April 24th

We got the Czech Black Hot Peppers planted today in one of the raised beds. They have a nice deep purple black color in the leaves. I went ahead and planted 4 short rows of Royal Burgundy Beans next to them. The Sugar Snap Peas look wonderful and we got the screws put in on the trellises. We just need to thread the twine next. 

The two 50 ft rows of potatoes behind them look gorgeous. I love the thick fleshy potato vines. I am going to need to hill them up in the next week. I can't wait to see just how many potatoes we can get. I've never had much luck with potatoes but I have never actually hilled them up before because I kept persisting in believing the fairy tales of just covering them in straw. "If you toss it they will come." 

Emmeline had a blast outside today finding bugs while I planted. There was a lot of squeals of laughter. At one point she was looking on the ground and I asked her what she was doing.  She responded with, "I need bugs". She was carrying a large ant for a while and chasing a spider at one point. I am a little concerned that she'll pick anything up. 

Got some planting done today

It's starting to look nice out there. I have felt so lethargic this spring but am starting to really feel motivated to work in the garden.  

We got a 45 ft row of Masai Haricots Verts planted. I love green beans. I can't wait. 

 

I also have Provider Bush Beans and some Bush Romanos to eventually plant. My mom's favorite are Romanos so I got those for her as well. 

We also planted a 45 ft row of some brown crowder peas that I picked up from the feed and seed on my birthday. I don't know much more about them. Fedco Seeds is where I ordered this spring and they don't have any southern peas if I recall correctly. 

I also got two 45 ft rows of peppers planted. I have Klari Baby Cheese Sweet Pepper, Sweet Pimento Sweet Pepper, Jimmy Nardello's Sweet Pepper, Chocolate Sweet Pepper and Czech Black Hot Pepper. Yum.  

I am feeling overwhelmed about all I bought. I always do. David's the calm and rational one. He reminded me that I can just put aside what I can't grow now and do it next year.  

All the work I spent mulching our 4 rows of bush peas was for naught. The straw was full of wheat seed. Nice healthy wheat seed. It's coming up great. David just hoed out 2 rows and we had 2 other full bales that we broke up and tossed in with the chickens. They can eat the seed and fertilize the hay and then I can used it later in the garden. It's so frustrating to work hard and have something screw up though. Grr. 

We did find a guy locally that will deliver those large round bales directly to our house. What he has currently does have seed in it. But he says he's getting some without seed in this weekend.  

We lost track of time though and spent THREE hours hoeing and getting 4 rows planted though. And I had already prepared the holes for one of those rows of peppers last night. This is why I have to mulch. We just don't have the time or energy to weed that much land on our own. And I think I have a few thousand square feet of garden space this year. Actually I think we have at least 3,000 square feet if I take into account the herb garden but don't count all the fruit trees shrubs we just planted.  

The potatoes are coming up well though. And growing fast. I'll need to go hill them up soon. The bush peas in the back garden are doing ok but they didn't come up as well as the sugar snap peas in the raised beds. Oh boy I can't wait for sugar snap peas. Isaac was just telling me while I was planting the crowder peas how he wanted a garden with even more sugar snap peas. "I'll get 50 bags. Are you impressed with that?" LOL  

Eudora did such a great job helping me in the garden too. She was so cute. She carried a little bucket of the home made "Complete Organic Fertilizer" and would dump a scoop in each hole I dug. Then she carried the pepper plants in her bucket for me and had to help plant them. She did a surprisingly good job. They kids are very excited about the Chocolate Sweet Peppers and the Klari Baby Cheese Sweet Peppers. I hope they aren't disappointed when they find they taste of neither chocolate or cheese!

I didn't realize it had been so long since I posted

I am currently overwhelmed with all our plans in the garden. I just planted 100 row feet of potatoes. Yesterday I planted 32 ft of Sugar Snap Peas up 2 trellises David built for me on our new raised beds. We have two 48 foot long raised beds now. In the back garden we have four 40 foot rows of bush peas planted. We are trying to grow as much as we can in large quantities.

I didn't start a large variety of seeds this year. But we started a large number. We have Rosa Bianca Eggplant, a variety of heirloom tomatoes and peppers including a Chocolate pepper that appears to have a really crummy germination rate. I also start a few dozen rainbow swiss chard. And we also have tomatilloes. Our tomatilloes last year just made delicious salsa verde. We want to make a lot of that and can it this year. 

I got a canner the end of last summer and have been experimenting with it over the winter. It definitely takes some time to feel comfortable with it. I recently canned a lot of dried beans. Dried beans are so much cheaper than canned so we never buy canned. But it gets old having to soak them before each use or soak and freeze and then thaw bags of them. So this will be a convenience food. 

I have my two sweet little girls laying here next to me. They are watching Cinderella. Eudora says she plans to marry a prince when she grows up. LOL 

David is on a planting spree right now. We have planted or are planting now apples, pears, figs, mulberries, kiwi, juneberry, currants, blueberries, autumn olive, cherries, strawberries and asparagus. We also just cut down a tree today that will be inoculated with Shitake mushroom spawn. I can't wait. I've always wanted to grow mushrooms.

Our chickens are laying well. They had been averaging about 9 eggs a day but that has gone up recently with as much as 13 in a day. With the amount we spend on feed that comes to between .50 and .66 per dozen. We are able to feed them pretty cheaply because they eat all our scraps. 

Next week we have a poultry order shipping the day after my birthday. It's a whopping 77 birds. We are getting mostly chickens but several ducks and turkeys as well. We'd love to raise our own Christmas and Thanksgiving turkey with a couple more for the freezer. And the ducks, well we have had ducks before and they are just adorable. We have a spot for a nice little pond back by the chicken coop that we plan to excavate for them. I'd like to get a rain water catchment system set up on the coop roof that redirects to the pond only a couple of yards a way to keep it filled. The pond will also double as a water storage system for the garden. 

We have lots of plans but not enough time and energy. But we get a little bit more done each year. I was just showing David today the solar shower at Path to Freedom. That would be so nice to have and David said it looks pretty simple for him to make. We all get so grimy working outside this time of year. I think showering outdoors is so nice anyway when we have been able to do it at the beach. 

We lost the camera for over month but found it yesterday. I'll have to eventually get around to posting some pictures on here of what we are doing. 

It's that time again

(Here are the girls in some Ethiopian dresses Frederica bought them! And see the messes they love to make.)

David and Dad are getting us manure. It feels like it's been forever waiting on someone to be able to get some. One of the plus sides of unemployment I guess. Now that the coop is done and Christmas is over and we are almost well again with the exception of me we can track down a source of manure. I teased David about telling the people that I would take all the manure they could give me. It turns out David didn't have to. They were so excited that David had told them we might be able to come back for a second load this afternoon. The man said if his wife knew they wanted this much manure she might take to calling us to come get some. I hope this works out! The last people we dealt with had great manure and a front loader but just couldn't be bothered to answer phones or returns calls except sporadically. David is outside right now unloading the trailer load of manure on our swale.

We have 10 apple trees and 10 blueberry bushes we have heeled in waiting to plant. My Dad has as many blueberry bushes across the street for us and about 7 fig trees. I'd like to come up with some more money to order a few pear trees, autumn olive and mulberry trees as well. Our plans are to turn our large front hill into a kind forest garden. This year I plan to plant the swale in winter squash and watermelon with perennial herbs in between like comfrey. The hill is to be planted in the fruit tree and berry bushes. I plan on planting various herbs and mulching around the base of the trees. And then we want to loosen the soil all over the hill and plant clover and other herbs and nitrogen fixing plants. The soil needs a lot of work in some areas.

Next fall I'd like to get around to planting daffodils and narcissus around the trees as well. Eventually I'd like to fence the area in and let ducks run in it once the plants are more established. They can fertilize it, weed and mow it and lay eggs. And if we plant it right it should provide most of the ducks food. I'd like to put a few bee hives in to pollinate the trees and provide honey.

I hope to go ahead and order the ducks this spring. They might use a chicken/duck tractor versus the coop till we can move them to the front lawn. In the meantime I hope to let the kids herd them to the areas in the woods that hold water and breed mosquitoes. Fintan calls them leaks. We can't sit near one side of the yard in the summer without getting eaten alive. Of course it's the nice shady spots that are mosquito ridden.

We got 3 Americauna hens the other week as well as an Americauna rooster. The rooster is younger than the hens and still has some pin feathers around his face. When we introduced them to the rest of the flock a black Silkie rooster promptly let the new rooster know who was in charge. I don't think it will take the new rooster long to realize that he is actually twice the size of the other roosters and not half grown yet. In the meantime he kind of stands in the corner a lot looking sad and the hens sit in the nesting boxes a lot with their backsides facing out. I hope they come to like it a little better soon! The kids love the blue and green eggs though.

I just finished reading Bill Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture and loved it. I think I like it as much as Gaia's Garden. It had some really wonderful plans and ideas that I hope to implement with the chickens. It will involve having several runs off their coop rather than just the one I had been thinking about. We will rotate the birds access and plant grazing crops for them in the other runs/yards. I have no idea how much light we will have in a lot of the yards for planting. Our plans for that part of our acre still involve a lot of thinning of the woods. But we could at least plant things like lettuce and buckwheat. The greens would supplement the chickens diet. Their manure would fertilize the soil in preparation for the next crop.

Straw and stuff!

You can see the new feeder and waterer here. That is Robin Hood in the background making a landing.


This is Loud Mouth. He was a very bossy busy little guy from the beginning always very alert to checking out what's going on. He has a little harem of two Porcelain d' Uccle hens, Tiny and Tick. They are all really tiny. The smallest of all our birds. Even more so than the other D' Uccles. I am not sure if that is typical or not.


This is the left side of the coop as you come in the door. They love all the straw! The entire coop is roofed but the left side only has the wire between the studs as you can see. We will eventually totally enclose it once we get around to putting in a large run. But I didn't want to have it fully enclosed before we had a run done.



This is Click and Clack. We really don't need two Golden Necked d' Uccle roosters. However they are really cute. They are always together. I don't know how they figured out from the beginning that they look the same but they did and they like to hang out.

We have a coop!

It's finally finished. Yippee! We just need to go buy some straw and some better feeders suited to a large coop. It took a while to transfer them all and coax them in. But they love it. Oh, and it's snowing today! The chickens are cold. I can't wait to fill all those nest boxes with straw.

A long cold winter?

In The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pa told Laura how they could expect a long cold winter when they came across the biggest muskrat house he had ever seen. He said the animals always knew what was coming. Right now our squirrels are working frantically all day to bury acorns all over our lawn and garden. My Dad has noticed it at his house as well. Fintan even made a squirrel feeder. He cut out a rectangle in an empty cream container and filled it with acorns and set it up on a log for the squirrels. It's really amusing to watch. I'll look out the kitchen window to see one eying the house before and while burying his loot. They seem genuinely concerned about us catching them or knowing where they are storing all their acorns.


I am fairly confident we won't have to scour the yard this winter for their acorns though. I have been working this past few months to put aside our own food for the winter. We have canned food and dried food from the garden and stocked up from the store and Farmer's Market. It's really helped with David's job loss to have a full pantry to help with grocery expenses.

Last night David made some curry. I asked him about one of the ingredients because it looked like apple slices in it but it was my dried eggplant. We were both really impressed with it! I had been thinking that I was not going to bother planting eggplant next year because I just can't think of a lot of ways to eat it fresh. But I started slicing and drying them this summer because I hated to see them go to waste. I am so glad I did. They really added something special to the curry with their taste and their texture. We had chicken in our curry but we could definitely make a vegetarian curry and not miss the meat all that much if at all.

We didn't appreciate the tomatillos that I planted all that much either till the end of the summer when we realized what a great salsa verde we could make with them. They are definitely being planted next year as well. I was pretty disappointed that the purple tomatillos weren't really purple. Only a handful ever turned purple and I know I was very careful about keeping track of them seperately from the green tomatillos.

So how are your squirrels acting?