Today he is four weeks old. Four weeks! Can you believe it? He's surprising everyone with how he's coming along. He's picking up a lot more on sound, and has even started to initiate play. His preferred play partner is Ginger Bear, who doesn't let him off lightly for being disabled either.
I've been spending my days lately on a new project. I'm working on organizing the seeds again and getting them ready and inventoried for selections for this year. In doing so, I came to the reality that I am a visual person. I like to be able to see what I'm working with. A long list of seed variety named doesn't really help me to pick varieties. I need to sit down and research the varieties, and I need a way to keep track of where they came from, how many I have, and make it easier for me to find them in the growing collection of seeds. So I'm putting together a new website.
Each variety has it's own page with a complete, researched description of the variety, days to maturity, interesting facts, where I got the seeds from, and a photo of the actual seeds in the collection. This gives me a visual on what kind of container I'm looking for, or if I have plenty to trade or just a few that I need to grow out. The plan them is to slowly go through the entire collection (over 1700 varieties currently), photograph, research, upload, and categorize everything... Meanwhile keeping it updated as I get more in trades, purchasing, or whatever else. This is a huge project, and I'm sure it will be ongoing and long term, but what a reference guide it will be when I'm done! I'm starting with peppers because that's what the kids and I organized and photographed first. Then I can move on to others. We've organized and alphabetized the broccoli, cauliflower, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, and peppers so far. I'm not ready to officially unveil it yet. I want to have more done on it first, but know that it is coming along as I have time.
In other (awesome) news, I got word that the big swap package is finally coming back! It should be here Thursday! I am looking forward to going through it and updating the seed stash list. There are some pretty amazing seeds I'm expecting in this package that will be grown in the garden this year.
Today while out doing barn chores I found raccoon tracks coming up from the lake to the one rabbit cage still outside. Some of the hardware mesh looks a little bent. I suspect it attempted to bite the wire but was unsuccessful in breaking in. I have made a mental note to make sure the birds are locked up promptly when it gets dark out to try to avoid possible incidents. We lost two ducks on Christmas eve 2017 to a suspected raccoon attack. I don't want to deal with that if I can avoid it. There are seeds under the bird feeders and frozen eggs and tomatoes and kitchen refuse in the compost pile that a raccoon would be welcome too. I don't mind sharing the land with them, I just don't want to share my animals with them.