Waddle your way to self-love

Listen to your Daddy (Warclucks)

Stop pecking at your perceived imperfections. Your crusty and wobbly bits make you even more beautiful, because they make you even more you. —Daddy Warclucks, who got a bit of frostbite on his comb and waddles (but don’t worry, he’s recovering nicely!)

Here’s What’s Happening At Good Spirits Farm

• Here’s how I know spring is coming: We’re back in the egg business! We were getting about three eggs a day for the last couple months, but this week the gals stepped it up. I think we got a dozen yesterday. What good girls!

• We’re working on revitalizing a corner of our pasture taken over by nettles. Weedy patches are often a sign of degraded soil, so instead of spraying (we don’t use herbicides here!), we’re working to fix the root of the issue. Last weekend I scattered a mix of rye, clover, winter wheat, and orchard grass seed. Then, we moved a 1200-pound roll of hay onto the patch. Now I’ve got Benni, Julia, and Gimlet munching on the hay roll. They’ll poop and pee and stamp a lot of the hay into the ground, adding a ton of organic matter and nitrogen to the soil. They’ll also press those seeds I scattered into the ground. Hopefully, come spring, we’ll get more grass than weeds.

• Chris installed our tree swallow boxes in the pasture yesterday. The resident bluebirds on the farm immediately went to check the boxes out, thinking they must be for them. Luckily, tree swallows nest earlier in the year than bluebirds, so they should get the first crack at them.

Here’s What I Loved This Week

I’ve found a habit tracker helpful in sticking with my resolutions. (Guess who has made the bed EVERY morning so far in 2021? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not Gimlet!) I got the idea from the book Atomic Habits, which I think is a helpful guide for anyone hoping to make small changes in their life.

[Note: I put the link to the habit tracker I have in the paragraph above not because I get kickbacks from Amazon for promoting it—I promise, I do not!—but because the last two images in the promotional photos are so weird I had to share them.]