Things have been very busy here in our neck of the woods!

My little darlings, as I like to call them, are now permanent residents outside. Of course I am referring to the three baby squirrels that we rescued earlier this year when I found them fallen from their nest. They are looking for food on their own, but we still spoil them with corn and sunflower seeds.

On some days they greet us on the porch in the morning, and will still come running up my leg, or jump onto my shoulder. My husband, Jim, built a couple more squirrel boxes and hung them in trees near our house. The babies are all staying in one of those boxes overnight. They have been a great success, and it is a joy to have them around!

Our garden is growing beautifully! I have already picked sugar peas three times, and I have gotten quite a few Eight Ball zucchinis!

Our green beans are in blossom, and our potatoes just started to blossom.

Our cabbages seem to put size on every day, and my carrot tops are beautifully frilly!

The onions are big enough to start harvesting some to eat, and there are little green tomatoes hanging from the vine!

My peppers haven’t started to blossom yet, but I was a bit late getting them in the ground this year.

My flowers are starting to bloom beautiful too.

My Delphinium are opening, one of my favorite.

I’m a sucker for the cottage garden look!

On the fauna side of things, I have had lots of broody hens in the past month!

We now have four mother hens with peeps running around, and another that is still sitting, but not on chicken eggs! Our neighbor over the hill is a farmer, and farms the fields right next to ours. He came to our house a couple of Saturdays ago. He was mowing his field when he came across a turkey hen sitting on a nest. The hen took off without being hurt, and he just missed the eggs with the mower! He gathered up the clutch of eggs and came to our house. He knew we had chickens, and wondered if we had any broody hens we could stick the eggs under? It just so happens that we had a Welsummer hen that had just gone broody. It’s funny how things work out sometimes! So that hen is now sitting on ten turkey eggs. We don’t know how long it will take them to hatch, because we don’t know how long the turkey hen was sitting on them before she was disturbed. We also don’t know how they will do if they hatch. I know wild turkeys are very touchy. It is an experiment, and we’ll figure it out as we go! Our goal is to get them big enough to let them loose.

It is fun to watch all these mothers with their babies, and as they get bigger, we will start culling some of the older chickens from the flock and put them in the freezer. The first four babies that Mamma hatched for us back in December are now laying beautiful darker brown eggs.

Another change with our chicken flock is they are now in a very large fenced area. I prefer them roaming free, but we couldn’t let them roam and have a nice garden and flower beds! They thought they had to remove all my flowers and replace them with large dusting holes for themselves! We bought 300 foot of chicken fence and made a large enclosure. We hope to add another 300 feet very soon. That fence also gives us a little more peace of mind as far as predators are concerned.

My husband and I just took a vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in May.

The beach there is so nice. It is never crowded, and is within walking distance from the house we rented!

What a way to relax! We had a great time! As I said at the start … life is good!

It was a normal Friday afternoon at our house. My husband, Jim, had gotten home from work around 4:00. We usually have a Friday ritual of going to the bank and the grocery store to pick up any items we might need, and sometimes go out to eat. Hubby was on the phone, so I decided to go collect the eggs awhile. That way, when he was off the phone, we could leave. I grabbed the egg basket and away I went.

We have to check for eggs late in the afternoon because about half of our hens are late layers. I stepped into the chicken house and was gathering eggs when I realized I was hearing a noise. It sounded kinda like a high pitched squeal or whistle. My first thought was, “Oh, there is a nest of baby birds close by.” I dismissed it as that, and started back about my business. In a couple minutes, the noise got louder and more demanding. I listened again, giving it more of my attention now and I realized this was not baby birds but something else. I looked out the door that the chickens use to go in and out of the chicken house, and I saw all of our ducks and chickens with their faces pointing the same direction, intently staring directly on the other side of the fence. I knew that whatever was making the noise also had the attention of our poultry. I finished gathering the eggs and walked around the back of the fence. There, on the ground, squealing their little heads off were three baby squirrels that had obviously fallen from the nest. It was very windy, cool, and raining. I’m not sure if the wind blew them out of the nest or if they crawled out and fell, but it really didn’t matter. As soon as I saw them, I scooped the poor little darlings up and brought them in the house to show my husband and to warm them up. They were still pretty small. They did have some hair on them, but not completely covered, and their eyes and ears were stilled closed.

We are not strangers to taking care of baby squirrels. About three years ago, my husband found a single baby squirrel that had fallen out of the nest not far from the same place these three did. We decided then we were going to try to save that one too. We got online and looked up info on how to determine the age of the baby squirrel, and how and what to feed them. The info was not difficult to find. We were to use a syringe, remove the needle of course, and fill that with the formula to feed the baby squirrel. We needed to get puppy milk replacer, available at our local pet store. That squirrel we named Spunky. It was very easy to teach him to drink from the syringe, and he did very well. We fed him the recommended amounts, and after a few weeks, we started to wean him on to solid food. He ate things like seeds and dried fruits and nuts.

I have to say here that I do NOT recommend keeping wild animals as pets. It was and is our intention to raise these babies up, re-introduce them to the wild, and set them free. When Spunky was big enough, we started taking him outside every day.

My husband built a squirrel box for him and attached it to one of our trees. He took to the box, and eventually he started staying out all the time. He would still come to us for peanuts, but he was doing fine on his own. Spunky was a success. He still comes to our bird feeders, three years later.

Now back to our new babies. As I said, we were familiar with what we needed to do, but these babies were a bit smaller than Spunky was, and there are three of them instead of one. We went to the pet store and got the milk replacer. Once again, it was very easy to teach the babies to drink from the syringe. So far, these babies are doing fine. If they continue to progress the way they have been, I have high hopes that they will be just as successful as Spunky was.

It is, however, more of a challenge trying to deal with three baby squirrels as opposed to one. They are adorable and getting more rambunctious every day! On advice from my niece, Jordan, we have named the squirrels Alvin, Simon, and Theodore! Those names fit them very well! Now if we can just convince our cat Belle, who is not happy with the situation, that these babies are just temporary residents…. No worries, the squirrels are completely safe from Her Highness!