Watching the Flowers Grow

This has been a busy week. Preparations for the fair (August 21st and 22nd) are gearing up. And tonight is Opening Night for our local Little Theatre Company’s production, The Music Man. That has meant less time traipsing around with my donk-a-lonks. Paco keeps a close eye on the window blinds in the morning. When he sees our bedroom blinds go up he starts his watch. When I shoot out the back door he is often perched somewhere with an eagle eye closely monitoring the possibility of a ‘furtive carrot treat pass off’! 😉
Meanwhile, his jenny pals are enjoying soaking up the morning heat on the sandy knoll.
It’s hard work watching the spring flowers pop up all around them. The woods are bursting with trillium and dog toothed violet buds. The first violet popped yesterday.
Although we’ve removed the daffodils from the woods and the knoll they are happily blooming away in the front yard.
We have a good chunk of the woods on the ‘people side’ of the fence line. It’s a great home to daffys. It used to be home to an array of brilliant red tulips… We’ve conceded the tulip war to the squirrels. Over the past two years they’ve dug up (and eaten we presume) almost one hundred tulip bulbs!!! So the daffodils reign supreme at the Meadow.
We’ve had some real sunny warm days this week. The donkeys have spent hours standing in the shade of the cedar trees or in the back yard beneath the pine trees. They still have a lot of their winter coats! It will take them until August before they shed down to a true summer coat. Poor things! Then it starts to get cooler again. I’ve read about people who ‘shave’ their donkeys for the summer … But I’m thinking although their coats are warm they are likely also a deterrent to the spring blackflies and mosquitoes.
Did you know that donkeys can snore? Darby and Bella are our pros. I think part of it is that they’ll sleep with their noses flattened into the ground. Then they’ll come to me to get me to brush the sand out of their snouts!
I love that they are all so comfortable with our routines that I can putter around them scooping up manure and they don’t budge an inch. In fact all of the jennies will whinny at me to come and brush them – just to add to the luxuriousness of the sun, sleep and sand. 😉
Paco … not so keen yet on being handled while ‘he’s down’. I’ve managed to sidle up to him once and gently scratch his neck. This is a good season to work on that – he is some itchy!
So while the donkeys sleep through the midday we humans are puttering around enjoying the spring chores. The grass is greening up, the trees are almost ready to burst their buds and the swarms of blackflies and mosquitoes are yet to arrive. (There … now that I actually wrote that down TODAY will surely be the day they return!)