Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?

We have a garden. It's still a bit early, but we are starting to reap what we sowed. Today's take was carrots, onions, and spinach. Yummy!

So, tonight, we had a spinach salad with onions, carrots on the side, cheese pasta with ground beef, and bread. My kids crack me up. They will eat almost any veggie from our garden with one simple rule. They must eat it IN the garden. I am so glad we don't spray or use any type of chemicals in our garden. They have tried so many new foods simply pulling them off the plant and popping them in their mouths while standing in the wonderful soil. Why would I want them to miss that? Yes, it means more work for us physically. I have to pull weeds by hand, we have to pull bugs off of plants by hand sometimes, but my kids smiles as they taste a new vegetable is all I need to do it every year. 

Today our youngest son decided spinach was his food to try. I cut him a leaf and he took a bite. He declared it to be one of his new favorite foods. He ate a huge helping of raw spinach and carrots for supper, no dressing needed. 

We are going to have to double plant a few areas where things just didn't grow for some unknown reasons. It's a bit late in the game, but I am hoping we might have some success. 

On another topic, my husband brush hogged our "yard" today (the 10 or so acres around our home). After lunch he came running in and told me to grab a basket and put something soft inside of it. I grabbed our egg basket, put one of my son's old windbreakers in it, and ran outside behind him. I didn't know what was going on, but he seemed insistent. 

He walked me over to an area near the edge of our property and told me to look in an high grass area he hadn't mowed. I asked if it would bite me (joking of course) and he replied "not yet". That got my curiosity up. I moved the grass aside and found this:

8 wild turkey eggs. No, that one isn't cracked, it's grass on the shell.

We ran them in, they had been away from their Mom for a bit, but we didn't think long enough to hurt their viability. My husband had seen the Mom fly away and waited to see if she would return, which she didn't.

I put them under a heat lamp to see them warm until we could figure out what to do. I called our state's department of wildlife. They first got me in touch with the law enforcement division (think game warden). In some states it's illegal to possess the eggs of a game bird. Come to find out, it's not in our state. It is illegal to release them back into the wild if you hatch them unless you are a rehabilitation center. So, we figured maybe we could get 1 or 2 to hatch and survive (turkeys take a lot of training to be able to be, well, turkeys). Then we would keep them as a pet.

Thankfully I found a local wildlife rehabilitation center very close to me. I live in a tiny, tiny, tiny rural town. I was SHOCKED that she was 1 mile from my home. She knew my mother-in-law, we know her husband and have met her once. She took eggs (most rehab people only take live animals, not eggs), she took turkey eggs, she had room for all 8, she could pick them up right then. Within 4 minutes of the call they were in her hands to try and save them. Hopefully in about 20 days (with the helps of the wildlife biologist we estimate the oldest egg is 8 days old) there will be 8 brand new little turkeys on this planet ... or at least a few given how many eggs often don't hatch or the babies don't make it.