath away, but I'm more than happy to have the fairly large patch of those cute little flowers in the side field. The Wine Cups have multiplied since the flowers started coming up. Seems like there were just a few a couple of weeks ago, and now it looks like there are more than a hundred in just that one spot.


In a couple of weeks, Spring will have sprung itself out and Summer is going to be here in all its over-heated glory. Everyone is hoping that this summer isn't a repeat of last year's, but whatever it is, I plan to keep my promise of not complaining about the heat. I can still remember the frigid cold that made us shiver and froze some of the outside water pipes. I would rather put up with the sun and the heat than have to wear layers of clothing in frigid temperatures.

The past two days have been perfect... sunny but not broiling, warm nearly to the point of being hot, but not quite there yet. And the sky..... such a pretty blue and filled with white puffy clouds for as far as your eyes can see. Truly picture-postcard days. We still can't believe we live here.