This week has been quite busy! Last Friday we finally put in about 100 asparagus crowns that another farmer gave us. We have to wait two years before there will be enough for a harvest, so it’ll be a while before we can enjoy the fruits of our labor, but then they should last up to 20 years! Our poultry family continues to grow with this week’s addition of three ducks, one guinea, and 25 more chickens. The new chickens are great for our egg production, but we don’t have all of their housing quite set up yet. Our current priority is making more chicken tractors so that we can get them out of the barn and onto pasture. With the recent heat wave, we have been adjusting to a new schedule--now it’s too hot from about 11-4 to do anything out in the sun, so that time is spent on indoor or shady jobs, and then we’ve been staying out in the field until about 9:30, enjoying the cooler evenings. Another challenge with the heat is keeping our cooler-weather crops, like our lettuce mix, from bolting and getting bitter. We want to be able to provide lettuce all summer, so we have erected some shade cloth over our lettuce bed, in the hopes that it will last a little longer. Our new fences seem to be protecting our little crops from deer, so now our focus is deterring the neighborhood rabbits. Perhaps a Rosy Buck puppy is in the future.