The front part of this beautiful structure protects the birds (most of whom are not in sight for some reason) from the hawks and the foxes and other predators. The goose lives outside and fends for himself. I’ve probably discussed him earlier. He’s mean to the chickens and the ducks, so has been barred from paradise. He’s also been mean to me, so I probably need protection! I bore the bruises from his pinch for an entire year and just as it started to fade, he pinched my leg again. I have complete respect for the strength of a goose’s jaw. For a while, there was a sort of daily dance we did, but then I learned to pick him up by the neck, tuck him under my arm and parade him around talking baby-talk and turning his neck in every direction. After doing this twice, he’s decided to leave me alone, though he doesn’t actively run away as he does from Joe.
In the back, you can see the top of the fence that runs around the vegetable garden. It protects the vegetables from the deer and the groundhogs, though not from the bunnies, who have taken a shine to the beans this year. On the left, where there is a trellis over the gate, there are some grapes that look good every year until they suddenly succumb to some kind of black rot. Maybe this year they’ll do ok for a change. When I am working in the garden, the chickens gather by the fence because the garden has some of the dread Johnson grass, alas. I don’t want to put that noxious weed in the compost, so I poke it through the fence and the chickens eat it, roots and all. I figure their digestive systems will at least prevent the pulled roots from re-rooting. It does not seem to have survived under the the cloth and mulch that Joe laid between the raised beds.
No stories or amateur philosophy today, just the observation that gardening and animal husbandry involves a lot of battling forces, some of which can partly be kept in check by architectural solutions.
has the small flock of geese terrified hahahaha