Now that spring is in full swing, every day is a flurry of activity from the time I open my eyes and reach for the coffee in the morning.

Contrary to popular belief, sled dogs don’t hibernate in the off season so their needs come first, which means half the morning is spent brushing out the remains of their winter coats, exercising them, making sure their pens are clean and insuring that they have plenty of fresh water to drink and to play in before the heat of the day sets in.

Then they spend most of their day napping, digging new holes and trying to make friends with the new neighbor behind us who is a bit of a snob.

He does have lovely conformation, though. 🙂

By nine I’m ready for a nap but there’s no time for that! I have to make sure that all the other critters get fed and watered and any eggs I may have missed the night before or ones that get laid by my early layers get collected before they go bad in the heat. The fertilized ones go into the cartons set aside for incubating and the rest go to the pups for a morning treat and for my breakfast which I have to cook from scratch thanks to my wonky immune system.

Then I get to do dishes so they don’t pile up before I have to make lunch and dinner from scratch, too. Yay!!!

But before I can get to all that, I have to make sure that all of the flowers and veggie beds are doused really good, again because of the killer heat, which takes longer than ever since we’ve expanded our gardens this year. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, I really enjoy it but it does mean I have to be mindful and that’s not easy when you have allergy-induced brain fog!

Which means I have to remember to take my morning meds before I set out to do everything else and I also have to remember NOT to over water some of the herb containers on the back porch on the way out because I learned the hard way that unlike everything else around here, some of them actually thrive on neglect.

Go figure!

I also learned that even if you do everything right, some things will just refuse to cooperate, like my little thyme plant there. 😦

It’s not dying (yet) but it hasn’t grown at all since I planted it which is frustrating. I’ve been able to harvest quite a bit of rosemary off of the other two plants on either side of it in the same container and Thyme and rosemary have basically the same needs, or so I thought, so I don’t know what its problem is.

Maybe it’s just a problem child.

I can’t fuss over it too much, though, because I’m busy with other things that demand my limited attention span. Like the younger seedlings that haven’t been planted yet (but are out hardening off finally now that the threat of frost is behind us woo-hoo!) because they dry out sooo quickly in the heat.

Have I mentioned it’s hot here now? Well it is, and it’s a killer. To me and to the plants and pups. I can’t be out in it for more than a few minutes at a time or I have a major mast cell attack, regardless of whether I took my meds.

So I have to keep an eye on the temperature outside and I also have to keep an eye on the wind advisory alerts every day because it can start up with almost no warning and knock everything off my flower cart. Or knock over new trees we set out, like this cute little baby Lodi apple we’ll be planting this weekend to expand our orchard.

Our local nursery has them marked way down so we might go back and get a couple more.

The only thing better than discounted trees are free ones, and the neighbor has been graciously giving them to us just by having a quaking aspen in their front yard.

They are prolific gift-givers!

It used to annoy us how many suckers were invading but then we realized that we kinda like quaking aspens. They grow fast and they look pretty, not to mention they are FREE.

So last year we decided to stop mowing down all the babies that were sprouting up in our lawn and have strategically kept several of them to let them grow into a nice little quaking aspen forest in the front corner next to the crabapple.

We left enough room to drive the mower around them.

Which brings me back to things to do. Our lawn always needs mowing now, it seems. The fertilizer we’ve been using is really doing the trick which is great, but it takes a while to mow. It takes even longer to weed whack. No wonder we welcome the snow by fall!

Of course then we have to shovel that, but I digress…

Speaking of shoveling, I really should be out there mucking out the chicken coop instead of writing this blog post. 🙂