March 24, 2020

Exciting times with the Coronavirus going on.  I bought myself some new friends for this quarantine time.  Some chicks and ducklings.  I found that the ducklings were making the tote too wet for the chicks and I had trouble keeping up with getting it dry.  I saw a youtube video from Homesteady using a paint tray and a screen.  However, I could not find one in our small town.  I ended up improvising with a deviled egg tray with lid that I drilled some holes in.  I used the round feeder for a waterer and it fit perfectly. This way when the ducks slosh the water in the beaks the extra water can drain down into the deviled egg tray through the driller holes and not get the tote wet.  At least that's the theory. . .

We decided to plant the new elderberries in the circle in our back yard that was made for perennial fruits and vegetables.  Here they are planted in their new location and trimmed to let the energy of the plant go to the roots.  We are planning to try between the elderberries as a new place to plant raspberries.  They are on order!


While we were tilling this up, we moved the three strawberry plants found and some irises to a new location in the kitchen garden.  Unfortunately some other things that were not as useful as we thought they would be had to go under the knife of the tiller when we were preparing the soil.

We have been having some extremely warm days, one of which was going to be 85 degrees, so I though I should get out the bee hive and set it up as a bee trap.  I included three frames of drawn comb and the liberal use of some lemon grass oil.  Cross your fingers!  My beekeeper came home and checked it and said I did ok.

The tomatoes are getting healthier and I went to my neighbor who gave me some of his sweet potatoes from last year so we can grow some slips for this year's garden.  Unfortunately, we couldn't work them last year and we did not have some of our own that we could use.

On camper news, this week we worked on painting and plumbing.  One of the things I did was to spray paint the shower walls with white appliance epoxy.  I would not do that again.  First of all there is a limit to how much you can mask the area and still be able to breathe.  Second if you open the back and front doors for breathing, it will blow the paint all over the camper and you will end up with a mess.  I ended up having to hurry and clean up the floors with vegetable oil before it dried there.  I swear I read about lots of people who did this.  I don't know what I did wrong, but never again.  After painting the shower walls, I replaced the gold handheld shower sprayer with a new one in silver.  I just used a regular handheld shower device and kept the hook that was already in the camper when we bought it.  I took it down and painted it silver.  Just be sure to get a handheld device with about 5 ft. of flexible tubing.  it was easy to unscrew the old one and screw in the new one.  When I put the hook back on the wall, I put a little caulking on the back before I screwed it in to avoid leaks in the future.  My husband also replaced the kitchen faucet, and I touched up the countertop as it was a different shape than the old faucet.

Additionally, I took down the air conditioner housing and spray painted it (outside) with white appliance epoxy.  It looks so much better than that gold color!



Lastly, I want to leave you with a Coronavirus story.  So one of my neighbors posted this story on Facebook.  She said that she was talking with her four year old daughter and said, "I need a glass of water."  To which her daughter replied, "Well, I need a baby unicorn."  lol.  Up until this time I hadn't thought about how tiring the restrictions of the Coronavirus quarantine have been on our little ones.  So I got out my scraps and made her a baby unicorn which I delivered to her mom in stealth mode so she could figure out the perfect timing, especially since there are other small ones at home.  It made my day to be able to do something for a child that would add joy to her life.