Still here. Still writing the citizen science book. Still not so good at blogging about the writing process while I am wrestling mano-a-mano (mano-a-keyboard-o?) with it. I did take some time off over the weekend, though, and there were adventures …
On Saturday, my husband and I turned this:
(Otherwise known as our newly dug 900 square foot garden plot
planted with a cover crop of buckwheat.)
Into this:
(Otherwise known as our newly dug, enriched 900 square foot
garden plot now ready for a late-season planting of oats.)
We had planned to rent a tiller, but our experience with that particular garden machine has not been good. And so we turned the garden by hand. It was a surprisingly pleasant way to spend an afternoon … heart-pumping work, kids nearby (but not near enough that we could stick a spade in their hands), lazy chit-chat, lots of water breaks in the shade.
Things took a turn toward scary, though, about halfway through the plot. I slid my spade into the soil for the millionth time and a GIANT FURRY BEAST shot out of the tangle of buckwheat stems at my feet. It charged me! I was not terribly level-headed about this … at least not until I figured out that the GIANT FURRY BEAST was an Eastern Cottontail Rabbit. A baby Eastern Cottontail Rabbit:
(Otherwise known as the cutest furry beastlet on the planet.)
Sadly, the mother rabbit has not returned to the garden. We’ve moved the babies into an open cardboard box, retrofitted with their previous fur-lined burrow/nest, and left them in the garden, hoping for the best. We’ve had the “they are wild animals and not pets” talk, and the “survival of the fittest/Darwinian evolution” talk, and—when we found one of the rabbit babies dead on Sunday morning—the “circle of life” talk. Still, the kids and I are rooting hard for the three remaining beastlets:
(Can you blame us?)
