Daily Life in the Summer

Clothes on the line, giant hydrangea, and healthy back field.

Tarahumara Sunflowers.

Sensations Cosmos.

Tashkent Marigold.

The babies - almost 2 months old!

Wordless Wednesday

Lush Green World

Almost four inches since this morning.

Despite what the news said (clocked us around an inch of rain for today), we've had almost four inches of rain in the last twelve hours. We also had the same last Sunday. It's been great for the growing of things! Including mosquitoes!

Purple and white flowers on field peas.

Red and yellow new potatoes. Made a tasty potato salad.

Really though, it's been wonderful. Our back field is thriving. We thought we might need to irrigate it - contemplated accessing the stream at the back of the property, rain barrel etc. But no need for that. Most of potato plants are already done flowering, aside from those planted late and those hit by the farmer's weed spray. *sigh*

The field peas have been doing fabulous. They are beautiful, and are also
smothering a lot of weeds, as we hoped. We still have to figure out something for harvest in a couple months. It might be me and my scythe, ha. Or with hubby's weed whip. Time to make friends with more farmers!

Strawberry harvest seems to have ended for my June-bearing berries. July has brought on the ripening of our wild blackberries though. They are tasty, but tiny and full of thorns and one must battle the legions of mosquitoes to get to them. This morning was nice and cool, so I could suit up and venture into the middle of the blackberry patch in relative safety. We won't turn down free fruit!

The garden has been growing great. This is my first year planting peas and cabbage, and they are both doing spectacular. I made a pea and mint salad yesterday that was so-so. I think eating the peas fresh is the absolute best - you can't top that sweetness. I made a slaw with half of the red cabbage for dinner tonight - very tasty and also quite sweet. Home grown is really worth it for health and flavor. And no worries about chemical types here. The white cover cloth has worked well for keeping most of the cabbage moths/ caterpillars from our crop. They were my main fear in planting cabbages, but so far, so good.

Turnips, red cabbage, zucchini, peas, lettuce, calendula and chamomile flowers.

Pea row, with volunteer sunflower, lettuce and other greens.

Under-cover cabbage, zucchini, flowering parsnip, tomatoes and sunflowers.

Beautiful volunteer Mayo Indian amaranth. Almost as tall as the sunflowers this year! 

Baby chicks in the outside "playpen" next to the garden.

Spring time photos

Iris putting on a show in May.

The potatoes are growing up!

Thanksgiving dinner walking through our yard.

Double rainbow after a sunny day rainstorm. Note also our amazing doors to nowhere!

Golf ball sized hail this morning!

Luckily the garden was fine. Strawberries, lettuce, rhubarb, turnips, and herbs.

Chicken Family Update

Momma Maran with one of her tiny babies poking out.

Well, a lot has happened in chicken land this spring.

Two hens went broody in April. That is, they took up residence in the nesting areas, but stopped laying. I moved one momma and a clutch of eggs to our other shed, and strongly "encouraged" the other to get back to normal life.

Momma chicken proceeded to sit on the eggs (some hers, most laid by others) for twenty-two days. At day twenty-one, with much excitement, hubby lifted her up and found three littles under her. One more baby hatched the following day. It was a bummer that only four out of twelve eggs hatched, but as a new mother, I think she did well enough.

Momma chicken would continue to sit and keep her babies warm, but after a few days, they were out and about in the warmer weather, and we let them out of the shed to experience the green grass. This was pretty much the cutest thing imaginable - momma with her four littles around, pecking and digging in the dirt and grass.

Things were quite lovely until the chicks were just a little over a week old.

Then one morning as hubby and I were getting ready for work, I looked out the window to see a neighbor dog next to the coop.
I blasted out of the house, but half of our flock was already dead, with their necks broken by this failed duck hunting dog.

Momma chicken, her sister Maran, the two Easter Eggers and our handsome and valiant rooster were all gone.

It was utterly heartbreaking to listen to our four little orphans peep and cheep away, calling for a mother that could never come to them again.

We alerted the neighbor, who had only moved in a few months earlier, and she and her daughter helped to round up the dog. They were also able to see the damage their pet had done to ours.
Luckily for us, the neighbor did feel awful about the situation (I have heard that this is not a given) and brought us some chicks breeds similar to those that we had lost.

So, a bittersweet result of the day was that we had ten baby chicks to watch grow up. They are all doing well, despite their traumatic early days.

Our four originals, and their new friends.

We knew free ranging chickens was a bit of a gamble, and tried desperately to think of a good solution to our predicament. The neighbor said that they would mind their dogs better, but we are also much more careful about when we let our chickens out. It is very hard to fence and cage chickens that know life as a free-range chicken. We are working on this balance now.

Farm life is sunshine and roses quite frequently, but there are also some major reality check moments like these.

Spring time, the beginning of busy season!

Ground cherry pie, with a juicy blueberry pie in the background

Things have been going well around here. Spring came early - average last frost is May 17th, and I think we got our last one around April 20 this year. That's a-ok, since things were late last year! 

I've been doing a lot of early spring clean up, both outside and inside (in the freezer). After making pies for Easter, I've been making them regularly again. This coconut oil and butter crust is absolutely fabulous for fruit pies.

Overwintered parnips

Out of all the plants I tried to overwinter, the parsnips did by far the best. I also got some leeks and green onions, but the kale and collard greens did not make it. 

My strawberry patch is doing okay, as long as I keep it weeded. Some of my fruit trees didn't make it through the winter, and that is a major bummer, but most of them are alive and well.

The two big old apple trees were in bloom around May 1st. I didn't get my first spraying done until May 9th, which is not ideal at all, but I just sprayed the trunk, so hopefully things should be okay. 

   

Potatoes planted in the lovely black dirt in our back field

We've been doing a bit of planting on our back acreage this year. A neighbor farmer has planted it in corn for the last many years, and this year I bought field peas to put in on a few of the acres. So far they seem to be doing well. We need to get some tractor implements to do more field work though!

I've hand planted small sections of potatoes, hull-less oats, buckwheat, amaranth, sweet corn, flint corn, popcorn, melons and squash.The neighbor farmer also planted most of the remaining acreage in field corn, slightly to our surprise, but at least that gives us more time to figure out bigger plans for back there. 

One of the Maran hens has been sitting on a clutch of eggs - hopefully there will be some babies next week! A couple others have tried to go broody, but only this one has been allowed to continue. The others were not nearly as dedicated as Mama Maran.

Mister the rooster and some of his ladies in the lilacs

Wordless Wednesday