The Country Garden Showcase... A Ruby Surprise & Queenie's Eyes

Ruby, my little rhode island red hen, surprised me with her first little egg last evening.  I am so excited.

I checked all the nestboxes several times after I noticed that Ruby was acting funny.  She was balking a lot and for the first time that I have ever observed, she was playing musical nest boxes and hopping into and out of them one after the other scratching out cute and tidy nests inside each box.

My girls will be 5 months old on August 29th.

Jerry says I should eat it, but I just want to look at it and admire it a little longer...  Maybe tomorrow. 

This was the view from the fence last evening during a thunderstorm that cooled things down a bit.  

 We found out last Friday that our little baby rooster Queenie has cataracts.  He's going to be fine.  I prayed that it wasn't Marek's disease and thankfully it's not.  The veterinarian says that unfortunately many birds do not get enough Vitamins E and A in the egg from their mothers or are unable to procure it efficiently from their food.  The result is cataracts and ultimately blindness.

My Queenie's cataracts just became noticeable less than a week ago, but I felt that something strange was happening for about two weeks.  I noticed that he would run into the fence when spooked or occasionally walk into the food dish.  The most important change I could see was that in the last few weeks he has not run straight into my arms when I approached him.  That just isn't Queenie.

Anyway, we've got lots of supplements now and I am hand feeding him at least once a day to give him the Vitamin E.  He still has a small field of vision and we hope his vision doesn't get worse, but it doesn't seem to stop him from trying to get close to the ladies...

 Jerry is digging a hole to China. Not really.  He is digging a hole to put in a small septic system for our travel trailer/water softener.   A gray water system of sorts.  We have to keep the water softener water out of the house septic system here because we have really dense clay soil that's already full of salt and the salt actually increases the compaction of clay particles making septic tanks fail.  Our washing machine water was already diverted into a leach pit about a decade ago.  I wish we could re-purpose the grey water, but with all the salt it would just kill our plants.  I don't think it's cost effective to desalinate either or Los Angeles would be doing that already instead of draining the Owens River.

This was my view as clouds broke following a bit of late afternoon thunder and showers. Lovely isn't it.

I am looking forward to reading your garden links to see just what you've been up to this week...
Please share.