5.01.2011

May Day feels more like February Day this morning...

I expected to wake up to a beautiful spring day today per all the weather forecasts from the past week, but alas it's cloudy again with a wind chill of 22 degrees. This is getting really tiresome.

That said, we did have a very busy and productive yesterday, including picking up our chickens! We now have three tiny little Silver-Laced Wyandotte hens peeping in a Rubbermaid in our extra room, out of reach of the (very curious, very frustrated) cats.






We're scheduled to finish up the permitting paperwork this week (finally...finally...FINALLY!) and then just have to deal with the coop inspection (for which we need to finish preparing -- we are just converting the back few feet of our shed) and we should be home free. This whole process has dragged out from our attempted early start (foiled by the city) in early-mid March and has involved a fairly insane number of requirements for a couple of backyard birds, so I am incredibly glad it's almost over.

Yesterday morning was also the first big Northside Food Resource Hub get-together since the initial meeting, including the first plant hand-out. The weather was absolutely miserable -- windy, icy-cold rain coming down hard, occasional lightning -- but the attendance when we got there just after it started was still pretty good. I imagine it picked up as the day went on.


We got a bag of seed packets and a few cold-weather plants -- the bulk of the pickup is later in May, in hopes that by then spring will have gotten around to arriving.


I should have more updates this week on various local initiatives, including Transition Town NE Minneapolis and the Canning Co-op I'm trying to start. Right now, though, the coffee downstairs is calling me, and then I need to get outside and work on that coop!