May 12, 2020

The garden is taking shape.

I have been busy these past few months – mostly picking up where I left off years ago. This time around though, I am keeping myself more measured so as to not get overwhelmed. It does feels good to be “back at it” and I’m looking forward to having a good season.

I am starting a garden again. The last time I grew vegetables was back in 2014, which was the last year of our CSA. For now, I am going to grow for our family and a little extra for friends and donations. I am keeping the garden simple- squash, pumpkins, corn, beans, peppers, eggplant, and heirloom tomatoes.I also made a raised bed for black raspberries.

I kept the hoop house planted all through winter with arugula, mescalin, lettuce and garlic. I experimented with zucchini, planting it in early March- it is beginning to flower now and hopefully, with hand pollination, I will have crop before June.

I have also re-begun bee keeping after a three-year hiatus. I am taking this slowly too. In the past I have had both good and bad “bee years”. There were years when I had more honey than I could ever hope for, and years when I couldn’t keep a hive going no matter what I tried. By starting out with just one hive I am hoping to relearn the basics and get some beekeeping confidence back.

A new leghorn and blue rock.

We still grow strawberries and raise chickens for eggs. Of course, without the CSA, we downsized these endeavors years ago. We now have a small area of strawberries mixed with day lilies. It works out well for berries and for flowers that bloom well into the fall. Instead of keeping 25-30 chickens as we did back in the CSA years, we maintain a flock of 12-15 now. Of those, only half lay regularly. The other half is made up of retired chickens who deserve a restful life after supplying us with many, many eggs over the years.

One of the things that I am happy about is that we stopped selling eggs in March and began giving them, along with greens that I grew in the hoop house, to three families who’s household heads lost their jobs because of covid -19. We will continue to do this for so as long as needed, and I will expand if the need continues to grow. I think that this is the best reward of having this small farm – that we can use it to help others. Every little bit helps.

April 7, 2020

 The time has come for me to transition from the hoop house to the garden. I am getting ready to turn the garden soil over and till in last year’s compost to prepare for outside planting.  Meanwhile, in my home, in a southern facing window, I am starting tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc. from seed. In mid-May, after the danger of frost passes, I will “re-home” these to the garden, and then direct seed vegetables including beans, corn, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins and more. 

Thinking back, it was a good winter season in regards to the hoop house. I planted garlic in early December ’19 (see blog post of December 29, 2019), and at this time, it is 6 to 8 weeks from harvest. I like to grow it in the hoop house exclusively now because I don’t need to worry about drainage or weeds. Now that I grow mostly for just Kath and I, I only raise 15 plants - that is still a lot of garlic and we always have enough to share.

Through the winter I grew successions of radishes and arugula, and am now doing the fourth and last succession. I had planted lettuce and chard but the mice ate the tender seedlings as they came up. I tried to discourage this by placing ground garlic in these beds, and when that did not work, I tried ground pepper. That did not work either. Since the mice did not like eating the spicier seedlings of radish and arugula, I planted a hot mesclun mix that included leaf lettuce. The mustards, arugula, and mizuna acted as deterrents, protecting the lettuce seedlings. When these lettuces grew enough that the mice ignored them, I replanted them in other beds, and harvested the spicy stuff for salads. The lettuces remain untouched by mice and are maturing nicely. I am happy that the plan worked, and will try the same next year.

Another thing I am experimenting with is to grow Zucchini in the hoop house. I planted four seeds back in early March and they are up and growing. I am hoping that these will mature and provide zucchini much sooner than those I will be planting from seed in the garden come mid- May.  If it goes well, I will try this again next year and include other vegetables, such as cucumbers and acorn squash. 

I am looking forward to having a summer garden. Sadly enough, I haven’t had a garden of any sort since we laid down the CSA and let the field go fallow. It will be good to have a garden again- I am really looking forward it.

February 15, 2020

Today we lost Princess, aka Louie’s Chicken. We called her Louie’s Chicken because every evening she would make her way to Louie’s stall and roost in the corner feed bucket, spending the night there as he looked after her. Sometimes, before she settled into the corner bucket, she would perch on its rim and begin clucking and squawking at poor old Lou, as if she wasn’t happy with him for some reason. Louie would just lower his big old head and tilt it so that he could see her with his one good eye, then look at her sympathetically as if he was saying he was sorry for whatever it was that upset her.

I don’t understand everything about how animals connect, but I know that there was a strong, special bond between the two. It is very unusual for a chicken to leave its flock to roost alone, and especially on cold, below freezing nights, when they are known to huddle for warmth. Yet Princess would go off alone to be with Lou.  There was something intuitive that only they could know, and that we could only observe. I think somehow, they comforted each other, and in ways I will never begin to understand, they looked after each other. In the end, it was just two good souls that understood each other.

When Louie passed, Princess integrated herself back into the flock. I never saw her again in Louie’s stall- neither to roost nor to scratch around looking for bugs. I never even saw her passing through. I don’t think she could go back because she never did. 

Through last summer Princess had bouts when we thought that we would lose her, but she seemed to bounce back. Unfortunately, this time she didn’t. We did our best when she fell ill again, but it was her time, and none of us had a say.

I can’t help to think that tonight, she is perched on the rim of some cloud beside Lou, and she is giving him a piece of her mind. I bet they both sleep well tonight, and sleep happily as two good souls do.