Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Homestead Happiness, April Week 3

More fresh veggies, an archeological discovery, and grass-craving chickens made us happy this week.

Our onion sets from last year that didn't produce bulbs, are just the right size for eating as green onions right now.  And since we want to use that garden space for other veggies this year, it's a perfect storm for green onion-themed cuisine. Yum!

While digging up a garden bed, we hit a buried brick.  Further digging revealed that it was actually a line of bricks, two wide, and about six inches underground.  We haven't had a chance to chat with the neighbors yet to see if they know what it's from, but clearly some sort of man-made thing used to exist here.  Could it be a clue about our absurdly high selenium levels?

We've also been finding pockets of dirt where the soil particles are held together by some sort of white material.  It looks slightly filamentous, but is very crumbly at the same time.  Some kind of good fungus, we hope?

We had a few inches of snow last Thursday, but the chickens could see green grass under the picnic table and freshly turned dirt out in the yard.  When we got home from work, we could tell they had a case of coop fever.  It makes us happy that the chickens aren't content to just hang out in the coop all day.

What made you happy this week?

2 comments:

  1. We have those buried bricks as well. Puzzling! They look like some sort of buried foundation or former wall. So wish we could go back in time and see our place 70 or 90 years ago. I'm curious, though, about the link between the bricks and selenium.

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    1. I don't know if there's a direct link between the bricks and the selenium, but I was thinking it might be a clue to a structure that used to house selenium-intensive activities. We found out that there used to be a few other outbuildings in the yard (one chicken coop, others of unknown purpose), and many houses in this area used to have brick incinerators in the back yard to burn garbage.

      Nothing conclusive yet, though! :-)

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